Sublime

Black people have brought new feelings to life and made them available to broader publics.

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

thinking about alterity and difference that has become a useful critical tool for feminist, antiracist, and other political work.

From Klein, Sedgwick extrapolated something she called “reparative reading,” which she contrasted with “paranoid reading” (“reading” functions here quite broadly, spanning different media): the former is a means of seeking pleasure, nourishment, and amelioration, whereas the latter aims to forestall pain and ward off threats.

It and programs like it have become part of the texture of gay life, part of the media ecologies that shape our daily practices and desires, that transform how we think of ourselves and how we move through the world.

Cultural critic Lauren Berlant puts it eloquently: “There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”

some forms of sex, like those in public or online, become the castigated and fascinating objects of mass culture, while simultaneously representing the birth of new forms of sociality.

vital force affecting and affected by transformations in, most obviously, sexual mores, as well as the politics of representation and the growth of network cultures.