El Clóset

Abstract

The closet, in its most basic meaning, is defined as a piece of furniture where we place everything we decide to keep or hide, but what happens when people use it to mask their sexual identity? In this case, "the closet" becomes a space that can be explained from heteronormativity and is used as a mechanism of biopolitical control through which families and society exercise power over the body and sexuality of its members, of those who subvert the norm in sexual matters. This research seeks to analyze the social factors that drive a person to assume or not, in the public eye, his or her homosexual identity within what is commonly referred as "coming out of the closet", as well as to expose the effects of the process of such coming out in the lives of the investigated subjects and their closest relationships. To achieve these objectives, the research work is expressed through the production of an ethnographic documentary video made with five homosexuals from the city of Cuenca-Ecuador, who, through an ethnographic method and a qualitative approach, expose their life experiences in relation to the so-called "closet". The study showed that "the closet" is a very complex symbolic space, both imaginary and real, that simultaneously represents subordination to the hetero-patriarchal system and submission to the norm in order to live and belong in our modern societies. Therefore, the "closet" is a space from which one never fully emerges; it is a threshold that is permanently crossed.