Sedgwick's The Body In The Closet

The body in the closet
Visibility is not simply about the recognition, identification and categorization of bodies, but it is also how bodies negotiate and exist within systems of power. These are the very dynamics which regulate the invisibility of certain bodies as well. The idea of the ‘closet’ which Sedgwick develops, points at how complicated the promise of invisibility inside the closet and visibility outside the closet is. According to her, culture can be understood through the epistemology of the closet. The idea of the closet revolves around the idea of gay identity and self-identification of the body to a sexuality. Closet seems to be the space or the tool which has the power to make ‘invisible’ the queerness of the body. The act of coming out of the closet …show more content…
Sedgwick questions the nature of the range of definitional paradigms that the closet attaches to a gay person’s identity. The “taint of abnormality” that is associated to the notion of a deviation from the norm and the disclosure of this deviation makes it, all of a sudden, the most integral part of one’s identity. Sedgwick points out the contradictions within the epistemology of the closet. The closet first of all seems to have a pervasive influence on sexuality itself. One is in it yet one is not in it as Sedgwick provides. The closet seems to suggest that one’s idea of the self is contingent on one’s sexuality as it exists with respect to the closet. As one exists in it, or as one comes out of it, the knowledge of being in and that of being out is a result of the closet itself. This kind of knowledge production has its stakes in the epistemological existence of the closet as well as in the epistemological construction of heterosexuality as the normal form of sexuality. Sedgwick, however, points out that the numerous sexual subjectivities that are available for self-definition is only a result of the knowledge production that revolve around those subjectivities and influences