Reparative Work in a Paranoid Structure: Vulernability & Harassment Dynamics: A Lecture by Jennifer Doyle

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).

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Department of Performance Studies, and Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. 

Jennifer Doyle is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). She is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.