Description:

Join the Department of French and Italian for a special lecture with David Halperin, Author of Saint Foucault and How To Be Gay and W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan.

The lecture is open to the public, and refreshments will follow. See the description below:

In 2003, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published the final version of a paper called "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.”  Her paper has gone on to become one of the most beloved and influential essays in queer theory and queer literary studies.  The bulk of it is taken up with a trenchant denunciation of the inventors of queer theory, including Sedwick herself, for their alleged “paranoia.”  I have never been a fan of this admittedly brilliant and humane argument, with its polemic against Foucauldian analysis, and in this talk I plan to challenge the essay's canonical status and enduring prestige.  I propose to push back against the tradition of postcritique in queer literary studies which it inaugurated, to undo the erasure of history which I believe its trivialization of paranoia encourages, and to describe, as well as to exemplify, the advantages of so-called paranoid reading for the purposes of queer literary studies and for the larger project of queer critique.