Epistemology of the Closet

“Insofar as ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge [...] these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as part of particular regimes of truth.”

In this passage Sedgwick notes that the asymmetry at the heart of cultural binaries affects how an individual comes to know the world and who belongs to privileged and disadvantaged positions in a given binary relation. Knowing how individuals correspond to places of privilege and disadvantage within a given cultural binary (straight/gay, white/person of color, able-bodied/disabled, etc.) relies on a form of knowledge that views the underprivileged term from the vantage point of the privileged position. Hence, the ignorance that Sedgwick speaks of is produced by this one-sided means of knowing the world.

“The analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions—heterosexual/homosexual, in this case—actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B [homosexual] is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A [heterosexual]; […] the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A.”

In this passage Sedgwick outlines one of the key analytical and argumentative tools she deploys throughout the text. Her “deconstructive” arguments, as she notes, are characterized by three main insights. First, one must acknowledge that any cultural binary that is typically presented as symmetrical in their relations are actually grounded upon a dynamic and unstable relations. Thus, cultural binaries correspond not to symmetrical relations between terms but to asymmetrical imbalances between two social groupings such that one term is privileged over the other. Second, the privileging of one term over another in a cultural binary implies that this term subordinates its other while also depending on its subordination for its very meaning and existence. Third, says Sedgwick, the conclusion to be drawn is not the proposal of the restabilization of cultural binaries but an acknowledgement that it is this very dynamic irresolvability that renders various social groups (heterosexual/homosexual) intelligible in the first place. 

“I’ll argue that the now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition has affected our culture through its ineffaceable marking [...] And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the [...] immanently self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be specified as competitions for the material and rhetorical [symbolic] leverage required to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence of definition.”

Sedgwick provides an alternative means of overcoming the pitfalls of the irresolvability at the heart of cultural binaries. Rather than assuming blind faith that the contradictions between binary terms will resolve themselves, by necessity or by logical argument, Sedgwick proposes that any political resolution means a struggle over who sets the terms of how a given society understands itself and its corresponding frameworks that make that knowledge possible. 

“Judicially, a ‘homosexual panic’ defense for a person (typically a man) accused of antigay violence implies that his responsibility for the crime was diminished […] The widespread acceptance of this defense really seems to show, to the contrary, that hatred of homosexuals is even more public, more typical, hence harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged groups. ‘Race panic’ or ‘gender panic,’ for instance, is not accepted as a defense for violence against people of color or against women.”

Sedgwick addresses the false and illusory assumptions that underpin the panic defense and how these ideas have informed both public opinion and legal precedent. As she remarks, the acceptability of the panic defense stems from the false belief that violent and murderous outbursts against persons perceived to be homosexual are justified precisely because the accused’s actions were symptomatic of some type of psychological pathology. This psychological pathology of panic is revealed to be equally false since what has been proven by individuals and the courts alike is that the hatred of homosexuals is not some private, atypical, phenomenon but a widespread, cultural, and public occurrence as proved by the number of cases wherein an individual is judged to be innocent after having admitted to having harmed a homosexual on the basis of a supposed state of panic.

“I tried to turn what had been a taxonomic [...] category into a structural principle [...] I used it [the homosexual panic defense] to denominate ‘the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century Western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail’— as, specifically, ‘only one path of control, complementary to public sanctions through the institutions described by Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of ‘the sexual.’’”

Sedgwick draws out the structural and societal implications of the case of the panic defense in order to outline the basic contours of the psychology into which contemporary men are socialized. Just as the panic defense justifies violent homophobic behavior on the basis of an individual reaffirming their heterosexuality, the psychic makeup of heterosexual men is predicated on the compulsion of always having to reassert their heterosexual credentials. Whether it comes to violence or not, the structure of heterosexuality is such that individuals are compelled to continuously reassert and perform the fact of their not being homosexual.

“Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not [...] The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence.”

