Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet

When Erin Murphy and Keith Vincent first contacted me to participate in this symposium, I started thinking about the first time that I encountered Eve Sedgwick and Epistemology of the Closet.¹ I knew that I had been in graduate school at the time and I began to piece together a chronology. Last weekend, I realized that I should probably look through a pile of boxes that I have stored in various basements and attics over the past twenty years. These dusty, heavy, banged-up cardboard bricks have earned me the affectionate mockery of at least one girlfriend over the years, who wondered why I would ever want to hold onto their contents, which were marked with labels such as “Bills from 1991” or “Bibliographies.” But my pack-rat tendencies paid off. In a box marked “Graduate School—Miscellaneous,” I had kept, very neatly, a clear record of my first contact with Eve Sedgwick and Epistemology of the Closet. It turns out that some of you were there, too.

Uncannily, it was twenty-two years ago to this day that Eve Sedgwick gave a talk that would become the introduction and first chapter of Epistemology of the Closet, the readings for our panel.² Sedgwick’s talk was part of a conference called, unsensationally, “Lesbian/Gay Studies ’87: Definitions and Explorations,” organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale (figure 1). It’s worth noting that there was no physical center; it was simply a loose collection of faculty, chaired by the late John Boswell, and a bunch of brilliant graduate students, including George Chauncey, Adrienne Donald, Susan Edmunds, Regina Kunzel, and Beth Povinelli. I was in my first semester of graduate school and, though I didn’t know it fully at the time, this conference would be utterly formative for me, personally and professionally. Sedgwick spoke as part of a panel entitled “The Canon and the Closet,” along with Michael Moon, who, I noted in the program margins, was speaking that day about Whitman, Alger, and James (figure 2). Lee Edelman, my fellow panelist this morning,

Figure 1.

Conference program, “Lesbian/Gay Studies ’87: Definitions and Explorations,” Yale University, 30–31 October 1987.

Figure 2.

Conference program, “Lesbian/Gay Studies ’87: Definitions and Explorations,” Yale University, 30–31 October 1987.

would also present a paper called “Homographesis” that same day. The late Gloria Anzaldúa was there, too, speaking about “Recognizing and Reconciling Our Differences.”

As part of her presentation, Sedgwick distributed a handout, a copy of which I had tucked into my program. It’s fascinating to look at this page in retrospect and to realize how succinctly it captured and projected the key ideas for which Epistemology of the Closet would become renowned (figure 3). It has the charm—and poignancy, now—of being partly written in Sedgwick’s own hand and thus gives a sense—to me, at least—of the freshness of her ideas at the time, as well as their complexity. The page as a whole reminds us that feminist theory was understood as the theoretical framework to be reckoned with in that moment. At the top of the page, she quoted an excerpt from Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,”³ whose insistence that feminism was not adequate as a theory of sexuality would help fuel the mighty field-clearing work that Sedgwick would perform in Epistemology of the Closet. The orderly typescript list of binarisms, which, she argues, are “inextricably structured through the problematic of homo/heterosexual definition, in the twentieth century,” signals, too, how thoroughly deconstruction had saturated available theoretical models and how much more fascinating it became in her hands.

In the dynamic caption on the right side of the page, Sedgwick explained that she was offering “a hypothesis about contemporary gay and lesbian discourse and controversy: that sexual separatism and gender integrationism (under these definitions) tend to go together, and vice versa,” an explanation that again recast her fundamental concern with the relationship...