When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic”

Wow. I mean, really: wow. I re-read Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet for this collective engagement with core texts from 1990, and was reminded of the vertiginous nature of her audacious claims about sexuality and knowledge. When I first read "Axiomatic," I'd finished my BA in English at the University of York (UK), and was about to start my MA in Women's Studies. That summer of 1991 was heady in lots of ways: I was living in a liminal space (the about to and the having done); my desire for friendship and friends had become increasingly bound up with politics and writing; and "Axiomatic," whose contours I could only barely follow but whose importance I sensed, accompanied me as an obscure companion. A very Sedgwick fantasy, of course: these memories of the anticipation of something I only later came to realize as significant.

In re-reading 'Axiomatic' in 2020 that "wow" has other intensities: the banality of the proposition that sexual meanings structure knowledge (eyeroll: yes, we know); and how it is "Axiomatic" itself — and its centrality to the invention of and institutionalization of what we know as "Queer Studies" — that has made it possible to be bored in exactly this way. But that's not what it was like then, and perhaps it shouldn't really be now either.

In her introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, "Axiomatic," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gives us her forceful central proposition: that Western knowledge as a whole is organized through a sexual binary (heterosexual versus homosexual) and that this works to privilege the heterosexual ordering of history, and of social and intersubjective life.1 For Sedgwick, that opposition is anything but straightforward: its pivot is the closet after all. In suggesting that it is the open secret that structures knowledge and power, Sedgwick foregrounds the instability of this formative binary, its failures and false promises, as well as its fear and trembling. The centrality of the sexual to knowledge, then, has the pace and feeling not of a romance or an action movie with their fully known plots, but of a noir thriller whose stalked actors never appear to be quite as they are. In centering the closet, Sedgwick disrupts our claims to finally know other people, too, both in the present (people are different from one another, and unknowably so, perhaps) and in the past (since the closet door can never be finally closed). Thus Sedgwick's proposition challenges both a teleological view of history that proceeds from what we know about then to what we know (about) now, and a politics of visibility and final identity in the present.2

In an era of the relative institutionalization of Queer Studies (depending on where one is, and of course never without threat) it is hard to remember that extraordinary turn that its inaugural authors risked: to insist on a field that was concerned both with homophobia and its own unstable referents at a particularly intense moment of the AIDS crisis. Whether because of an internal incoherence founding identity, or because of an insistence on multiple locations and uncertainties (or both), early Queer Studies writers posited sexuality as structuring knowledge through its erasures as well as its offerings.

So in this recent re-reading and confrontation with the turns and returns that constitute our field, I kept coming back to the enduring place of ignorance in Sedgwick's text. For Sedgwick, one of the consequences of epistemology formed in and through as well as of the closet is that knowledge is consistently authorized through a necessary and willed ignorance, rather than through fact or dextrous analysis. In many ways, this insight prepares the ground for her subsequent seduction by affect via Silvan Tomkins (with Adam Frank), opening up already the limits of epistemology over other kinds of understandings of the world.3 But for the now of reading "Axiomatic," the open secret of the closet functions to foreground ignorance in a range of ways that tell us something about the "how" of sexual epistemology.

Sedgwick's first example of ignorance, and far and away my favorite, is that of French President Francois Mitterrand's encounter with US President Ronald Reagan, an encounter that disadvantages Mitterrand despite his considerably stronger mastery of languages. Sedgwick puts it like this: "If M. Mitterrand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks — as he did lack — French, it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one."4 As always with Sedgwick, we feel her light linguistic touch, her deft use of the subjunctive, her evident pleasure in poking fun. It's a beautiful and brilliant representation of the ignorance that is fundamental to transatlantic power relations, and a clear example of her point that "knowledge" is not always an advantage. But so too it highlights the gendered and sexual dynamics of this hyperbolic relationship, the ways that the closet remains that open secret within which obscured difference is played out in front of our eyes. Reagan is the pioneer white American, and Mitterrand the over-educated Frenchman: nationality itself is gendered and sexualized through the performance of this ignorance. Their encounter makes a butch (anti)hero of Reagan and a disadvantaged effeminate queen of Mitterrand. For Sedgwick, it is the epistemology of the closet that makes it possible to make Mitterrand into a faggot (and Reagan his butch), and their encounter that proves the universality of its logic. That Mitterrand is a resolutely heterosexual figure (with his famously long-term mistress) matters little here, and in fact may serve to underwrite rather than undermine the queer performative power of the encounter.