Sedgwick takes up the notion of the closet and argues that it structures homosexual experience. This is due to the fact that, unlike other forms of oppression whether based on skin color, physical ability, gender expression, and so forth, an individual’s choice in sexual partner perpetually remains something that is largely kept out of public view. Thus, even if someone may be “out of the closet” to their friends or family, in a world where strangers are encountered more frequently than acquaintances, homosexual life is lived and felt as a perpetual question of wondering whether others know or do not know one’s own sexual orientation, and if they do know, then to what extent this knowledge informs how others relate to them on a daily basis. The closet, then, is a structuring principle of homosexual life precisely because simply being out of the closet does nothing to rid oneself of the experience of wondering to what extent others are privy to one’s private life.

“[...] [T]hey denied his standing to bring the suit in the first place, on the grounds that he had failed to note on his original employment application that he had been, in college, an officer of a student homophile organization—a notation that would, as school officials admitted in court, have prevented his ever being hired. The rationale for keeping Acanfora out of his classroom was thus no longer that he had disclosed too much about his homosexuality, but quite the opposite, that he had not disclosed enough. The Supreme Court declined to entertain an appeal [...] the space for simply existing as a gay person who is a teacher is in fact bayonetted through and through, from both sides, by the vectors of a disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden.”

Sedgwick uses the example of an eighth-grade earth science teacher barred from a teaching position on the basis of his sexual orientation to underscore the double-bind specific to homosexual life. Not only is it the case that Acanfora was denied the ability to bring his suit to trial because he had not disclosed his previous association with a student homophile organization (this would have disqualified his hiring in the first place), he was also penalized and kept out of the classroom for the same reason. Thus, as Sedgwick concludes, homosexual life is caught between a state in which one is obligated to reveal themselves while simultaneously penalized for not having revealed enough about their sexuality. Homosexual life, then, appears, in the eyes of the law and the state, as always being too much and never enough.

“Vibrantly resonant as the image of the closet is for many modern oppressions, it is indicative for homophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions. Racism, for instance, is based on a stigma that is visible in all but exceptional cases [...] so are the oppressions based on gender, age, size, physical handicap.”

Sedgwick makes a distinction between homophobic oppression and ties it to the liberal usage of the vocabulary of someone “coming out” or “being out of the closet.” For Sedgwick, oppression based on one’s sexual orientation differs from other forms precisely because sexual orientation is not something that is immediately legible to others. Thus, while the language of “coming out” has widely been used to talk about other oppressed groups (and as Sedgwick notes, journalists in the previous decades have spoken on the 1960s as the decade that African-Americans “came out” to the rest of the country), it is language that nevertheless articulates a unique kind of homosexual oppression.

“...[A] crossing whereby the (structurally generalized) vessels of ‘knowledge itself’ do come to take their shape from the (thematically specified) thing known, or person known. The shape taken—the form of knowledge that represents at the same time ‘knowledge itself’ and a diagnosable pathology of cognition, or the cognition of a diagnosable pathology—must, in accordance with the double presentation of Claggart’s particular depravity, be described by some such condensation as ‘homosexual-homophobic knowing.’ In a more succinct formulation, paranoia.”

Sedgwick outlines the compulsive and restless paranoia that constitutes the way in which heterosexuality relates to homosexuality. With respect to Melville’s novella, Billy Budd, in particular, Sedgwick argues that the perpetual questioning that Claggart, the homosexual character of the novel, is subjected to by the heterosexual figure of Billy is a form of “knowing” that takes the form of that which the subject desires to know. That is, it is precisely because Claggart always appears to every character in the text as elusive, secret, and hard to read, that the way in which Billy comes to know Claggart is through relations of suspicion and doubt. Thus, when Sedgwick argues that heteronormativity as structuring principle of how we relate to the world takes the form of the thing it desires to know, she means that the relentless suspicion and doubt attributed to the homosexual, as other of the heterosexual, produces a way of knowing others in a manner that is nothing short of paranoid.

“It is time to pause here, perhaps, and ask explicitly what it means to have found in Claggart the homosexual in this text, and in Vere its image of the normal [...] Claggart’s ‘partiality’ and Vere’s ‘impartiality:’ perhaps rather than being mutually external opposing entities, X versus non-X, desire versus non-desire, ‘partial’ and ‘impartial’ are meant to relate here instead as part to whole: Claggart’s impotent constricted desire gnawing at his own viscera, Vere’s potent systemic desire outspread through all the veins and fault lines of naval regulation. The most available term for Claggart’s desire may be ‘private;’ for Vere’s, ‘public.’”

