Abstract
R. Kelly’s widely popular, episodic opera Trapped in the Closet (Trapped) begins with the protagonist, Sylvester (Kelly), waking up alone, noticeably disoriented, in the bed of a presumed one-night stand. His sexual partner, Cathy, soon returns to the bedroom to inform Sylvester that her husband Rufus is coming up the stairs. First considering jumping out of the window, Sylvester decides to hide in the closet to avoid the inevitable confrontation. A few seconds later, Rufus arrives, and the couple begins to engage in foreplay until the untimely ringing of Sylvester’s cell phone interrupts them. After searching other parts of the apartment, Rufus approaches the closet to find Sylvester waiting inside, with a Beretta in hand.
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Notes
S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 197.
Eve K. Sedgwick, Epistemologies of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 11. Sedgwick’s assessment of one key crisis in the twentieth century comes roughly eighty years after W. E. B Du Bois’s prediction that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men.” I envision this article, and my larger dissertation project, as an opportunity to examine exactly how Sedgwick and Du Bois’s declarations describe black sexuality in the twenty-first century.
Countless scholars have made this claim. Instructive to my work is Daphne A. Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent and Fred Moten’s piece, “Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2: 217–46. Both Brooks and Moten theorize the relationships between race, space, and sexuality and focus in part on the condition of containment. Fanon’s canonic Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967) is also deeply instructive on these issues.
John L. Jackson Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008).
B. Ruby Rich quoted in D. Contreras, “New Queer Cinema: Spectacle, Race, Utopia,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2004), 119.
Peter Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 15.
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 37.
Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 53.
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© 2012 Shaka McGlotten and Dána-Ain Davis
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Snorton, C.R. (2012). Trapped in the Epistemological Closet. In: McGlotten, S., Davis, DA. (eds) Black Genders and Sexualities. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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