Anderson Cooper, Opacity, and the Loss that is Queerness

Blog post discussion features Nicholas de Villiers' OPACITY AND THE CLOSET: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol.

de villiers_opacity coverThe response to Cooper’s declaration also reminds me of Nicholas de Villiers’s recent concept of “opacity.” If we all “knew” Cooper was gay, but no one knew it, can we really say there was a closet at all? Perhaps we could read Cooper better through a lens of opacity. (Haha, that sounds funny.) But really, I wonder how much the closet breaks down as a metaphor in this case. If the closet doesn’t have walls and a ceiling, was it really there at all? De Villiers insists that by employing the idea of opacity, we open up new modes for queerness that don’t depend on the closet. What happens when we force Cooper back into a closet that wasn’t there in the first place, then make him come back out? (I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s an interesting question.) It reinforces the tyranny of the closet, I think.

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