Re-queering the Queer Space Discourse: On Paranoid and Reparative Reading Strategies

Keywords: paranoid reading, reparative reading practices, queer space discourse, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, New York City
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

Queer geographical research on histories of communities and territories has unearthed the spatio-temporal situatedness of queerness as something other/more than a defense against oblivion but sometimes discernible, nevertheless, without respect to the cultural narrative or context. Coming to terms with the theoretical foundations upon which a linearity of knowledge has been built in queer geography and the ways it has changed or stayed the same means that we also confront a chaotic array of fragments from the historical archive awaiting reconstruction. This paper draws connections between the personal and the collective, through which analytical entities such as AIDS, trauma, gentrification, loss, memory, and cultural preservation represent an opportunity for recursion to conversations about reparation and reparative reading practices. For scholars with a geographic research focus this may mean, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has proposed, disengaging from “paranoid” modes of reading the past, and instead creating “reparative” and productive potentialities that examine how queer spaces can be differently narrativized. Using New York City as a case study of a constantly evolving queerscape—whose recent history is overwhelmingly framed within the contradictory discourse of sexual and political emancipation of the pre-AIDS/pre-gentrified era vis-à-vis a neoliberal/desexualized/apolitical post-gentrified present—I suggest that we should view well-established knowledges as necessarily limited and incomplete. Performing a reparative reading, I argue, requires a paranoid critique of prevailing discourses, from which long-lost queer spaces can be ultimately recovered and recuperated.