ABSTRACT
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's scholarship bears the imprint of her life-long involvement in political activism, particularly her involvement in community-led AIDS and anti-homophobia protest and organizing of the 1980s. In the context of what Sedgwick saw as a deep-seated climate of cultural and instructional homophobia, Epistemology of the Closet offers a radical rethinking of the relationship between sexuality and broader society. First, Sedgwick argues that the homo/heterosexual definition is not simply a product of Western ideas about identity and social organization; rather, it is the very basis of those formations. Second, Epistemology of the Closet problematized the notion of the closet, arguing that the complex relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit that underpin it have the potential for being peculiarly revealing as a critical framework. Finally, Epistemology of the Closet proposes an important intervention in the disciplinary frameworks of gay studies and feminist thought.
