Reparative Work in a Paranoid Structure: Vulnerability & Harassment Dynamics
a lecture by Jennifer Doyle
April 15, Friday
3 to 4:30 pm
Jennifer Doyle, English, University of California, Riverside
Victims of workplace harassment and discrimination who don’t lose their jobs are forced to find ways of repairing their relationship to their work. How does one do this, within a paranoid institutional context? Or in a cultural context that pathologizes openness and vulnerability as forms of naïveté? What would it mean to accept harassment as an organic potential of groups, especially within a large organization identified with the reproduction of knowledge and power? Here Jennifer Doyle revisits Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in order to bring its ethos to bear upon the ubiquity of harassment. The aim is not to explain where harassment comes from, or to propose solutions to the harassment dynamic. It is, instead, to describe those modes of working-through which are prohibited/rendered unthinkable by contemporary discourse on sex and the workplace (in which one can never be paranoid enough).
Department of Journalism
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor
Followed immediately by the Annual Forum, in Honor of Muriel Dimen: Danger Talk: Sexual Error, Boundary Crossings, & the Limits of Thought.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the Department of Performance Studies.
This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible.
For more information about this event, contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.