Sedgwick's second example, and the one I was most surprised by in my return to "Axiomatic," concerns the centrality of ignorance in men's defense against accusations of rape. I was surprised because, since 1990, Sedgwick has been associated with queer theory over feminist theory, and more precisely with theorizing the significance of the inquiry into sexuality as an area separate from the inquiry into gender. Along with Gayle Rubin, Sedgwick is credited with the attempt to keep "gender" and "sexuality" distinct. And yet that inheritance turns out to have had the unfortunate side effect of obscuring the close attention Sedgwick does in fact pay to gendered sexual violence in "Axiomatic." Or more accurately, my surprise indicates my own retrospective reading of the impossibility of insisting on the separation and engaging their overlaps (while Sedgwick does not appear to suffer from the same problem, the one I am bound to attribute to her).

Sedgwick elucidates how the rape of women is governed by an epistemology of the closet that rewards men's ignorance and punishes women. The authority of heterosexuality is enforced through both the banalization of violence, but also the refusal of reading violence as violence (through ignorance). The epistemology of the closet allows for the defense that "I didn't know she didn't want it" to stand as legitimate, and for the misogyny this certainty is based on to be obscured. As Sedgwick notes, "it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education)."5 Men become men through their schooling not only in ignorance, but also in how to demonstrate it: how to keep hidden the deadly violence of male power within an unstable heterosexual/homosexual economy.

Finally, Sedgwick turns to the example we might have expected her to privilege from the start: the firing of people with HIV/AIDS, and the finding in favor of employers who demonstrate ignorance of medical knowledge of transmission. Sedgwick's analysis hinges on an irony. If the demonstration of medical knowledge is a disadvantage for employers seeking to sack HIV+ employees, then better not to know, not to become educated in the mode of transmission of the virus. The epistemology of the closet is writ large: too much knowledge makes its possessor suspect rather than reliable. A plea of "how could we be expected to have known?" signals the resolution of uncertainty: they are queer and contaminated; we are straight and untouchable. One of the horrors of the AIDS crisis is that the mode of defense against its rumors is precisely the mode of its viral circulation. Silence = Death.

Reflecting on these three examples of ignorance that Sedgwick explores as part of her case for epistemology being of the closet, I am struck by how they demonstrate Sedgwick's universalizing over minoritizing claim for the significance of sexuality. Thus, in each case ignorance functions as a central aspect not only of how homophobia works, but rather how homophobia structures other social contexts. The heteronormative violence of rape, transatlantic power relations and the Cold War, and employment precarity that favors the employer: all three are examples of the importance of an unstable heterosexual/homosexual binary regulated by the closet. They set the tone for responses that unwittingly reproduce the same dynamics even if in critical mode: one might consider chivvying Mitterrand to be more of a man, for example, or insisting that consent be hyper-visible if ignorance of it is not to prevail, both of which place the burden on representation onto the object of "closet politics."6

Identity here is somewhat beside the point. And yet Sedgwick never abandons identity, moving carefully between her universalizing claims and her minoritizing sensibilities in ways that refuse any imagined demand that she make up her mind. She is careful to acknowledge, for example, that everything that she is able to think and do in "Axiomatic" is thanks to theorists who have come before her, who have taken essentialist risks and courted obscurity: radical feminists, LGB proponents, and anti-sexual violence activists appear as brave if flawed heroes blazing a trail she walks more tentatively along. As a reader from both 1990 and 2020, I feel as much reassured as disappointed that this tension is still alive and well at the heart of queer theory. The move between minoritizing and universalizing claims continues to claim queer alternately as authorial crown or deconstructive sword, and despite consistent interrogations of the subject or object of queer theory, it is still mostly queer queens and kings who wield that sword and "heteronormativity" that feels its sharp edge. We might point to more recent work on "homonormativity" and "homonationalism," and suggest that this attention shifts the object of analysis, but as both Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar suggest, these homo-norms are critically located as part of rather than outside of heteronormativity and thus closet epistemology.7

Sedgwick puts that tension to work at the heart of her queer methodology in "Axiomatic." She knows she needs to value those most subject to the vicious vagaries of heterosexuality as violence (marginal subjects) but must also refuse a wholly identity-based approach to the study of sexuality. And so, in a move that I've loved teaching to successive generations of students, one that shows what it means "to queer" (as queer), Sedgwick hones in on one way of intervening in epistemologies of the closet: the valuing of nonce taxonomies. Nonce taxonomies are the name Sedgwick gives to the precise modes and orderings of the world produced by gossip, or other knowledges that circulate among the under-appreciated. For Sedgwick, nonce taxonomies describe both the knowledge that circulates in itself — the specific information (often with an ironic take on the powerful) — as well as the form that it takes (going in circles, whispering in corners, binding the dispossessed). Such knowledges are important because they embrace rather than seek to resolve the open secret, and thus keep the function and form of knowledge itself in open play. Nonce taxonomies concern who to trust, how to read a social landscape and how to navigate its dangers and possibilities, with a view to survival. And they are a means to turn merely living into pleasurable living.

