Forgetting Sedgwick

Extract

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was not a historian of sexuality, but she was keenly aware of the historicity of sexuality and erotic desire in ways unlike other major figures in queer theory. This fact has gone largely unnoticed in queer studies, a field dominated by literary and cultural critics that has an uneasy relation with academic history. An example of the historicity of Sedgwick's theories of sexuality can be seen in her famous critique of Foucault's Great Paradigm Shift—that imaginary moment in the late nineteenth century when the category of the modern homosexual was thought to displace the category of the sodomite (Epistemology 44). The formulation of axiom 5 in Epistemology of the Closet—“the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity” (44)—reveals a deep consciousness of the “irreducible historicity of all things … discerning the time-and-place specificity of a thing, identifying the ways in which it relates to its context or milieu, and determining the extent to which it is both enabled and hamstrung by this relationship,” to cite the historian Hayden White's description of history as critique (224). If Foucauldian genealogy (or a “history of the present”) “begins with an analysis of blind spots in our current understanding, or with a problematization of what passes for ‘given’ in contemporary thought” (Halperin 13), it is vital, as Sedgwick puts it, to “denaturalize the present, rather than the past” (Epistemology 48). Sedgwick's vantage point on a queer past pivots around “homosexuality as we conceive of it today” (45), a phrase as resonant now in sexuality studies as was Foucault's reference to the homosexual as a species (Foucault 43). So entrenched are the modern categories of identity that Sedgwick repeats the phrase over and over in her cogent analysis of our current conceptions of sexuality. Such insistent differentiation between an alien past and an equally—if not more—alien present, the distinction between “them” and “us,” reverberates across the history of homosexuality. Consider, for instance, Matt Houlbrook's discussion of men who refrain from using “‘gay’ in the way we would use the term today” (xiii) or Jonathan Ned Katz's understanding of the presentness of our present standpoint—“what we today recognize as erotic feelings and acts” (6).