Sedgwick analyzes how Melville portrays Claggart in relation to Vere, the ship captain. Referring to one of the key scenes in Billy Budd, where Claggart, Billy, and Vere retire to the captain’s private quarters to settle the disagreement between Billy and Claggart, Sedgwick argues that the fundamental binary that determines the relations between the characters is that of the private versus the public. For Sedgwick, it is the private-public relation that governs the scene because Vere is the character who embodies a sense of supervening impartiality, as embodied in the fact that it is he who is tasked with arbitrating Billy’s charge of possible mutiny on the part of Claggart. And unlike Vere, Claggart’s characterization throughout the novella has always been one of secrecy, opacity, and privacy. More importantly, however, the fact of Claggart’s homosexuality reaffirms his position of privacy because the prevailing power dynamics place Claggart in possession of a knowledge that other members of the ship are not privy to. For Sedgwick, this fictional portrayal represents the fusion of homosexuality and secrecy so closely linked with homosexual panic.

“In both German and English culture, the Romantic rediscovery of ancient Greece cleared out [...] for the nineteenth century a prestigious, historically underfurnished imaginative space in which relations to and among human bodies might be newly a subject of utopian speculation. Synecdochally represented as it tended to be by statues of nude young men, the Victorian cult of Greece gently, unpointedly, and unexclusively positioned male flesh and muscle as the indicative instances of ‘the’ body, of a body of unphobic enjoyment. The Christian tradition, by contrast, had tended both to condense ‘the flesh’ [...] as the female body and to surround its attractiveness with an aura of maximum anxiety and prohibition. Thus, two significant differences from Christianity were conflated or conflatable in thought and rhetoric about ‘the Greeks:’ an imagined dissolving of the bar of prohibition against the enjoyed body, and its new gendering as indicatively male.”

Sedgwick explains the principal logic of how Ancient Greek culture was received and interpreted by both German and English culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. For Sedgwick, it was the German and English reception of Ancient Greek art during this period that served as the culture basis for a redefinition of the acceptable and prohibited ways in which people, especially men, were allowed to relate to the male body. Moreover, this reception was important for the culture logic of homosexual panic. As seen in this passage, the redefinition of the spectatorship of the male figure as being tied to unphobic enjoyment and the recodification of the viewing of the female form as tied to sin and transgression, both lifted a certain prohibition on male-male relations. However, it also served to further entrench the paranoia or homosexual panic within male-male relations insofar as the new norm for heterosexual masculinity became an obsessive and perpetual demonstration of one’s non-homosexuality as a result of the lifting of the restriction and the now unphobic possibility of enjoyment at the sight of the male body.

“The crystallization of desire as ‘temptation,’ […] gives the game of wholeness away in advance. Each of these enunciations shows that the ‘Hellenic ideal,’ insofar as its reintegrative power is supposed to involve a healing of the culturewide ruptures involved in male homosexual panic, necessarily has that panic so deeply at the heart of its occasions, frameworks, demands, and evocations that it becomes not only inextricable from but even a propellant of the cognitive and ethical compartmentalization of homophobic prohibition. That it is these in turn that become exemplary propellants of homosexual desire seems an inevitable consequence.”

Sedgwick explains the manner by which antihomosexuality came to be culturally embedded and serve as a logic that propels heterosexuality. The logic of homophobic desire is reestablished in the heterosexual/homosexual binary at the turn of the century by virtue of male-male relations being cast as both permissible and impermissible simultaneously. In this passage in particular, Sedgwick qualifies her previous analysis by introducing the manner by which temptation was integrated into homosocial desire. 

