E K Sedgwick, "Axiomatic" (Summary)

Eve Sedgwick's book Epistemology of the Closet explores the Foucauldian claim that "homosexuality" began around 1870, implying that individuals who preferred sex with people of their own gender were for the first time defined or identified as "homosexuals." However, Sedgwick argues that even as we try to dismantle the category "homosexual," one large model is being replaced with another, which contains a pun: we are all different from each other and we are not always the same ourselves.

Same-gender sex and different-gender sex involve a mixture of both kinds of identification. Auto-identification requires narratives that try to account for how we came to be what we are and establish what we are – though this can never be finally determined. Such narratives can also trigger further identifications by and with others. More particularly, Sedgwick implies that lesbian and gay studies need a particular mix of auto- and alloidentification if they are to remain different from, but not radically other to, each other.

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The contradictions discussed in the book are not between prohomosexual and anti-homosexual people or ideologies, but rather the internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each form of discursive and institutional 'common sense' on this subject inherited from the architects of our present culture.

According to Foucaus demonstration, modern Western culture has placed sexuality in a more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge. The language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

In gay and lesbian studies, the line between straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident and tossing off commonplaces that turn out to retain their power to galvanize and divide is weirdly unpredictable. In dealing with an open-secret structure, it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.

Sedgwick  explores the concept of nonce taxonomy, which is a rich and unsystematic resource for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of human social landscape. It suggests that people with the experience of oppression or subordination have most need to know this, and that the writing of Proust or James would be exemplary in projects of nonce taxonomy.

Not all gay men or women are very skilled at the nonce taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it makes sense to suppose that their distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation. The sustained pressure of loss in the AIDS years may be making such needs clearer, as one anticipates or tries to deal with the absence of people one loves. What is more dramatic is that every theoretically or politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect of delegitimating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other.

Deconstruction, founded as a very science of difference, has both so fetishized the idea of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now look for help in thinking about particular differences. In more familiar ways, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and other engagé critical projects have deepened understandings of a few crucial axes of difference, perhaps at the expense of more ephemeral or less global impulses of differential grouping.

In the particular area of sexuality, the author assumes that most of us know the following things that can differentiate even people of identical gender, race, nationality, class, and "sexual orientation" – each one of which, if taken seriously as pure difference, retains the unaccounted-for potential to disrupt many forms of the available thinking about sexuality.

Sedgwick explores the complex relationship between sex and sexuality in modern culture, arguing that they represent the full spectrum of positions between intimate and social, predetermined and aleatory, physically rooted and symbolically infused, innate and learned, autonomous and relational traits of being. It hypothesizes that there is always at least the potential for an analytic distance between gender and sexuality, even if particular manifestations or features of particular sexualities plunge women and men most into the discursive, institutional, and bodily enmeshments of gender definition, gender relation, and gender inequality.

gay/lesbian and anti-homophobic enquiry still has a lot to learn from asking questions that feminist enquiry has learned to ask, but only so long as we don't demand the same answers in both interlocutions. In comparing feminist and gay theory as they currently stand, the newness and consequent relative underdevelopment of gay theory are seen most clearly in two manifestations. First, it is now common for feminists to ask what they aren't yet used to asking as anti-homophobic readers: how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systematically with each other, and how the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others.

The first great heuristic breakthrough of socialist-feminist thought and the thought of women of color was the realization that all oppressions are differently structured and must intersect in complex embryodiments. This realization has as its corollary that the comparison of different axes of oppression is a crucial task, not for any purpose of ranking oppressions but to the contrary because each oppression is likely to be in a uniquely indicative relation to certain distinctive nodes of cultural organization.

The separatist-feminist interpretative framework emerged in the 1970s, which posited that there were no valid grounds of commonality between gay male and lesbian experience and identity. This view led to the perception that women who loved women were more female, and men who loved men were possibly more male than those whose desire crossed gender boundaries. The axis of sexuality was seen as coextensive with the axis of gender, and male homosexuality was often seen as the practice for which male supremacy was the theory. This gender-separatist framework implicitly and propelled a particular reading of modern gender history, dehighlighting the definitional discontinuities and perturbations between more and less sexualized, more and less prohibited, and more and less gender-identity-bound forms of female same-sex bonding.

Since the late 1970s, there have been numerous challenges in understanding how lesbian and gay male desires and identities can be mapped against each other. These challenges have emerged from the'sex wars' within feminism over pornography and S/M, which exposed a devastating continuity between a certain feminist understanding of a resistant female identity and the most repressive nineteenth-century bourgeois constructions of a sphere of pure femininity. The reclamation and relegitimation of a courageous history of lesbian transgender role-playing and identification have contributed to this renewed sense of shared histories, cultures, identities, politics, and destinies between the two groups.

