ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Hannah Arendt’s vision of democratic politics to theorize the reach of a movement for lesbian and gay rights and liberation. It aims to explore Arendt’s analysis of the Jewish question in modern Europe, which she saw as intertwined with the fate of the modern nation-state, investigates fundamental dilemmas of modern democracy, especially the tensions between the aspiration to political equality and the facts of social difference. The chapter examines work by Sander Gilman on “Jewishness” to attend more fully than Arendt herself does to the interpenetration of race with sexuality and gender within scientific discourse. The closet is central to Kosofsky Sedgwick’s interpretation of the emergence of homosexuality in the nineteenth century in contrast with a pervasively homosocial order where close ties among men perpetuated male domination. Gilman’s material amply demonstrates the affinities between the racial rhetoric of “Jewishness” and that associated with constructions of homosexuality as a “third sex.”.