“Catholicism in particular is famous for giving countless gay and proto-gay children the shock of the possibility of adults who don’t marry, of men in dresses, of passionate theatre, of introspective investment, of lives filled with what could, ideally without diminution, be called the work of the fetish. […] And presiding over all are the images of Jesus. These have, indeed, a unique position in modern culture as images of the unclothed or unclothable male body, often in extremis and/or in ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored. The scandal of such a figure within a homophobic economy of the male gaze doesn’t seem to abate: efforts to disembody this body, for instance by attenuating, Europeanizing, or feminizing it, only entangle it the more compromisingly among various modern figurations of the homosexual.”

Sedgwick compares the impact of the European reception of Ancient Greek culture with the hegemony of Christian iconography, in particular with respect to the figure of Jesus Christ and the crucifixion. Just as the valorization of Ancient Greek statues of the male figure lifted the prohibition on the enjoyment of beholding the male body, so too did the figure of Christ consolidate the place of the male body at the end of the nineteenth-century as a site of unphobic enjoyment. The integration of the body of Christ alongside Ancient Greek statues had the effect of reorganizing the boundaries between permissible and impermissible male-male desire such that the desire for discriminating between “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” became even more rampant, just as the celebration of the male body was on the rise during this period of European history. 

“If these modern images borrow some of their lasting power from mid-nineteenth-century association of sentimentality [...] what their persistence and proliferation dramatize is something new: a change of gears, occupying the period from the 1880s through the First World War, by which the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who [...] embodies for an audience that both desires and cathartically identifies with him, a struggle of masculine identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine. Nietzsche says, ‘With hard men, intimacy is a thing of shame—and [...] something precious’ (Beyond, 87). This male body is not itself named as the place or topos of sentimentality, the way the home, the female body, and female reproductive labor had been in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather, the relations of figuration and perception that circulate around it, including antisentimentality, might instead be said to enact sentimentality as a trope.”

Sedgwick treats the relationship between sentimentality and antisentimentality as it was being recoded in mid-nineteenth-century literature. For Sedgwick, what comes through in the writings of Nietzsche and Wilde is a certain manner by which antisentimentality appears as an acceptable, masculine, form of sentimentality and allows both writers to recuperate a form of expression that was currently being seen as something degenerate, effeminate, and weak. The implication of this value shift is that men perceived to be ‘sentimental’ were also men who were suspected of being gay—and here, once more, Sedgwick rediscovers the anxiety around homosexuality at the core of the rules and mores that govern heterosexual life. 

“Sentimentality, insofar as it overlaps with ressentiment in a structure we would not be the first to call ressentimentality, represents modern emotion itself in Nietzsche’s thought: modern emotion as vicariousness and misrepresentation, but also as sensation brought to the quick with an insulting closeness.”

Sedgwick explicitly addresses the relationship between the cultural value of sentimentality and Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, ressentiment came to define the emotional, psychic, and social lives of individuals living through the modern era. Ressentiment occurs when individuals and societies repress feelings of envy and hatred in order to appear as respectable and moral agents in the world. 

“Camp [...] seems to involve a gayer and more spacious angle of view [...] Unlike kitsch-attribution, then, camp-recognition doesn’t ask, ‘What kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle?’ Instead, it says what if: What if the right audience for this were exactly me? […] Unlike kitsch-attribution, the sensibility of camp-recognition always sees that it is dealing in reader relations and in projective fantasy [...] about the spaces and practices of cultural production. Generous because it acknowledges (unlike kitsch) that its perceptions are necessarily also creations, it’s little wonder that camp can encompass effects of great delicacy and power in our highly sentimental-attributive culture.”

Sedgwick treats the similarities and differences of “camp” and “kitsch” as two modalities of aesthetic production that have come to be tied to homosexual life. According to Sedgwick, while kitsch typically involves attribution as part of its existence (i.e. one attributes kitsch to something else or another person), camp involves a layer of recognition such that the individual interpreting an art object as camp may see a part of themselves in the aesthetic experience taken as a whole. It is this difference that leads Sedgwick to view kitsch as the lesser and more cynical cousin of camp since kitsch involves an asymmetry between producer and consumer. By contrast, camp aesthetics exist as a more inclusive and suggestive experience whereby spectators are not demeaned in the process. 

