إبستمولوجيا الخزانة (Epistemology of the Closet)

مقدمة

“Epistemology of the Closet” appeared in 1990, the same year as Butler’s “Gender Trouble”. Its introduction, “Axiomatic”, begins with a series of axioms, the first of which is that people are different from each other, and states the book’s thesis: an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture is incomplete without a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, which took shape, as Foucault had shown, around the end of the nineteenth century. Sedgwick describes two unresolved contradictions in this definition: between “minoritising” views, for which homosexuality concerns a distinct minority, and “universalising” views, for which it concerns the sexuality of everyone; and between views of same-sex desire as a crossing of genders and as a bond within one gender. The chapters read Melville’s “Billy Budd”, Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” together with Nietzsche, Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and Proust, and show how secrecy and disclosure, knowledge and ignorance, private and public are organised around “the closet”, which she called the defining structure of gay oppression in the twentieth century. The book became one of the founding texts of queer theory.

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• ارادة المعرفة1976 · ميشال فوكو

مزيد من أعمال إيف كوسوفسكي سيدجويك

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