ISSUE I | SPRING 2018
Queering the Closet: Impossible Metaphors and the Politics of Subjectivation
JOSEPH RUPPRECHT '18
In order to achieve queer subjectivation, one must come out of the closet. The closet is both a place in the home as well as a metaphor that structures particular conceptions of queerness. In order for this metaphor to fulfill its premise, then it must produce narratives that are compatible with the configuration of reality that it suggests. However, the metaphor of the closet suggests a notion of queer identity that does not adequately account for queer people’s experience of that metaphorical place. It produces a narrative in which a subject moves from being “in the closet” to “out of the closet,” from one stable position on a binary to another. This binary ignores aspects of the queer experience, including the disorientation, fracturing, and erasure of queer narratives. The metaphor of the closet also produces the narrative that being in the closet equates to repression and coming out equates to liberation. Although leaving the closet suggests a narrative of liberation, the way the closet configures queer experience could mean the opposite is true. In this paper, I will argue that the metaphor of the closet fails to adequately explain the reality it imagines by suggesting a problematic and inaccurate binary of in/out and by precluding the possibility of liberation. In order to argue this, I will rely on Ahmed’s notion of a queer phenomenology, Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, and Butler’s theories of subjectivation.
Although the closet is not a material object, its role in the configuration of queer experience establishes its potential as an object of phenomenological investigation. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed presents a phenomenology of Husserl’s table. She claims that Husserl choses to write about the table, not just because it physically held the paper on which he wrote, but also because of an organization of social reality that allowed white men access to philosophical discourse. Just as the table is one of “the ‘materials’ of philosophy,” the closet serves as one of the materials of queerness (Ahmed 34). The closet is a place in the home, in one’s room, a place few people see. It exists both as a physical place and as a metaphorical object necessary in the construction of queer identity. By centering the metaphor of place, one might arrive at queer identity through the threshold of a closet. Arriving at queer identity suggests the successful completion of a narrative, a sense of liberation from an imposed silence.
However, we must problematize the notion that leaving the closet is an act of liberation. Instead of liberating subjects, the closet imagines a binary divide in queer people’s identity that has problematic and inaccurate implications on narratives of queerness. As a component of queerness, the closet metaphor structures a narrative for one’s identity that suggests a division between a period of being “in the closet” and “out of the closet,” a linear movement from one identity to another. However, no queer person experiences their life in this way. Coming out of the closet to one set of people or in a particular space does not necessarily affect the reception of that person’s identity as it exists in other spaces. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed argues that bodies are not exterior to the spaces that produce them. She claims, “bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but rather are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling” (Ahmed 9). Take for example a queer subject who is not out to everyone in their life. This subject may inhabit spaces with people to whom they are not out, such as a classroom or a household. By existing in these spaces and being produced by them, they lose their queer identity and must exist as a prismatic assemblage of their assumed cis/hetero identity and their internal queer identity. An object that establishes a binary between in and out serves as an inadequate metaphor for queer experiences by forcing queer people to continually fracture and reconfigure their identity during processes of subjectivation.
This forced binary of being in or out also means that the closet functions as an impossible object upon its arrival, thus establishing disorientation as a condition for queer subjectivation. When a subject comes out to someone, they metaphorically emerge from the closet that had been hiding their identity; however, in the context of this social relation, the closet had not existed as a component of the subject’s identity until they acknowledge leaving it to that particular listener. In other words, the closet arrives at the moment of the subject’s exit from it. This has disorienting effects on how the closet functions as a metaphorical object. While most objects are “an effect of towardness,” the closet becomes an effect of ‘away-ness’ or ‘behind-ness’ (27). This imagines queer people to be distant from the place that produced their identity and thus implies a constant looking back at what is not there in order to move forward along the process of subjectivation. When arguing for a notion of queerness as disorientation, Ahmed claims that “disorientation occurs when [the extension of bodies into space] fails” (11). By suggesting a look back in order to move forward, the metaphor of a closet presupposes a failure of queer bodies to properly orient themselves in relation to time and futurity. This looking back at what is now gone ruptures or confuses the present and future of the queer subject. Therefore a binary of outness cannot logically account for the construction of reality that the closet presupposes.
The in/out binary also ignores the fact that although the closet disappears at the moment of its inception, a subject never fully transcends its effect on their identity. This is because the closet is a metaphor that suggests conditions which cannot be fully transcended. Speaking on backgrounded objects, Ahmed claims that “we remain reliant on what we put in brackets” (33). The closet disappears from an out subject’s immediate surroundings, but the traumas that the space may have produced do not. The image of a closet implies traumas associated with shame, secrecy, and silence. However, a binary construction of outness suggests that by coming out, queer people transcend the shame and silence of the place they have left. Such a narrative ignores the fact that the closet a subject builds for themselves in order to leave inevitably shapes their position and orientation in reality. This makes the binary construction that the closet metaphor implies inadequate for describing queer experiences of that place.