“I do not, myself, believe same-sex relationships are much more likely to be based on similarity than are cross-sex relationships. That is, I do not believe that identification and desire are necessarily more closely linked in same-sex than in cross-sex relations, or in gay than in nongay persons. I assume them to be closely linked in many or most relationships and persons, in fact. I certainly do not believe that any given man must be assumed to have more in common with any other given man than he can possible have in common with any given woman. Yet these are the assumptions that underlie [...] the definitional invention of ‘homosexuality.’”

Sedgwick addresses widely held cultural assumptions about the nature of homosexual desire and homosexual relationships. As Sedgwick notes, the cultural bias or unfounded assumption regarding same-sex relationships is that both individuals desire one another due to the erotic power of one’s capacity for identifying, as close as possible, with one’s romantic/sexual partner. On this view, the argument would be that homosexual relationships arise from the identity between the drive to recognize oneself in another and the desire to have the other as one’s romantic and sexual partner. For Sedgwick, however, the more rational and obvious response to this falsely held opinion is that having things in common with a partner is not specific to an individual’s sexuality—precisely because both straight and queer couples experience a strengthening of their emotional and romantic bond when they are able to mutually enjoy a hobby, or activity, or interest with another person who also genuinely enjoys said activity, and has enjoyed it prior to the existence of their being in a relationship. It is for this reason, says Sedgwick, that the myth of homosexual desire being grounded on the desire for identification with one’s object of choice lacks any credible basis.

“Homosexuality ‘was not conceived as part of the created order at all,’ Bray writes, but as ‘part of its dissolution. And as such it was not a sexuality in its own right, but existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality.’ [...] Before the end of the eighteenth century, however [...] with the beginnings of a crystallized male homosexual role and male homosexual culture, a much sharper-eyed and acutely psychologized secular homophobia was current [...] Thus, at least since the eighteenth century in England and America, the continuum of male homosocial bonds has been brutally structured by a secularized and psychologized homophobia, which has excluded certain shifting and more or less arbitrarily defined segments of the continuum from participating in the overarching male entitlement.”

Sedgwick discusses the historical transformations in public displays of masculinity and how these transformations have affected how male-male interactions have come to be policed for their potential homosexual valence. According to Sedgwick, homosocial bonding between men has come under even more intense scrutiny as it has become more ubiquitous and harder to pin down. The reason for this is the widening of the sphere of interaction between men. Just as the range of interactions has broadened for men in tandem with the ever growing sphere of labor, historical shifts have now made it such that men have to interact and spend more time together outside of traditional environments if only to succeed at their job. For this reason, heterosexual masculinity becomes ever more vigilant and suspicious of moments that appear to suggest homosexual desire. 

“If such compulsory relationships as male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the middle distance of male homosocial desire, then it appears that men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain may always [...] be foreclosed. The result of men’s accession to this double bind is, first, the acute manipulability, through the fear of one’s own ‘homosexuality,’ of acculturated men; and second, a reservoir of potential for violence caused by the self-ignorance that this regime constitutively enforces. The historical emphasis on enforcement of homophobic rules in the armed services in, for instance, England and the United States supports this analysis. In these institutions, where both men’s manipulability and their potential for violence are at the highest possible premium, the prescription of the most intimate male bonding and the proscription of […] ‘homosexuality’ are both stronger than in civilian society—are, in fact, close to absolute.”

Sedgwick continues discussing the how homosocial bonding has given rise to an even more rampant homophobia in its wake. In the military, where there is a high premium placed on an individual’s masculine/aggressive traits while an equally high premium placed on an individual’s ability to cohere with a large body of male counterparts, vulnerability and violence come into closest contact and are upheld by virtue of the same double-bind: the obligation of homosocial bonding and the vigilance of preventing or identifying homosexual desire.

“Put another way, the usefulness of Freud’s formulation, in the case of Dr. Schreber, that paranoia in men results from the repression of their homosexual desire, has nothing to do with a classification of the paranoid Gothic in terms of ‘latent’ or ‘overt’ ‘homosexual’ ‘types,’ but everything to do with the foregrounding, under the specific, foundational historic conditions of the early Gothic, of intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds.”

