Sedgwick, Eve.
Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
"Preface to the 2008 Edition" pp. xiii-xviii
"Introduction: Axiomatic" pp.1-66
[Summary]
Homo/hetero binaryの脱構築がECの主眼にある。セクシュアリティは対象選択のジェンダーという軸ひとつには還元できないものである（それゆえジェンダーに関する研究としてのフェミニズムとセクシュアリティ分析は完全に重なるわけではない）。その他にnature/nurture議論（つまりセクシュアリティを本質主義、構築主義のどちらによって捉えるべきかという議論）を超える必要性（実際、この二つのviewは歴史上共存してきたのであり、二者択一の問題ではない、という議論）。Sedgwickは本質主義の代わりにminoritizing view、構築主義のかわりにuniversalizing viewという言葉を使って、その議論が誰の人生に資するものであるか、という観点から考えるべきだ、と主張する（minoritizing view, universalizing viewにいてはChapter 1に詳しい。欲望の可変性に高い評価を与え、行為に重点をおけば構築主義的universalizing viewが得られ、ゲイ・アイデンティティとゲイ・コミュニティに高い評価を置き、人間に焦点を当てればminoritizing view が得られる、ということ）。
☆Sedgwickにとっての"queer"はhomo/hetero binaryの突き崩しにある
●Like Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, also published in 1990 and also widely considered a founding text in queer theory, Epistemology of the Closet doesn't use the word "queer." So what is queer about it? Retrospectively, I would say it's exactly this resistance to retreating homo.heterosexual categorization--still so very volatile an act--as a done deal, a transparently empirical fact about any person. The resistance is not a matter of airily wanting to ignore the "facts of life" in their materiality. If anything, the specificity, materiality, and variety of sexual practice, along with their diverse meanings for individual lives, can be done better justice in a context where the impoverished abstractions that claim to define sexuality can be treated as not authoritative (xvi).
☆Sedgwickの"coming out"モーメント
●That's [i.e. focus on the materiality/specificity of individual sexuality] part of the reason why, in a book on gay/lesbian issues that uses the first person freely, emphasizes the importance of perspective effects, and has a special focus on the powerful performativity of coming out, the author herself stubbornly fails to come out in it as either lesbian or a heterosexual. Not to make a big mystery of it--and because I've written as much in other connections in the ensuing years--I'm willing to say nowadays that when I've had sex with another person, it has been with a man. (Climactic revelation.) Yet there still seems to me something telling in the different choice this book made in its time (xvi).
●As the writing of Epistemology progressed and the designations "homosexual" and "heterosexual" came to seem more and more contingent, I found it increasingly hard to see how anyone would identify with the latter tern except from eagerness to disavow its antonym. . . . Because one term occurred in a relation of extreme subordination to the other gay coming-out at least didn't have the pharisaical liability of sounding as though one felt entitled to congratulation (or sounding as though one were trying not to sound as though one felt so) in having that status. It is as if one couldn't say "heterosexual" in the first person without invoking, fatuously, the mendacious pretense of the two term's symmetry--as well as of their empirical transparency (xvii).
●That was part of what my performative insistence was about: a refusal to pretend to make sense within a bifurcated discourse that did not make any sense of me (xvii).
★さらにSedgwickは（homosexualityの研究をし、gay-affirmativeである人間として、）heterosexualであることを公言することが"hectoring but rather abject position" (xvii)を形成する（とすくなくともEC執筆当時には思われた）ことについて言及している。カミングアウトの行為にはhomo/hetero binaryを一度受け容れて話すことがつきまとうように思われたので、語らないことに政治性が見いだされた、ということ。これはとても納得できるのだよね。カミングアウトの行為は政治的に有用ではあるのだが、それをしないということも潜在的に（gay-affirmative的に）政治的であるということ。これはやはり組み込むべき議論のような気がする。
☆世紀転換期における変化: homo/hetero binaryの誕生
●The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century--its popularization preceding, as it happens, even that of the word "homosexual." . . . What was new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence (2).
☆クローゼット、沈黙という名の発話行為
●[I]n the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routine basis. As Foucault says: "there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things . . . . There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses" (HS 27). "Closetedness" itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence --not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differently constitute it (3).
●[T]he phrase "the closet" as a publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available, obviously, only by the difference made by the post^Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet (14).
★沈黙それ自体をperformanceとして見なすというのには賛成なのだが、このあたりでのSは沈黙を抑圧として捉えているように見える。
☆セクシュアリティの多元的な軸—homo/hetero binaryに還元され得ないものとしてのセクシュアリティ（セックス／ジェンダー／セクシュアリティ）
●It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones of sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc. ), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual orientation" (8).
●Sex, gender, sexuality: three terms whose usage relations and analytical relations are almost irremediably slippery. The charting of a space between something called "sex" and something called "gender" has been one of the most influential and successful undertakings of feminist thought. For the purposes of that undertaking, "sex" has had the meaning of a certain group of irreducible, biological diffrentiations between members of the species of Homo sapience who have XX and those who have XY chromosomes. . . . "Sex" in this sense--what I'll demarcate as "chromosomal sex"--is seen as the relatively minimal raw material on which is then based the social construction of gender (27).
