The Closet

Definition

The closet is, in Lee Edelman's usage, the double figure joining a room-type and a psychic condition: the "water closet" of plumbing and the "site of bodily relations discursively tabooed" are "near allied" — which is why "the men's room tends to lack windows" just as the closet does (p. 103). The figure then interiorizes: the law of the men's room includes "the law whereby the straight male body becomes a closet itself: a spatial enclosure for an autonomous subject able to imagine inhabiting his body only by conceiving his body simultaneously as container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet; as bestowing upon him the social protection, the cultural shelter, it uniquely affords within our patriarchal sex-gender system, but only so long as he performatively shelters the structural flaw that opens his body, by way of its multiple openings (ocular, oral, anal, genital), to the various psychic vicissitudes able to generate illicit desires" (p. 104). The closet is thus not only where the queer subject is hidden — the discursive closet of "coming out" — but the container-form of masculinity itself: the body imagined as an enclosure, "being and needing a closet," sheltered only while it conceals its own permeability. The concept binds architecture's smallest private room to the psyche's enclosure, making the closet the point where interiority, containment and sexual regulation coincide.

A second, domestic-threshold register appears in Anne Troutman's chapter: the closet as the dwelling's smallest hidden space and the threshold to its hidden system. "In my brother's closet there is a small rounded door, no taller than a small child. It is hidden behind all the clothes that are hung on the rack in front of it" (1997/2006, p. 357) — the closet as concealment's device (the clothes that screen the door) and as the passage's mouth ("opens into the dark recesses of the eaves where we have our club"). Where Edelman's closet is the container-form of the body, Troutman's is the container-form of the house's unknown: the closet holds the door to the eaves, the unused twin holds the way to the parents' bedroom. The register adds the closet's childhood function: storage space doubling as secret-passage, the smallest room in the house operating as its deepest threshold. See hidden-spaces, concealment.

Key Thinkers

• Lee Edelman — the concept's theorist in these sources: the closet as the men's room's "near allied" and as the body's own enclosure-form ("Men's Room," 1996/2006).
• (Referenced in the wiki more broadly, not paged — see log: the literary-critical closet of secrecy and disclosure, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet onward.)

Related Concepts

• The Men's Room — the closet's built cousin: the windowless washroom whose lack of view and translucent glass enact the closet's visual logic (pp. 103–104).
• Privacy — the closet as privacy's smallest unit: the stall's "cloistered protection" against the urinal's exposure; the "cultural shelter" the closet-form affords within the patriarchal sex-gender system (p. 104).
• Interiority — the closet interiorized: the body "as container and thing contained," the enclosure that models the subject as container of space.
• Enclosure — the general spatial operation of which the closet is the minimal case: containment as both protection and trap.
• The Uncanny — the closet's affect when the enclosure fails: the "toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed," the loss of "at home-ness" (p. 107).
• Corporeal Inscription — the "structural flaw" of the body's "multiple openings" that the closet-form must shelter: the body whose enclosure is itself produced, not given (p. 104).
• Boundaries — the closet as boundary made absolute: visual commerce arrested, exchange still permitted "analogous to those that would seem most successfully arrested by its circumscription of the visual" (pp. 103–104).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the concept's source: the men's room "near allied" to the closet, "both as 'water closet' and as site of bodily relations discursively tabooed" (p. 103); the straight male body as "a closet itself… container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet" (p. 104); the stall's "cloistered protection" as the closet's spatial offer within the men's room (p. 105).
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the domestic-threshold register: "In my brother's closet there is a small rounded door, no taller than a small child. It is hidden behind all the clothes that are hung on the rack in front of it. The door sticks slightly when pulled and opens into the dark recesses of the eaves where we have our club" (p. 357) — the closet as the hidden-space system's threshold, concealment (the clothes-screened door) and passage (the child-scale entrance) in one smallest room. See hidden-spaces, concealment, childhood-spaces.

Open Questions

• The wiki's enclosure-tradition (Bachelard's cell, the hermetic seal, the made bathroom) treats enclosure as the interior's productive condition; Edelman's closet treats it as masculinity's regulatory container. Are these the same enclosure with different occupants — and can a theory of the interior hold the shelter and the closet together?
• If the body "becomes a closet itself," is the closet a room-type, a body-schema, or a discourse — and which of the three does interior design actually build?
• The closet's "cultural shelter" is conditional ("only so long as he performatively shelters the structural flaw"): what spatial forms exist that shelter without requiring the sheltering performance — and are they buildable in the washroom, the stall, the home?

Stub note: This page was created from two sources (Edelman 1996/2006; Troutman 1997/2006) and still requires fuller treatment — the literary-theoretical closet (Sedgwick, the "glass closet"), wardrobe/closet histories of storage and secrecy, and the design literature on coming-out and domestic closets.