Sedgwick, Eve.
Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
Chapter 1 "Epistemology of the Closet" pp.67-90
[Summary]
20世紀においてクローゼットはhomosexualityに限定される隠喩の地位を超えて、広く抑圧機構の隠喩となってきたが、それはhomosexualityが深く「秘密／開示」「私的／公的」といった二項対立に関わっているからである。が、homosexualityは他の抑圧（人種、性、年齢その他に関する差別）と違い、可視的なスティグマに基づいていないだけに、カミングアウトの行為は、あえてhomosexualityを認識しようとしない、homosexualityを不可視化しようとするシステムの、権力を伴う無知を暴くことが可能である（もちろんhomosexualityのカミングアウトはそんなに単純明快なものではなく、たとえばsexuality/erotic identitiyというものがrelationalなものであるがゆえにカミングアウトする相手との関係を揺るがす可能性があることなどの特有の危険も持ちうる）。
☆クローゼットをユートピア化しないこと
●To say, as I will be saying here, that the epistemology of the closet has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout this century is not to deny that crucial possibilities around and outside the closet have been subject to most consequential change, for gay people. There are risks in making salient the continuity and centrality of the closet, in a historical narrative that does not have as a fulcrum a saving vision--whether located in past or future--of its apocalyptic rupture. A meditation that lacks that particular utopian organization will risk glamorizing the closet itself, if only by default; will risk presenting as inevitable or somehow valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment and sheer pain (68).
●"The closet" and "coming out," now verging on all-purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politically charged lines of representation, have been the gravest and most magnetic of those figures. The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century. . . . The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its seemingly unambivalent public sting can be counterposed as a salvational epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the closet (71).
☆「知」と「セックス」の概念的不可分性
●For any modern question of sexuality, knowledge/ignorance is more than merely one in a metonymic chain of such binarisms. The process, narrowly bordered at first in European culture but sharply broadened and accelerated after the late eighteenth century, by which "knowledge" and "sex" became conceptually inseparable from one another--so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion--was sketched in Volume I of Foucault's History of Sexuality →中でもhomosexualityが認識の対象として拒絶されることによって、秘するべきものとして構築された。[I]t was a long chain of originally scriptural identification of a sexuality with a particular cognitive positioning (in that case, St. Paul's routinely reproduced and reworked denomination of sodomy as the crime whose name is not to be uttered, hence whose accessibility to knowledge is uniquely preterited) that culminated in Lord Alfred Douglas's epochal public utterance, in 1894, "I am the Love that dare not speak its name."
