American literary critic and one of the founders of queer theory — whose Epistemology of the Closet (1990) established that the closet (the open secret of homosexuality) is a structuring principle of modern Western culture.
The epistemology of the closet: Sedgwick's foundational argument is that the homo/heterosexual definition has been and continues to be a crucial organizing principle of modern Western culture — and that the closet (the figure of knowledge and ignorance, speech and silence) structures not just gay experience but the entire epistemological landscape. By analyzing literary texts (James, Melville, Wilde, Proust) through the lens of the closet's open-secret structure, she showed how heteronormativity organizes culture. The concept of 'homosociality' (intense social bonds between men that are maintained through the traffic in women and the exclusion of homosexuality) was introduced in Between Men.
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