Sedgwick places the double-bind expressed in the above passages in historical context and juxtaposes it with Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of human sexual desire. For Sedgwick, the repression of homosexual desire that Freud explains in terms of the latent or overt nature of human sexual development remains an unsatisfying explanation. Why? Because the repression of homosexual desire requires its social prohibition prior to it becoming internalized on the part of the person. Sedgwick sides with the historical explanation that views the conditions of the early Gothic period as singular in shaping the repression of homosexuality since it was at this period where intense male homosocial bonding was compulsory while men were also socially obligated to remain within the bounds of heterosexuality. 

“In Victorian fiction it is perhaps the figure of the urban bachelor [...] who personifies the most deflationary tonal contrast to the eschatological harrowings and epistemological doublings of the paranoid Gothic. Where the Gothic hero had been solipsistic, the bachelor hero is selfish. Where the Gothic hero had raged, the bachelor hero bitches. Where the Gothic hero had been suicidally inclined, the bachelor hero is a hypochondriac. The Gothic hero ranges from euphoria to despondency; the bachelor hero, from the eupeptic to the dyspeptic. Structurally [...] whereas the Gothic hero had personified the concerns and tones of an entire genre, the bachelor is a distinctly circumscribed and often a marginalized figure in the books he inhabits [...] The bachelor hero can only be a mock-hero; not merely diminished and parodic himself, he symbolizes the diminution and undermining of certain heroic and totalizing possibilities of generic embodiment.”

Sedgwick takes up the figure of the bachelor in Victorian fiction and contrasts him with the Gothic hero in order to demonstrate the shifting values surrounding heterosexual masculinity. Unlike the Gothic hero who is described as willful and subject to bouts of euphoria and despondency, the figure of the bachelor is marginal, a self-parody, and essentially anti-heroic. For Sedgwick, the bachelor as detached, aimless, and not subject to desire in any form is the new figure through which heterosexual existence navigates the terrain of homophobic and homosexual dynamics.

“Impressively [...] the clarity with which Tommy and Grizel conveys this process and its ravages seems not to be dependent on a given, naive or monolithic idea of what it would mean for a man ‘really’ to desire someone. On that issue the novel seems to remain agnostic, leaving open the possibility that there is some rather different quality that is ‘real’ male desire or, alternatively, that it is only more and less intermittent infestations of the same murderous syndrome that fuel any male Eros at all. That the worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion to desire women and its attendant deceptions self and other, however, Barrie says quite decisively.”

Sedgwick uses J.M. Barrie’s novel, Tommy and Grizel, as a prime example of how male desire came to be policed and ultimately became a pernicious form of desire even for heterosexual men. As the novel goes on to show, and as Sedgwick makes explicit, one of the most deleterious effects that homophobia had on the lives of men is what she terms “the male compulsion to desire women.” This compulsion to desire women, for Sedgwick, is a logical outcome of a heterosexuality forever threatened by being perceived and interpreted as being inflected with homosexual elements. Thus, in order to perpetually stave off this perception of homosexuality, heterosexual men are compelled to desire women, and express that desire lest they be suspected of desiring individuals of the same-sex. Thus heterosexuality came to be plagued by an incessant need to display itself in order to continuously shield itself from the supposed “threat” of homosexual desire. 

“Thus, while the Charlus who loves men is described as typical of ‘the invert’ as a species, the Albertine who loves women seems scarcely to come under a particular taxonomic heading on that account; it is as if the two successive stages of homosexual definition...coexisted in Albertine and Charlus in an anachronistic mutual blindness. Or, alternatively, Albertine can seem to some readers to embody the utopian fulfillment of a universalizing view of homo/heterosexual definition, even as the incomparable Charlus [...] dystopically embodies the minoritizing view.”

In this passage Sedgwick comments on the ambiguous nature of Albertine and Charlus in Proust’s novel in order to underscore the way in which the function of the “closet” is operative in the heterosexual gaze when confronted with an individual whose sexual and gender identity is not immediately apparent. Ambiguity surrounding gender and sexuality, insofar as the ambiguity arises from an individual’s less than clear heterosexuality, tends toward their being characterized as feminine in some essential sense.