Response: "Epistemology of the Closet"

I wanted to re-read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet" before delving into more queer kids books because I think one thing that characterizes kids books in general - and ones on queer topics in particular - is the omission of content. This is partly out of pedagogical necessity, one assumes: a calculus textbook will be no use to someone who hasn't yet learnt arithmetic. But this is also done as a way to maintain (perhaps I should instead say "to produce") a childhood innocence.

Representations of queer folks in books for young children are caught somewhere between explanatory revelation and tactful withholding: sexuality is the topic, even though discussions of sex and sexuality are somewhat taboo in works for children. For all the tales that end with happy weddings of princes and princesses, none of them take the time to address what heterosexuality is. But now we have a set of books for kids that do address what homosexuality is, and I'm interested in investigating how that's been done.

Thus: Sedgwick. In her analysis of the biblical story of Esther, she proposes seven ways in which Esther's coming out as a Jew differs from a gay or lesbian coming out. By way of a quick summary, these are:

1. "...there is no suggestion that [her Jewish] identity might be a debatable, a porous, a mutable fact about her." That is, no one asks if her Jewishness is "just a phase."
2. "Esther expects Assuérus to be altogether surprised by her self-disclosure; and he is." She has control over others' knowledge of her identity.
3. "Esther worries that her revelation might destroy her or fail to help her people, but it does not seem to her likely to damage Assuérus, and it does not indeed damage him." The gay closet, however, is transmissible in that by outing oneself one puts others in a position of managing this nebulous knowledge.
4. "...Assuérus seems to have no definitional involvement with the religious/ethnic identity of Esther." A gay coming-out, though, has implications for the "erotic identity" of the person who receives the disclosure, because erotic identity is never not relational.
5. "There is no suggestion that Assuérus might himself be a Jew in disguise." This seems quite tied to #4 above: the receivers of such disclosures could themselves be in closets!
6. "Esther knows who her people are and has an immediate answerability to them." Gay people have no "intact" "identity and history" from which they emerge, to which they are responsible, by which they are legitimated.
7. "Esther's avowal occurs within and perpetuates a coherent system of gender subordination." Queer identities have a (necessarily?) unstable relation to "minority" and "gender." Esther's coming out provides an opportunity for a patriarchal continuity, which queer comings-out would likely rupture.                                                                             

Sedgwick articulates an economy of knowledge in which all people participate, projecting ideas about sexuality on those with whom we interact. And she goes on to show how the dynamic, reciprocally definitional closet is bound up with our several overlapping and contradictory categories of sexuality. What you know and how you know it are intertwined with ideas not only of queer "identity" but also of queer "acts."

Can we read picture books with overtly gay and/or lesbian characters as acts of coming out? What about picture books with implicitly queer characters: are these books in a kind of closet, or do they rely on a kind of open secret shared between the author and illustrator and the (child) reader? How do these books fit into Sedgwick's coming-out schema? Can we discern whether these titles propose "minoritizing" or "universalizing" categories of gay and lesbian sexuality? These are the kinds of questions I'm hoping to dig into as I continue my reading this term.