Queer Theory in the Classroom: Teaching Reparative Reading

Abstract

From its inception, queer theory has understood knowledge to be promulgated through embodied encounters and affective contagion. Separately, critics in Education have theorised how classrooms can generate their own micropolitics, where affect is accumulated in bodies and minds in ways that can alter students at the level of desire and motivation to learn. This chapter explores the role of classroom affect at a particular historical juncture: the literary studies ‘method wars’ and, in particular, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading as a method of queer theory that sought a deliberately contradictory relationship to that which had constituted political reading for the previous quarter of a century. Drawing on published anecdotes by Maggie Nelson and Jonathan Flatley (students of Sedgwick’s new method), the chapter finds that reparative teaching carries the potential to disrupt student/teacher binaries by inviting ‘uncritical’ practices like sentimentality and enthusiasm into the classroom and, resulting from this affective confusion, students cultivate a desire to learn that inspires them to grapple ongoingly with existential questions about the value of literary studies and the graduate’s place within it, as they navigate a precariously situated profession in which a hermeneutics of suspicion continues to dominate. Debates about reparative reading have played out between faculty, often with divisive results. This article attends to how these debates get routed through the student body; focusing on student subjectivity illuminates the stakes of the ‘method wars’ for professional and personal subjectivity.