Epistemology of the Closet » (2nd Edition)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Between Men, Tendencies, A Dialogue on Love, and Touching Feeling.

Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde--Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

Publishers Weekly

The homosexual closet, by Sedgwick's yardstick, is ``the defining structure for gay oppression in this century.'' She disagrees strongly with those who separate gays and straights as ``distinct kinds of persons,'' with no common humanity. Her close readings of Melville's Billy Budd , Wilde's Dorian Gray and of Proust, Nietzsche, Henry James and Thackeray bristle with keen observations relating entrenched fears of same-sex relationships to contemporary gay-bashing and obvious displays of heterosexual or ``macho'' attitudes. But Sedgwick ( Between Men ) does not prove her overstated thesis that homo/hetero distinction obtains with gender, class and race in determining ``all modern Western identity and social organization.'' Obtuse, cumbersome, academic prose limits the appeal of this treatise. (Dec.)

Acknowledgments     ix
Credits     xi
Preface to the 2008 Edition     xiii
Introduction: Axiomatic     1
Epistemology of the Closet     67
Some Binarisms (I): Billy Budd: After the Homosexual     91
Some Binarisms (II): Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body     131
The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic     182
Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet     213
Index     253