Every so often a female character comes around who captures the ire of the culture. I can think of Breaking Bad’s Skyler White, Succession’s Shiv Roy, Jennifer’s Body’s Jennifer Check, and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw’s just off the top of my head. These are characters who are undoubtedly flawed and whose transgressions range from minor to major but just the same, were strongly disliked by their audiences upon airing. A few months ago on Twitter, there was discourse about complex female characters in media and the culture’s low tolerance for any variant of multi-dimensionality in the form of perceived bad behavior. There’s nothing I hate more than having to explain a meme but here we go. The meme format says in quotes “we need more complex female characters” and then people would reply with a picture of a complex female character with the words “you could barely handle her.” And they’re right. We hate complexity in our female characters, and there are a lot of reasons for this, the most obvious being sexism. However, there’s a larger trend in audiences’ inability to grapple with complexity beyond the scope of female characters and it’s because we’re paranoid.
Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You” is brilliant not only in its acerbic title but in its analysis of what she sees as a mode of understanding that has come to dominate most cultural, political, and social criticism and the flattening affect it has had on analysis. She calls this paranoid reading. The paranoid reader is defined by a few qualities:
They are always looking for what is wrong with a work, a character, or an institution.
Paranoia is their only method of analysis.
The finding of fault is exalted as being the only barometer for truth.
Thorough, proper, and complete analysis is conflated with the exposure of fault.
Real and serious analysis can only occur from the paranoid position, and the fruits of all other modes of analysis are frivolous, hollow, and worst of all less real than the results of the paranoid. For Sedgwick, paranoia is not a diagnosis as it has historically been understood in the history of psychoanalysis, but borrowing from psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, paranoia is better understood as a position. The use of position implies a certain fluidity in the ability to move from one position to another rather than a diagnosis that is seen as a static aspect of identity. It is just one way of seeking, understanding, and organizing knowledge among many, and is effective but not exhaustive as an analytical framework. Sedgwick rightly points out that “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” In describing the perspective of the paranoid reader she says:
The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, the paranoid requires that bad news always already be known.
From the outset, the paranoid reader is looking to confirm their suspicions that something is wrong, expose it, and elevate it as the truth lest they be seen as an idiot. Sedgwick, quoting German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, says that this paranoid reading “already represents the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers.” What’s interesting about paranoid reading is that its primary motivation for analysis is the smug satisfaction of confirming what you already know. The paranoid reader self-satisfyingly sets out to capture and reveal the issues that lie latent within the work much like an x-ray confirms the doctor’s suspicion of illness within the body. You can’t tell the paranoid reader anything because they knew it all along. “Well, look what we have here…just as I suspected!” and “I hate to say I told you so” are phrases that sum up the disposition of the paranoid reader.
The issue with this is not paranoid reading itself but that paranoia has come to dominate the hermeneutic landscape as the only valid method for critical analysis because its conclusions are seen as more true than those derived from other perspectives. As Sedgwick says “in a world where no one need be delusional to find of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant.” There’s an assumption here that if someone chooses to analyze something outside of the paranoid position they are unaware of systemic oppression or bad news, or that they are downplaying its existence and effects, which feels like a weird jump in logic. However, paranoid reading necessitates that all bad news be anticipated and as such, turns its back on the existence of other conclusions. This includes the conclusion that the reader can understand multiple truths at once like the fact that systemic oppression exists and there is joy and pleasure to be found in the midst of it. The one-size-fits-all approach of the paranoid inevitably fails to capture the full scope of the situation and therefore our understandings are one-sided.
The paranoid reader who analyzes the character of Carrie Bradshaw watches the show, sees her innumerable offenses throughout the series, and concludes she’s toxic. “Why Carrie Bradshaw Is The Worst,” “Why Carrie Bradshaw is the Real Villain of Sex and the City,” “10 of Carrie Bradshaw’s Most Toxic Moments” are a few examples of the primary lens through which Carrie Bradshaw’s character is analyzed. And you know what? I’m glad they said it because otherwise how would we know Carrie does bad things? It’s not like there are six seasons, two feature-length movies, and two reboot seasons’ worth of bad behavior to tell us this. More importantly, how would we know who this character is, her function in the show, and what the show is trying to say if it wasn’t for this groundbreaking analysis that Carrie does bad things? Now that I see that Carrie=bad I can understand what her character and the show are all about and I can rest easy knowing we really got to the bottom of it.