●To the degree that it has a center or starting point in certain physical sites, acts, and rhythms associated (however contingently) which procreation or the potential for it, "sexuality" in this sense may seem to be of a piece with "chromosomal sex": biologically necessary to species survival, tending toward the individually immanent, the socially immutable, the given. But to the extent that, as Freud argued and Foucault assumed, the distinctively sexual nature of human sexuality has to do precisely with its excess over or potential difference from the bare choreographies of procreation, "sexuality"might be the very opposite of what we originally referred to as (chromosomal-based) sex: it could occupy, instead, even more than "gender" the polar position of the relational,. the social/symbolic, the constructed, the variable, the representational (29).
● It is certainly true that without a concept of gender there could be, quite simply, no concept of homo- or heterosexuality. But many other dimensions of sexual choice (auto- or alloerotic, within or between generation, species, etc.) have no such distinctive, explicit definitional connection with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class (31).
●It may be, as well, that a damaging bias toward heterosocial or heterosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of gender. This bias would be built into any gender-based analytic perspective to the extent that gender definition and gender identity are necessarily relational between genders--to the extent, that is, that in any gender system, female identity or definition is constructed by analogy, supplementarity, or contrast to male, or vice versa (31).
●sexuality extends along so many dimensions that aren't well described in terms of the gender of object-choice at all (35).
★フェミニズムとクイアスタディーズは完全には重ならないという主張。なぜなら前者はジェンダーという二元的な差異に関する研究であり、一方後者はセクシュアリティという性欲望対象のジェンダーには還元され得ないものに関わるから。ジェンダーという概念それ自体がヘテロセクシストなシステムに基づき、それを強化している可能性。
☆Coming out の意義
●[Allan Bloomのクローゼット擁護 in The Closing of the American Mind (1988)] Bloom blames the sexual liberation movements of the sixties . . . for dissipating the reservoirs of cathectic energy that are supposed to be held, by repression, in an excitable state of readiness to invested in cultural projects. Instead, as Plato's diversity of erotic expression"(237) has been frittered away on mere sex, now supposedly licit, "the lion roaring behind the door of the closet" has turned out "to be a little, domesticated cat" (CAM 99). . . . So Bloom is unapologetically protective of the sanctity of the closet, that curious space that is both internal and marginal to the culture: centrally representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even while marginalized by its orthodoxies (56).
●[Allan Bloomの「クローゼット」擁護—言説の中に取り込まれ得ない空間としての—に抗い、もう一度coming outの意義を明確化するS] It is heartbreakingly premature for Bloom to worry, at least with regard to homophobic prohibition, that the times are now such that anything goes, that "sexual passion is no longer dangerous in us." Our culture still sees to its being dangerous enough that women and men who find or fear they are homosexual, or are perceived by others to be so, are physically and mentally terrorized through the institutions of law, religion, psychotherapy, mass culture, medicine, the military, commerce and bureaucracy, and brute violence. Political progress on these and similar life-and-death issues has depended precisely on the strength of a minority-model gay activism. . .
And that side of the needed progress cannot be mobilized from within any closet; it requires very many people's risky and affirming acts of the most explicit self-identification as members of the minority afflicted (58).
★もちろんSは素朴にカミングアウトを称揚しているわけではない。ただしある種の権利獲得のためにはminorityとしてhomosexual identiityを確立してカミングアウトによって権利を主張すべき場合があり、それはクローゼットの中からは行われ得ない、としている。
☆Cross-identification: ゲイでない人間がゲイについて語るということにまつわる不安と意義—identification with/asという問題系
●What ... would make a good answer to implicit question about someone's strong group-identification across politically charged boundaries, whether of gender, of class, of race, of sexuality, of nation?
●After all, to identify as must always include multiple process of of identification with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it not, the relations implicit in identifying with are, as psychoanalysis suggests, in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation, and disavowal (61).
●For a politics like feminism, furthermore, effective moral authority has seemed to depend on its capacity for conscientious and enfoldment of women alienated from one another in virtually every other relation of life. Given this, there are strong political motives for obscuring any possibility of differentiating between one's identification as (a woman) and one's identification with (women very differently situated--for bourgeois feminists, this means radically less privileged ones). At least for relatively privileged feminists of my generation, it has been an article of faith, and a deeply educative one, that to conceive of oneself as a woman at all must mean trying to conceive oneself, over and over, as if incarnated in ever more palpably vulnerable situation and embodiments. The cost of this pressure toward mystification--the constant reconflation, as one monolithic act, of identification with.as--are, I believe, high for fiminism, though its rewards have also been considerable (61-62).
●[T]here is a whole different set of reasons why a problematics of identification with/as seems to be distinctively resonant with issues of male homo/heterosexual definition. ［このあたりのロジックはちょっとよくわからない、SによればChapter 3がidentificationの問題に触れているので、ここを再読すること."vicarious investment" がどういう意味を持ち得るのか、考える。］There may, then, be a rich and conflictual salience of the vicarious embedded within gay definition. . . . I can say generally that the vicarious investments most visible to me have had to do with my experiences as a woman; as a fat woman; as a nonprocreative adult; as someone who is, under several different discursive regimes, a sexual pervert; and, under some, a Jew.
★人種、階級、ジェンダーなどの境界を超えたcross-identificationが何を意味しうるのかという問題についてはもっと考えたいところ（Catherについて考えるときにはもちろん、それ以外、自分の研究全般に関しても）。メランコリックなアイデンティフィケーションとの関係？Identify with/as の構造というのはまさにmelancholic identidication なわけだから…
