News
Current SOF Fellow Irina Kalinka published a new article, "Reading in Dark Times: Toward a Queer Politics of Repair," in a special issue of Media Theory journal themed around critique, post-critique, and the present conjuncture. The whole issue is open access and can be found here.
Abstract
The essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) has been frequently cited as a foundational text of post-critique, especially in literary and queer theory. In this article, I will make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project, inspired by Sedgwick’s deep commitment to making oppositional strategy, and bring this understanding in critical conversation with some examples of its uptake during the post-critical “reparative turn” in the Humanities. I further posit that Sedgwick was already engaging in such reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ My overarching argument is that reparative reading, while at times misappropriated, can still provide the foundation for a larger project of queer repair – a prefigurative politics of the imagination.