This obviously sounds absurd when broken down like this but this isn’t too far off from how the conversations actually go. Unfortunately, paranoid reading is so totalizing as a method of analysis that it obfuscates any other understandings of the work beyond its adherence to moral and ideological purity. Saying that a character who obviously does bad things is bad is not groundbreaking, and I would argue that it’s not analysis. It’s rather a collection of instances that can be fashioned into a pattern of behavior that looks like analysis but that doesn’t actually help us understand what we’re viewing any better. Because of the anticipatory nature of paranoid reading, this arrogant need to not be taken for a sucker to use Sloterdijk’s words, our analysis can only go so far as what we already know, and this prevents new conclusions from being drawn, new relations from being formed, new ways of seeing from being illuminated, and new ways of understanding from being nurtured. It’s a practice in confirmation bias. And how sad to read something to only confirm your own worldview. How sad to not give yourself the opportunity to learn and feel and be challenged.
In the case of a character like Shiv Roy, yes of course she’s a bad person both politically and personally. However, the point of her character is not to be a good person. It’s not to divest from her wealth or treat her husband right. If we analyze the character of Shiv according to the paranoid critical lens we end up with an analysis that looks like “Shiv is part of an unimaginably evil dynasty of corporate greed, she cheats on her husband, she’s mean to her loser brother sometimes and that’s bad, so she’s bad and that’s the extent of the character.” But does that get at the heart of Shiv’s character? Does that give us a holistic picture of the point of the show? Certainly not. Does it tell us useful things about class dynamics and gender? Yes, but so does understanding Shiv as a multi-dimensional character. This trend where audiences insist that their characters represent absolute moral and political purity is bizarre considering that these are fictional works, and these people are not real. If there is any place to explore the complexities of the human experience it would be the realm of fiction where no real people are involved and therefore the stakes are relatively low.
We’re getting to the point where we interpret media in such a way that if it doesn’t line up with our ideological or moral understandings of the world at its face value, we reject it. We end up pathologizing things that don’t need to be pathologized and we condemn things that are actually subversive. Which is…not great. Women can read romance novels with stereotypical gender roles and not be contributing to their own oppression. People can buy bows and it’s not necessarily symptomatic of a larger collusion with choice feminism. Bows are not the reason choice feminism sucks. Female characters can be bad people and we can enjoy their characterization and see their role in the larger point of the work but that does not mean we endorse that type of behavior in real life. There’s a weird conflation here between understanding and endorsing. When we fall into the trap of analyzing and judging media only according to its moral or ideological purity (which by the way, is not possible) we not only negate the complexities of human experience but we delimit our understandings of politics and of ourselves to the narrow confines of overtly political acts and good moral conduct. How this idea of what it means to be a human being has come to be conflated with the truth is beyond me because purity is deeply antithetical to the mess that is human life.
There’s a lot of intolerance for things that are not readily understandable through the paranoid lens. I’ve heard (bad) jokes for years about contemporary art being bad because that person could do it themselves. But that’s not the point of the art. Technical skill is just one way of interpreting the value of a piece of art. Before even taking the time to understand the work, the paranoid reader has already made their judgment. They’ve closed themselves off from a new way of seeing the world. Another way I see this play out is with movies or books that people write off as “pretentious”. While some media is just pretentious, making that judgment before taking the time and the effort to read or watch the work, let alone understand it is lazy at best. Again, the reader has closed themselves off from other possibilities. The same can be said of people who denigrate romcoms because they are frivolous or stupid or naive. However, romcoms have a lot of depth in terms of what they reveal about chemistry and humor and pathos and even if they don’t, what’s wrong with a bit of frivolity here and there? Can we understand leisure and joy and lightheartedness as an important aspect of the human experience?
We can and we have to, and the way I see forward is what Sedgwick calls reparative reading. Reparative reading, like paranoid reading, is a position that one can inhabit when analyzing a work. The reparative position is a way of reading that is based in pleasure, nourishment, and care of the self. It requires that you let the text teach you as opposed to imposing your own meaning on it. The reparative reader allows for new possibilities to appear before them rather than jumping to an immediate judgment. Part of the reason why paranoid reading has eclipsed reparative reading is because reparative reading is seen as naive, sentimental, unserious, apolitical, and less truthful than paranoid reading. However, reparative reading can also contend with the bleak realities of systems of oppression and in this way is no less pessimistic than paranoid reading. Sedgwick quickly points out that it’s not as if reparative reading is glass half full and paranoid reading is glass half empty. The difference between the two modes of reading is the way the work is approached.
