ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the confining, colonizing nature, or at least effect, of the gaze as a social force. This chapter presents a literary account of a different use of the gaze. Rather than working as a psychoanalytic or social concept, the gaze involved here is 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 is vision as an act of connecting, though potentially unacknowledged, silent, that others may not notice; a gaze that enables subjects to communicate without opening up. The gaze in the closet is a homosexual gaze, desiring, establishing contact with the object, hence communicative, yet at the same time able to remain silent about itself, silencing the homosexual connection.
