quibbles with Sedgwick

Two small quibbles need to be aired concerning the passage from Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet excerpted in our readings. First, it’s jarring to notice Sedgwick’s use of the epithet “gypsy” in reference to the people known properly as Roma or Rom, since that is how they name themselves and how they are recognized by the United Nations, the EU, and other international bodies. “Gypsy” is a word of 16th-century European origin based on a dialect word for “Egyptian,” as Roma were once widely believed to hail from Egypt. What makes Sedgwick’s casual use of “gypsy” unfortunate is the highly derogatory charge the term carries, particularly in many European social contexts. It would be impossible to imagine Sedgwick referring, with a straight face as it were, to Native Americans as “Injuns,” yet something very similar occurs in her uncritical use of the functionally racist term “gypsy.”

Secondly, and in full awareness of the strategic liberties an eminence of Sedgwick’s rank may exercise with evidence, I find it nonetheless a bit odd to see her enlist Melville’s Billy Budd as evidence in her treatment of the historical process by which “sexual knowledge and knowledge per se” come to be conflated with knowledge of homosexual desire (p. 688). In tracing her epistemic arc from Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun), Sedgwick cites the “influence” of Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Billy Budd on this process of conflation, yet—without putting too fine a point on it—how can two novels published some 35 years apart be said to exert such a parallel “influence”? Famously, Billy Budd lay cobwebbed in a drawer before its belated publication in 1924, well after Melville’s death in 1891, one year after the publication of Dorian Gray. Sedgwick advances the two works as if contemporaneous, which would be a trifling anachrony except for the fact that Billy Budd cannot be said to have had an influence on anyone until its publication and reception. Sedgwick appears to suggest that its influence radiated by some occult means from the drawer in Melville’s dusty hovel, where he lived in impoverished obscurity at the end of his life. By the time the novella actually surfaced in the twenties, the process for which Sedgwick offers it as proof—her “condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexuality [. . .] to the homosexual topic” (688)—would have been completed, or mutated to a further phase.