People may disagree with me, but I find Sedgwick's style gorgeous and memorable. This may make the book difficult to read, but it also can make it quite a pleasure, and what else could one want from a well-informed, well-argued, politically necessary academic intervention?

For people deterred by Sedgwick's prose, I suggest you go pick up something more simple-minded. Whoever thought that reading a book shouldn't be a challenge? Who actually believes that one shouldn't struggle with difficult and new ideas?

The Epistemology of the Closet is a necessary book. Sedgwick's thoughts on ignorance and power (in response to Foucault's coupling of knowledge/power) are incredible. Her readings of Bowers v. Hardwick, the homosexual panic defense, and figurations of homosexuality are more than insightful: they are powerful critiques and exposes of the way that homophobia operates and is legitimated in contemporary American culture. Please please read this book. Read it twice or three times. Try it again and again. Each time you return, I promise you, you'll be startled by the ideas that come out, and hopefully, they'll mobilize you to do something more with them.

Take it to the next level and keep reading.

Sedgwick's main argument is as follows: she believes that homosexuality - male and lesbian - tends to be represented in both society and in literature as though it were an unstable, even deviant or perverse alternative to the fixed norm of heterosexuality. Homosexuality is all too often a thing of 'the closet'; it is a secret waiting to come out; it is the 'love that dare not speak its name'. In Sedgwick's preface to this book, she introduces a note of urgent contemporaneity to her writing that continually resurfaces later on. Clearly, Sedgwick perceives an urgent topicality in her subject matter.

This argument is sound. The execution is mostly fine. Occasionally Sedgwick seems to truncate her examination of works as soon as she has provided us with the bare outlines of their queer subtexts. For instance, she tells us that Claggart in Melville's 'Billy Budd' is gay, and that his testimony against the short story's title character contains an array of important, yet pervasively subtle, sexual connotations. Sometimes this approach borders dangerously on dispensing cheap thrills as Sedgwick proceeds to list terms that constitute sexual innuendo. Having done this, she does not try to link other themes in 'Billy Budd' - issues of legality, of social hierarchies and of mutiny - with the theme of homosexuality. Thus she doesn't always carry her analysis far enough. Why is Claggart gay, but not Billy Budd himself, or any of the other sailors aboard the Bellipotent for that matter? Why does Sedgwick make this seemingly petty distinction when the text itself is, as she rightly argues, deliberately secretive to the extent that it is refuses to make such details explicit? Still, this is an admirable and well-intentioned effort to create a foundation for further studies of queer theory. At the same time Sedgwick tries to emphasize the broader social relevance of her concerns. But here's the final catch: her style of writing is so densely compacted, so obfuscatory, so Jamesian in its complex morass of never-ending clauses that it's bound to marginalize a potentially much larger audience than the one it has now. And so this text, which is relevant in one sense, is esoteric in another. Moreover, Sedgwick likes to combine eloquence with banal profanities as freely as she mixes readings of Proust with Willie Nelson. For those who are phased by such language games, this set of reviews is where your intimacy with Sedgwick ends. For those remaining, Sedgwick's writing is a rare treat.