skeletons in the closet

‚ÄúIf Olivia is gay, then she's a closet case.‚Äù   ~ Sally Forth

While Hastie seems to suggest that there are libidinous aspects of consumption, Joyrich’s article “Epistemology of the Console” offers a more comprehensive model of how epistemology and consumption are also fundamentally intertwined with sexuality in the televisual sphere. Her premise is that “U.S. television both impedes and constructs, exposes and buries, a particular knowledge of sexuality” (440) as one of its structuring projects, to the point that “the closet becomes an implicit TV form” (450). In Epistemology of the Closet, which furnishes the theoretical framework for Joyrich’s argument, Eve Sedgwick investigates how, around the turn of the 20th century, the homo/hetero binary was rather remarkably transformed into the privileged, obligatory taxonomy for classifying all persons and all permutations of sexuality. Not only did this discourse manage crisis in the realm of sexual demarcation, it was also entangled with an array of other constitutively modern predicaments, such that “a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequently and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of the homosocial/homosexual definition” (72) — among them knowledge/ignorance, public/private, inside/outside, and masculine/feminine. Because “the structuring of same sex bonds [is] a site of intensive regulation that intersects virtually every issue of power and gender” (2-3), the borders of heterosexuality and homosexuality are incessantly policed (for their own sake and for the sake of the other fraught domains they intersect with), but they can never be definitively stabilized. The closet is the figure for this profoundly contradictory organizing principle, not only of sexual identity, but of all oscillations of secrecy and disclosure that are primordially filtered through the “one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy” (73). The exasperating and oppressive paradoxes of the closet, wherein that which is unknowable, unspeakable, and invisible is at the same time relentlessly studied, discussed, and represented (and vice versa), are emblematic of “the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers, too, to the incoherence with which heterosexual desire and identity are conceptualized” (82). As Joyrich sums up the quandary: “if, as Sedgwick compellingly argues, sexuality is inextricable from what counts as knowledge in our culture, then it is impossible simply to define a program of knowing sexuality” (459).

Applying this theory to television specifically, Joyrich asserts that the swinging of the closet door (445) is an aporia at the heart of televisual representation, perforated as it is with the kinds of overlapping cultural minefields that Sedgwick identifies:

Homosexuality — the mark of diacritical sexual difference in our society — [is] both an effect of and an obstacle to television’s confessional, familial, and consumer regime, the sexuality produced precisely as obstacle, necessarily inside and outside the televisual domain... With sexual disclosure seemingly compulsory yet forbidden, demanded yet contained, television constructs illicit sexualities ambivalently as both known and unknown (449)

Like Doty, Jones, and indeed, Sally Forth, Joyrich observes that the media have managed homosexual desire through deliberate ambiguity, with contradictory consequences: “Held ‘definitionally in suspense’ through connotation, homosexuality became impossible either to confirm or to disprove, with the unsettling (or heartening) effect that heterosexuality itself could no longer be absolutely guaranteed... this epistemic/erotic nexus has continued to construct homosexuality as both desired and disavowed” (442). This strategy is a key permutation of “the [TV] industry’s attempts to define sexuality as product while retaining its simultaneous anxiety around sexuality as practice” (451), an economic bargain often facilitated by “encourag[ing] an epistemology (and erotics) of ‘knowing viewers’” (453) (or, in my terms, trained detectives).
But, while Doty and Sally affiliate with a politics of visibility, Joyrich cautions that “in formulating a politics of representation, we need not — indeed, should not — simply ask for more... the explicit revelation of sexuality on commercial television need not explode the logic of the closet” (467). Doty himself notes that the appearance of overtly lesbian characters on TV shows often serves to localize and thus contain what are otherwise more pervasive and destabilizing homoerotic undercurrents (43). What Joyrich’s critical application of the architecture of the closet to television helps us to understand is that, when it comes to gays on TV, there can never be any uncorrupted movement from invisibility to visibility (just as “coming out” doesn’t resolve the double binds of the closet for non-fictional gay people [Sedgwick 68]). The problems of representing homosexual desire inhere in the ceaseless oscillation between visible and invisible, inside the closet and outside on the streets (or screen) that is constitutive of (post)modern culture itself.