Unnamed: Eve’s Epistemology

Given the saliency, etymologically, of honesty to honor, we might start with a bit of honesty if we want to honor Eve. The rubric assigned to this panel, “Feminism and Queer Theory,” performs, in its blandly copulative way, a violence against which the passion—and not just the keen intellectual passion—unleashed in Epistemology of the Closet¹ takes aim from the very outset. The snugness of relation in the pairing that lets these two, or perhaps these multiples, here called “feminism” and “queer theory,” share a space in what proves to be the closet of hendyadic singularity belies the persistent tension between them that is, as much as anything else, the stake in the introduction and opening chapter of Sedgwick’s Epistemology. It substitutes, moreover, “queer theory,” a term that never appears in the book, for what Sedgwick calls a “gay male-oriented” or “antihomophobic” analysis positioned explicitly in a troubled and troubling relation to feminist discourse. There are reasons, of course, why feminism can couple more comfortably with queer theory than with a “gay male-oriented” analysis. The latter would foreground divisions (between male and female, between gender and sexuality) while the former suggests a more pacific or even reparative encounter.

But for just this reason the title’s substitution of queer theory (something still to come while Sedgwick was writing Epistemology) for the specific terms deployed in her book to name its theoretical practice (Epistemology twice will quote the word “queer” but never once make use of it) suggests the consequential erasure of a name—an erasure that never, I hope to show, escapes determination by the interdependence of epistemology and the closet. In beginning with this erasure, though, I want to make clear that I find no fault with anyone involved in proposing, selecting, or approving the title of this panel, nor do I aim to defend identitarian claims such as those that attach to “gay male.” The erasure of the name that closets “gay male” while invoking The Epistemology of the Closet speaks rather to a structural principle informing the social relations of knowledge that Sedgwick’s text both examines and, like the panel’s rubric, also enacts. In the short space I have here, I want to consider a set of relations among “feminism,” “gay male-oriented analysis,” and the “queer theory” that here takes its place in order to see what queer theory could say about substitutive identifications and the closeting of names—a closeting that Sedgwick’s text at once anticipates, performs, and sheds light on.

I begin, then, with Sedgwick’s own account of the closeting of a name. Early in the introduction to Epistemology she writes,

I think of a man and a woman I know, best friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications of each other’s erotic lives—the man’s eroticism happening to focus exclusively on men. But it was only after one particular conversational moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the man, in their conversation together, as a gay man.

(3–4)

As if condensing in advance her reading of May Bartram in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Sedgwick carefully sets this scene as one in which a woman’s awareness of something intimate to the man needs a sign from him before that knowledge can emerge as a property they share. But what’s shared here, the explicit naming as “gay” of the man whose erotic life, we are told, just “happens” to focus on men (as if this were not an essential prop of the cathexes sustaining the friendship), creates a screen whose vivid pattern—the arabesque of gay male sex—lets this naming of what was unnamed screen out what goes without naming still: the woman’s sexuality. If a certain nomination of his makes it something they can share, nothing, at least as the story is told, permits the naming of hers. She, the woman who knows (in this like Sedgwick, who begins the anecdote affirming...