Abstract

Michel Foucault has detailed the manifold ways in which sexuality has become "the truth" of a person, a truth that must be made to speak, ceaselessly, in ever new permutations of the confessional. The metaphor of "coming out of the closet," indeed a Master-metaphor in recent cultural history, repeats and confirms this linking of sexuality to identity, to truth, and to speech. Why might someone refuse to tell the truth of his or her sexuality? According to the dominant logic of the closet, such behavior can only betoken closetedness, a lack of truthfulness-to-oneself and a crippling complicity with homophobia. But "outing" has been critiqued for its controlling impulse, whereby an individual is "categorically categorized." What if we were to take seriously strategies of resistance to this "outing" impulse, and consider them to be distinctly queer strategies, strategies of opacity, but not necessarily silence or invisibility? My project interrogates the viability of the metaphor of the closet, and puts forth a concept of "opacity" as an alternative queer strategy not linked to interpretation of hidden depths, concealed meanings, nor a neat opposition between silence and speech. I will be examining queer uses of forms typically linked to authenticity and truth-telling, namely the biography, the diary, and the interview. I look at three figures: philosopher Michel Foucault, writer Roland Barthes, and Pop artist Andy Warhol. My project also problematizes the role of the biographer, the interviewer, and the critic. My methodology draws on Queer Theory, and Cultural Studies critical theory and theories of subjectivity