Reading Postures: On Close Reading, Feminism, and Academic Life

Reading Postures: On Close Reading, Feminism, and Academic Life, Erica Delsandro and Jennifer Mitchell anatomize the many positions that readers embody, willfully perform, fall into unthinkingly, and are compelled to assume. Such postures shape the way we read, write, and even teach the texts we love—and those we love to hate. Informed by modernist studies, queer studies, and critical university studies, the individual entries in this abcdarium situate autotheory within academic life by examining the various ways we read as scholars, teachers, and women, critiquing structural inequities but also celebrating joy.

Each essay, co-authored and alphabetically organized, examines a specific posture — such as “angry reading,” “girly reading,” “killjoy reading,” “zombie reading,” and so on — and bridges feminist theory with deeply attentive close readings of literary texts, lived experiences, popular culture, politics, and academia. Cultivating intimacy and humor, the critical framework of this book invites an examination of the ways we have been and continue to be socialized as readers, writers, thinkers, and teachers within the neoliberal university and how we might betray the traditions that have shaped us. A hybrid, collaborative work that brings together the genres of personal essay, cultural critique, and manifesto, Reading Postures is ultimately an investigation of the shifting positions and shifting grounds that face queer feminist readers in the twenty-first century.