Image Credit: Wikipedia
Of the few theoretical works that I have dealt with, as an undergraduate, is Eve Sedgewick’s idea of the closet. I used it for a research paper in Queer Lit that discusses the closet and how queer people deal with the inherent shame that comes with the closet. In Gopinath’s article, they specially pushed back on the idea that “the closet” is the space where gay, or queer, oppression occurs. They go on to claim that there are plenty of alternative narratives that this can occur, and uses The Quilt as an example.
This part of the essay struck me as a little confusing, to be honest, and I want to suggest, in the best way that I can, that even the household activities that can be a space for lesbian or homoerotic expression, still operate within the closet. In other words, the closet itself is transnational, and perhaps something that can be salvaged from a “Euro-American context”
One of the defining ways that this movie depicts female gaze and desire is in the backdrop of tradition, religious connotation, and sexist ideas of the absence of female sexual desire. A part of my understanding of the closet is the idea that, given what spaces you have, when opportunities arise to allow queer desire in that space, take it. So when Sita and Radha use those moments within the space of the household and make them queer, they are turning into a queer space that still operates within the closet. The article talks about the scene when the whole family is together at a picnic and Sita massaging Radha’s feet becomes erotic to the ignorance of those around them. The basis of the closet is, what Sedgwick has called, the interlocutor, where only those who understand the discourse, such as this scene, can really know what is happening (female desire and eroticism). The idea of an interlocutor is a sense of communication that only some participants can really understand. With this same scene the interlocutors are Sita and Radha who know and feel it’s erotic, and the rest of the family are not aware because they are outside the available discourse.
My main purpose is to try and understand why this kind of reading is unavailable to Gopinath’s article because of their claim that there are many more available spaces outside of Sedgwick’s idea of the closet. That that idea is inherently Euro-American and does not envelop the complexity or opportunity for reading critically. And to be perfectly fair, many of the ideas of this article were above my understanding, but this charge from the author was one that I could partially articulate.
Discussion Questions:
- What are the narratives and alternative reading available outside of Sedgewick? What opportunities do they offer that can deepen understanding of the article and the movie/story?
- Is the extension of the closet, as understood in the West, inadequate for this film and movie?
ENG 654 