The irrepressible, relatively class-non-specific popular culture, where James Dean has been as numinous an icon for lesbians as Garbo or Dietrich has for gay men, seems resistant to a purely feminist theorization. Calls for a theorized axis of sexuality as distinct from gender have developed, and the newly virulent homophobia of the 1980s reminds us that it is more to friends than to enemies that gay women and gay men are perceptible as distinct groups. The internal perspective of the gay movements shows women and men increasingly working together on mutually anti-homophobic agendas.

The contributions of lesbians to current gay and AIDS activism are weighty, not despite but because of the intervening lessons of feminism. Feminist perspectives on medicine and healthcare issues, civil disobedience, and the politics of class and race as well as of sexuality have been centrally enabling for the recent waves of AIDS activism.

It can no longer make sense to assume that a male-centered analysis of homo-heterosexual definition will have no lesbian relevance or interest. The immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature. The gay essentialist/constructivist debate takes its form and premises from a whole history of other nature/nurture or nature/culture debates, which assumes culture as malleable relative to nature.

  For gay and gay-loving people, every step of this constructivist nature/culture argument holds danger: it is difficult to intervene in the seemingly natural trajectory that begins by identifying a place of cultural malleability, continues by inventing an ethical or therapeutic mandate for cultural manipulation, and ends in the overarching, hygienic Western fantasy of a world without any more homosexuals in it.

Essentialist understandings of sexual identity can provide a sense of gravity and resistance to social engineering momentum in human sciences. However, this approach also reaches deeply into the life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by constructivist gay theory, which focuses on the experience and identity of gay or proto-gay children. The emotional energy behind essentialist historical work may be more about recognizing and validating the creativity and heroism of the effeminate boy or tommish girl of the 1950s or 1960s, rather than reclaiming the place and eros of Homeric heroes, Renaissance painters, and medieval gay monks.

It is becoming increasingly problematic to assume that grounding an identity in biology or "essential nature" is a stable way of insulating it from societal interference. The gestalt of assumptions that undergird nature/nurture debates may be in the process of direct reversal. The conjecture that a particular trait is genetically or biologically based triggers an oestrus of manipulative fantasy in the technological institutions of the culture. In this unstable context, the dependence on a specified homosexual body to offer resistance to any gay-eradicating momentum is tremblingly vulnerable.

The presentation of biologically based "explanations" for deviant behavior is often couched in terms of "excess," "deficiency," or "imbalance" – whether in the hormones, genetic material, or the fetal endocrine environment. If researchers or popularizers had ever referenced any supposed gay-producing circumstance as the proper hormone balance or conducive endocrine environment for gay generation, they would be less chilled by the breezes of all this technological confidence.

In this unstable balance of assumptions between nature and culture, there is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for a concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, arguseyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished.

The most important work of history and anthropology is to defamiliarize and denaturalize not only the past and the distant, but also the present. However, this analysis is incomplete in that it has tended to refamiliarize, renaturalize, and damagingly reify an entity that it could be doing much more to subject to analysis.

The author argues that the most potent effects of modern homo/heterosexual definition stem from the implicitness or denial of the gaps between long-coexisting minoritizing and universalizing understandings of same-sex relations. This assumption has troubling implications for those living in a state where certain acts called "sodomy" are criminal regardless of gender, and the threat of juxtaposition on that prohibition against acts of an additional, unrationalized set of sanctions attaching to identity can only be exacerbated by the insistence of gay theory that the discourse of acts can represent nothing but an anachronistic vestige.

The project of the present book will show how issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured, not by the supersession of one model and the consequent withering away of another, but by the relations made possible by the unrationalized coexistence of different models during the times they do coexist. The author does not involve the construction of historical narratives alternative to those that have emerged from Foucault and his followers, but rather requires a reassignment of attention and emphasis within those valuable narratives, attempting to denarrativize them somewhat by focusing on a performative space of contradiction that they both define and, themselves performative, pass over in silence.

The author's first aim is to denaturalize the present, rather than the past, in effect to render less destructively presumable "homosexuality as we know it today." This narrative is of a directly personal sort and has been experimented with to disarm the categorical imperative that seems to promote cant and mystification about motives in the world of politically correct academia.

Identification with/as has a distinctive resonance for women in the dovetailing between old ideologies of women's traditional selflessness and a new one of feminist commitment that seems to begin with a self but is legitimated only by willfully obscuring most of its boundaries. Mainstream male-centered gay politics has tended not to be structured as strongly as feminism, but there are different reasons why this problematics of identification with/as seems distinctively resonant with issues of male homo/heterosexual definition.

In conclusion, the text highlights the complex and contested nature of identity politics and the role of gender and sexuality in shaping women's identities. By understanding the dynamics of identity politics and the impact of these dynamics on women, we can better navigate the complex and often contradictory intersections of gender, sexuality, and identity.