In the opening of the essay, Sedgwick recounts a story from the first decade of the AIDs crisis in which she’s talking to her friend, activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the origins of the AIDs virus. At the time it was widely speculated that the virus had been purposely manufactured by the US government. In response to Sedgwick’s question about the true origins of the disease, Patton says that there’s evidence to support the theory that the virus spread accidentally and the theory that the virus spread deliberately, but that she’s not really interested in how the virus spread. Patton says that whether we understand the virus to be created by the government or not, it doesn’t change what we know: “that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants who it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes.” Sedgwick’s point in telling this story is to ask what knowledge is for. This method of exposure doesn’t actually change anything and it doesn’t necessarily motivate people to action. This is not to say that exposure is not necessary or useful. The paranoid critical position is important. We need to read things for exposure, however, I want to contend that we must also undertake reparative reading because it is within the reparative position that we have the space and opportunity to develop the aesthetic, affective, ethical, and emotional dispositions that do impel people toward action.
Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (merely aesthetic) and because they are frankly ameliorative (“merely reformist”). What makes pleasure and amelioration so “mere”? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in the demystifying exposure: only its cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people’s (that is, other people’s) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn’t have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions).
I see the disdain for reparative reading as being in line with “serious” leftists’ obsessive categorization of behaviors as “political” or “apolitical” and never the twain shall meet, which I see as misguided, imprecise, and ultimately harmful. The decidedly apolitical realm of the aesthetic or the pleasurable is viewed as antithetical to a liberatory project, however, I don’t see these things as being mutually exclusive and I would argue both are necessary not only for robust political and ethical engagement but also for an existentially nourishing life. This is where the stakes really lie and why it’s not just about our ability to analyze a movie. I see how this paranoid disposition has seeped into other aspects of our lives, and it’s not yielding good results. This refusal to be surprised, to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there, to be hopeful is everywhere. The discourse around whether or not you should ask your friend to drive you to the airport is the result of a paranoid culture. We don’t ask those in our communities for help because we go into the interaction thinking they’ll probably say no. Part of the reason why it’s so difficult to try something new and put yourself out there is because you feel like you already know it’s going to be bad or embarrassing or a failure, and so you don’t try. The end of the story is already written before it even starts. Which is a huge problem in terms of sociality, interdependence, and cultivating interpersonal and systemic obligations to each other. If we want to grow and change both on a personal and an institutional level we must embrace the sense of hope, courage, vulnerability, and open-mindedness required of the reparatively positioned reader. This does not mean it won’t be difficult. In my favorite passage of the essay, Sedgwick says:
…to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.
There is a sort of nihilism in only employing a paranoid critical stance in our analysis in the sense that it denies us the opportunity to imagine a world that is different from the past and the present—it denies other relational understandings and possibilities. When we approach things with our noses up in the air because we already know what it’s all about, we reject the possibility of difference, of novelty, of contingency, of the future. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the dark side of nostalgia. It is an aesthetic and political disposition that is so taken with the past precisely because it can’t see the future. I’ve talked before about our cultural inability to imagine the future and how it creates stagnation in social, political, and cultural life. Why do things differently if it’s always been this way? And this makes sense. We are the inheritors of complicated, violent, and bloody histories. But this is why Sedgwick characterizes hope as traumatic. It is vulnerable and difficult to think of the future when the present and the past look so bleak. But we have to cultivate and nurture and search for the hope necessary for collective action and existential nourishment, and reparative reading is a good place to start. While taking the time and effort to understand a work or a character from a reparative position is not necessarily political, the more we practice the reparative position the more I hope that the reparative position will trickle down into other parts of our lives. Which I argue is politically necessary. Also, it will just make you smarter and better at analyzing things if you care about that sort of thing.
As someone whose paranoid who needs to develop a more reparative relationship to what I consume, I’m writing this as much for myself as anyone else. I see undeniable parallels between the paranoid way people approach media to how they interact with others in real life and it sucks. We owe ourselves and other people more. Paranoid reading is not enough, and we all would do well to try to diversify the ways we understand things, and more than that we would do well to try to understand things in the first place instead of writing things off from the outset because we think we already know what they’re all about. We don’t learn because we don’t care to understanding and we don’t care to understand because we think we already have the answers, and what we get from that is a regurgitated slop comprised of our own narrow points of view. We can embrace some complexity, I promise it won’t hurt.
Not me thinking I’m a reparative reader until reaching the paragraph about contemporary art and pretentious movies/books…