Gender is the conspiracy

Sedgwick: “As in Sentimental Journey, too, it is the ideological imposition of the imaginary patriarchal Family on real, miscellaneous, shifting states of solitude, gregariousness, and various forms of material dependence, that rationalizes, reforms, and perpetuates, in the face of every kind of change, the unswerving exploitations of sex and of class” (117). As everywhere in BM, S uses a very Foucauldian framework here to show how the seemingly inevitable form of the patriarchal family obscures the uneven, messy forms of shared human life, connected a thousand different lines of kinship and friendship, but limited and constrained by the stark symmetry of man-woman-child. And as Sedgwick implies, it's the patriarchal family that intensifies and sharpens gender differences, and reinforces the homosocial authority bound into patriarchal culture.

“It is the very minimalness, the arbitrariness, of the differentiation between male heterosexuality and its ‘opposite’ that has lent this distinction its power to organize complicated, historical transactions of power, including power of or over women” (118).