![]() ![]() Sedgwick's assessment of one key crisis in the twentieth century comes roughly eighty years after W. Sedgwick, Epistemologies of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 11. ![]() To articulate the existence of a “ghettocentric imagination,” then, is also to articulate that this is a cultural imaginary whose performative characteristics are assumed to refer to only one segment of the black community.Įve K. ![]() That quality certainly reflects tensions that have long been present in the black community, but it also reflects the more recent-and constantly growing and rigidifying-gap between the underclass and the middle class. The term “ghetto” has relatively recently acquired a pejorative quality in black speech. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 197. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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