Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick

If you feel really great about your intelligence and would like to never feel that way again, this book is for you. I find getting through one sentence of this book saps my life expectancy by about a three months, it's absolutely exhausting. But every once in a while, I feel like I have to challenge myself and read a rigorous work of criticism. God knows why, I'm probably a masochist. I don't think a normal person would actually read this. I will not be so unbearably cliche as to call the effort of reading this 'richly rewarding' (and I didn't actually read all of it), but it was most certainly interesting when I managed to dig my way through to some of the arguments that Sedgwick is making. I'm still not sure why she is unable to convey them in normal language, but perhaps she is just a higher order of intellectual being. I read this mostly as an exercise in understanding critical theory, I'm not very politically engaged (okay, I lie, not at all politically engaged), and I'm not very interested in queer theory. There is an incredible amount of theory in this book, and truly stunning level of thinking, and as an exercise in critical understanding, it was very interesting to me. The way Sedgwick thinks is incredibly interesting for me to follow, because it's nothing like my own familiar patterns of thinking. There's such a dense wealth of material in this book that pretty much every sentence can generate a dissertation thesis. She's truly a stunning intellect. A lot of uncertainties in knowledge that I had with relation to sexuality got resolved by this book, and I don't that before reading it I had appreciated what a difficult area sexual self-identification is. Also, a lot of the theories she writes about seem to me like common sense now, but that's probably because since it was written in 1990, the world has come a long way in terms of acceptance, which made me happy to think about. I wonder what Sedgwick would have to say about the current transgender issues, and what she would say about attitudes to sexuality in the world today (I wonder, but don't want to have to read). However, I think she isn't too great at reading texts, she tends to twist them out of all shape to serve her theories. I really wish she could have just stuck to theory because her readings seem like she just has blinders on to everything else that is going on in the text.