The binary imperative of the closet metaphor also allows for the erasure of those who cannot access materials for the closet’s construction. The closet metaphor suggests that queer people only achieve queer subjectivation once they emerge from it. Before the subject comes out, the closet does not have ramifications on their external identity; it does not exist narratologically for those who cannot access it. This creates a metaphorical situation in which a body occupies a space that does not exist. It is then a metaphor that selectively erases the identities of those who cannot participate in its arrival, which has problematic implications in a physical reality that presents so many barriers to the closet’s arrival. In our reality, the construction of a closet requires physical and metaphorical resources that are distributed unequally across different subjectivities. In regards to Husserl’s table, Ahmed claims that “histories shape ‘what’ surfaces: they are behind the arrival of ‘the what’ that surfaces.” Here she is explaining that the table arrives more easily for certain subjectivities due to the material labor of others: workers who built the table and women who provided the domestic labor necessary for the occupation of a philosopher to exist (44). Similarly, the materials necessary in the closet’s metaphorical construction arrive more easily for white bourgeois men who have access to economic capital, social comfort, and material safety. These factors facilitate an effective construction and safe exit from the closet. A metaphor that acknowledges the ephemerality and instability of queer identity could avoid erasuring those who fail to complete the narrative it suggests. Meanwhile, instead of liberating subjects, the closet constructs narratives of queerness that allows for the erasure of certain subjects, the disorientation of perception, and the fracturing of queer identity.
Furthermore, the closet metaphor fails to allow for the liberation it implies by producing
the possibility for both the marginalization and the cooptation of queer subjects. In The History of Sexuality V. 1, Foucault asks, “by what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated?” (Foucault, 8-9). Here, he is critiquing the notion that society represses or silences discourses on sexuality. Instead, he argues that there is “a determination on the part of agencies of power to hear it spoken about it” (18). These agencies of power force sex into discourse in order to ensure “the solidification and implantation of an entire sexual mosaic” (53). In other words, the construction of a closet services these agencies of power most if the subject leaves their closet. Leaving the closet suggests a discovery of truth. If the truth of someone’s sexuality is incompatible with the goals of the state, then technologies exist for regulating that identity. On the other hand, if this truth is compatible with the goals of the state, then we could see it “inserted into systems of utility” (24). For example, homonationalism imagines queer liberation in America and Europe as a justification for imperialism, specifically the occupation of the Middle East (Lewis 226). Similarly, the liberation of gay subjects from their closets allows for the creation of a gay demographic, “a mode of specification of individuals,” which could facilitate the organization of capitalist markets (Foucault 47). Therefore, the process of subjectivation that the closet imagines creates not only the possibility of oppression, but also the probability of cooptation and utilization. By imagining a narrative of coming out as liberation, the closet metaphor conceals the fact that power structures act on subjects both in and out of the closet.
The closet metaphor further belies its narrative of liberation by failing to accurately
account for the process of subjectivation. As stated earlier, coming out implies a shift between two stable identity positions; however, the process of subjectivation does not connote an active choice to move from one identity to the other, but rather the forced citation of certain norms over others. Butler claims, “this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject” (60). A subject does not actually have control over their own subjectivation as the closet metaphor implies. Instead, various norms manifest in the subjects’ behaviors and thus determine that subject’s identity position. Furthermore, the closet binary ignores the role abjection plays in the process of subjectivation. Butler states that, “every being is constrained by not only what is difficult to imagine, but what remains radically unthinkable” (59). For example, to be gay and out of the closet involves an act of disavowing heterosexual identity; however, heterosexual identity will always function as a constitutive exclusion for the production of a gay subject. While exiting the closet implies an active rejection of cis/heterosexuality, queer identity does not actually liberate a subject from the norms they seek to oppose.
In this way, the closet is an impossible metaphor for describing the experience of queer
subjectivation. By providing an impossible metaphor for identity-formation, the language forces us to lose sight of the operations that control our identities. The closet as a metaphor then functions as a “more devious and discrete form of power” than the repression of its interior (Foucault 11). To rely on the closet as the threshold to our liberation only reiterates its power over us. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed concludes that the table is a queer object (Ahmed 36). The closet is simply not queer enough to serve as the metaphor of queer subjectivation. But if a closet is not queer enough, then what is? Maybe instead of “come out of the closet,” we could “explore the carnival,” “enter the mirror maze,” or “have fun at the parade.” Regardless of its replacement, the closet is not what represses us, and leaving it does not equate to liberation.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage-Random House, 1978.
Lewis, Holly. The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection. Zed Books Ltd, 2016.