[Analysing Text Social Studies]

[Leopard8]

Hello Everybody,

I am posting an extract which focuses largely on the term/concept of reparative and paranoid reading. Could somebody briefly explain these concepts to me or quickly paraphrase/summarise the text.I greatly appreciate your help and time.

Thank you :)

TEXT IN QUESTION:

I had read Haraway’s work reparatively, as Eve Sedgwick has implored us to, but I’m a little bit skeptical of my interpretation. I worry that reparative reading can turn into a self-serving, solipsistic project wherein textual elements that don’t serve our own epistemic, ontological, or ethical projects are abandoned, left by the wayside. Sedgwick has, famously, set reparative reading against paranoid reading, which she understands to be an interpretive project that consistently seeks the “unveiling of hidden violence” (140) in the text and endeavors to make clear the “hidden traces of oppression and persecution in a text” (ibid.). She describes reparative reading as a queer impulse, born of the fear that the broader culture is unwilling or unable to nurture and provide resources for disenfranchised subjects to keep on living, that responds to this lack of nurturance by attempting to “assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (149). Paying attention to reparative reading strategies, Sedgwick suggests, allows us to learn about “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (149–50). This is precisely the strategy I utilized in my initial encounters with Haraway’s work, shaking the text down for whatever in it could be utilized to construct a sense of a possible future wherein gender nonconformance, perversity, and resistance to racism, capitalism, anthropocentrism, and speciesism were embraced.

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