The next meeting of the Queer STS reading group will take place on Thursday 21st February (after reading week) at 5pm-6pm in the Alice Farrands Reading Room (located on the ground floor of UCL STS, 22 Gordon Square).
This time, we will discuss Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (2003): Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. In this text Sedgwick wrestles with what she considers to be the dominant theoretical tools available - a 'paranoid' positioning - for exposing the operation of latent homophobia in any given text and suggests, instead, that/how we might take up a 'reparative' approach that gives primacy to surprise (rather than expectation) and weak (rather than strong or self-confirming) theories. Sedgwick's proposals are thoughtful, beautifully written and, we may find, are continually relevant to studies and intervention in structural oppressions.
The essay can be found here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/799/chapter/137442/Paranoid-Reading-and-Reparative-Reading-or-You-re
In the absence of an abstract, here is a quote from the opening of the essay (pp.123-124):
Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered or spread, whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus’s origin. ‘‘Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate,’’ she said. ‘‘But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?’’...Patton’s response to me seemed to open a space for moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions:What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?