ABSTRACT
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT THE confining, colonizing nature, or at least effect, of the gaze as a social force. This essay presents a literary case of a different use of the gaze. Rather than being a psychoanalytic or social concept, the gaze is seen here as a mode of producing and communicating meaning. In other words, the gaze I am discussing is a gaze that produces meaningful signals; it is a semiotic mode. Active but secretive, masking understanding with visuality, pursuing a knowledge that is more profound and new for being unacknowledged: such is the particular form of vision I want to put forward. What I mean here is that vision is an act of connecting, yet potentially unacknowledged, silent, one that others may not notice; a gaze that enables subjects to communicate without giving themselves away. The “gaze in the closet” is a homosexual gaze, desiring, establishing contact with the object, hence communicative, yet at the same time remaining silent about itself, silencing the homosexual connection.
