ABSTRACT
In this autobiographical fragment from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, set in a discussion of Racine’s Esther tragedy, the parentheses do more to highlight than to bracket off her experience of being framed by Esther at Purim. In this self-reflection one finds no trace of the capacity for subversion that I have described in the masquerade of Purim, no dislocation in the system that projects and fixates on her primarily as benchmark for man’s own identity. Here, the experience of dislocation is one that objectifies and disembodies: from “solidarity with their sex” for the sake of “their people,” setting the girl off as the privileged object of the father’s veiled gaze.
