Trapped in the Epistemological Closet: Black Sexuality and the “Ghettocentric Imagination”

摘要

In the summer of 2005, Robert Sylvester Kelly released the first five chapters of his twenty-two-episode magnum opus Trapped in the Closet, garnering a great deal of attention both from media critics and popular audiences. Elaborating on S. Craig Watkins's notion of the “ghettocentric imagination” and Eve Sedgwick's argument on the processes of epistemological production structured by the metaphor of the closet, this essay examines the relationships between and among black popular culture, the “closet,” and the maintenance of certain definitions of “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality”; it argues for a deeper understanding of the “glass closet,” a space of confinement and hypervisibility, as a structuring metaphor and trope in representations of black sexuality. Speculating on the relationship between black popular culture and theories of sexuality more generally, the essay suggests that the glass closet must also figure into scholarly assessments of the emergence of the “down low,” a term that typically describes black men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay, bisexual, or queer.