Gay Lense Sedgwick Summary

Using humor, Sedgwick seeks to explain society’s avoidance of seeing gay tendencies in writing and how it affects the reading of a text. When studying a text through a gay lense questions are asked as if the author was gay. She clearly seeks to explain that a gay writer is just the same as a heterosexual writer-- they just simply exist; there isn’t a need to read through a gay lense because that’s the one the book was created under. The ideas that readers tend to create of the writers often isn’t the reality and that affects the different lenses that we try to read through. Those who enjoy the arrangement of classical literature that we have and the authors who wrote them also have a tendency to avoid mentioning the sexual orientation of …show more content…
She uses the word “tautologies” to explain the relationship between the things we actually say and the equal reality that goes unmentioned. For me, that enhances the argument that society has truly succeeded at avoiding things it doesn’t want to see. By comparing the blatant language of a gay Socrates or Shakespeare to the Pope wearing a dress, her argument becomes more obvious. The Pope does actually wear a dress, we just cover it up saying it’s a robe. Socrates was gay, we just cover it up using one of the dismissals that Sedgwick proposes. By realizing that I often use tautologies to cover up things I want to avoid acknowledging, I am able to open up my views and biases more to understand texts in different ways.
I strongly believe that this is an idea that can stretch even beyond the idea of gayness in texts. By limiting Sedgwick’s point to only the gayness of an author, we lose a valuable tool at finding our own biases and tautologies. For example, we addressed the social differences in “Puppy” that were typically ignored in the time period it was written. Thus, we were further able to understand the position of both characters and grasp at the possible purpose of the story. We don’t excuse the behavior, per say, but we use it to further …show more content…
When she states that “dozens or hundreds of the most centrally canonic figures” should be considered, I feel like it gets excessive. (52) While many authors of critical Literature might be gay, we can’t simply assume they all are. That would be the same fallacy that society has been practicing just on other side of the coin. I do believe that the sexual orientation can create new possibilities for texts and their meanings. I also fully acknowledge that many authors are gay, even if we don’t know it. I just think that when approaching a novel, it shouldn’t be with the full intention of showing how the author is gay and that shouldn’t be the first thought when analyzing a piece. If aspects come up in the novel that are alluding towards that nature then they should be seen as such, but otherwise I think it should just be another lens that we have ready, but not in full