But even here, at her most celebratory of the sexual and gendered margins, Sedgwick displaces the subjects she claims with characteristic deftness, teasing: "I don't assume that all gay men or all women are very skilled at the nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation."8 The tension of identity is active, irresolvable yet central to the methodological grammar Sedgwick delineates. Importantly, Sedgwick sidesteps the relationship between identity and morality. Gossip might be (indeed, often is) malicious as well as instructive, and may well humiliate in unintended ways. It is viral rather than containable, and Sedgwick's claiming of it pre-figures her interest in affect as contagious and proliferating.9 Re-reading "Axiomatic" I could not help but be struck by the reclaiming of virality in the face of that ignorance that can fire HIV+ employees. In a glorious twist away from the blunt violences of dominant epistemology, Sedgwick reclaims the viral as a survival tactic, as that which binds marginal lives and creeps into dominant logics. It is those who refuse the epistemology of the closet, who seek to resolve its rampant instabilities, who are caught in self-reproductive ignorance and deadening certainty. It is those whose lives are at stake, in the end, who hold the keys to proliferation and creativity. What an homage!

Sedgwick's pleasure in language and her careful attention to the resonances between articulation and politics mean that she is a profoundly non-defensive writer. Yet I was struck by an exception in the rather vexed footnote 32, which has a long list of US women of color writing in the 1980s as a note to the insight that "complex embodiments" inaugurate radical socialist-feminist thought and work by women of color.10 The long note constitutes the primary engagement with scholars of color in the text: it stands out visibly as longer than her other footnotes, draws the eye. Yet it's primarily a list: there is little detail to differentiate the thinkers (who include lesbian of color theorists Lorde, Moraga, Anzaldua, and Smith). And if a reader wants to follow these references up, Sedgwick points her to "good overviews of several of these intersections as they relate to women and in particular to lesbians" via white theorists Snitow, Stansell and Thompson, and Vance. These commentators complete the footnote, as though the lesbians of color they come after should be parsed second-hand, under the authority of whiteness, rather than read independently. I winced at that footnote on this recent reading, which I do not remember doing in 1990. It felt as though the point of the note is that we recognize that Sedgwick recognizes these theorists of color, even though she does not really engage them. I hesitated to include this analysis of what I think of as Sedgwick's defensive white reading mode, thinking that I'd risk losing the brilliance of her exegesis of closet epistemology, sexual universalism, and nonce taxonomy. But that's a defensive white reading mode of my own: the idea that centering questions of race and racism, or more fully exploring the issue of white reader location, would detract rather than enhance any analysis of Sedgwick's continued relevance.

Keeping open the question of whiteness, rather than foreclosing it, allows an extension of Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet that takes us back to Duggan's homonormativity and Puar's homonationalism. It reminds me that both (white, middle class, consumer) homonormativity and (white, middle class, nationalist) homonationalism are effects of closet epistemologies. They are not, as they are sometimes read, the opposite of progressive queer possibility, or parallel violences to heteronormativity, but rather perverse effects or subsets of heteronormativity.

In closet epistemology, "gayness" can be claimed as part of a normative national project precisely because of how ignorance frames transnational relations, and how "I didn't know" can act as a gay as well as straight male violent apologia in the face of self-perpetuating aggression. Ignorance of histories of "queer" desire transnationally and transhistorically is key to preserving an integral gay identity as secular and Western. Ignorance frames "Muslim" and "gay" or "lesbian" as incommensurable, enabling Islamophobia to be framed as a gay-friendly practice, forever positioning Islam as pre-modern in the process. Or, if we read M. Jacqui Alexander with Sedgwick in the context of transnational representation of homosexuality as a Western import, we can highlight the willful ignorance at the center of imagining heterosexuality to be the proper kinship framing for anti-colonial projects. The open secret of queerness can thus be endlessly deferred as part of the condition of the family fantasy that grounds post-colonial nationalism.11

It is ignorance, in Sedgwick's sense of willed turning away from shared truth to shore up power relations, that enables questions of sexual and gendered identities to circulate transnationally as sets of competing rights claims. Instead of investing in those identity-plays as a paradox that could be resolved, we might want to follow Rahul Rao in re-examining transnational circulation of sexual and gendered meanings as part of an expanded nonce taxonomy instead: a sequence of silences, miscommunications, and reading failures, as well as pleasures and unlikely intimacies.12

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Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory at the Gender Studies Department, LSE. Her work focuses on the institutionalisation, multiple histories and translations of 'feminist theory' and she is the author of Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018).

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