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Wishing away ambivalence

Robyn Wiegman traces her attachment to ‘paranoid reading’ practices through her early domestic environment that ‘lacked sufficient ways to anchor anyone in an explicable world’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7). Following this account of what we might call Wiegman’s childhood bipolar habitus, I locate my equivalent attachment to such reading practices in a familial history whose modes of disavowal seem with feminist hindsight to be best described as a ‘structure of feeling’ – those ‘social experiences in solution’ that Raymond Williams famously named as forms of culture not immediately available, yet whose ‘particular deep starting points and conclusions . . . [nevertheless] give the sense of a generation or of a period’ (1977: 133– 134, 131, emphasis in original). If the original concept of ‘structures of feeling’ predominantly described social phenomena, I extend its remit here into the realm of familial dynamics, which, since second-wave feminism, have been theorised as always more than merely personal. When I was growing up in the suburbs of south London in the 1960s and early 1970s, this structure of feeling governed the respectable middle-class British family in which the bad things that happened were not just ‘not spoken about’, they were lived through repetitions of denial that made paranoid readings a necessity. My own investment in mastering the critical practices of exposure was not, as for Wiegman, occasioned by the idea of reading as ‘a rich affective resource for navigating the at times awful, at times exhilarating, paces of everyday life’ (Wiegman, this volume: 7), but rather, by the promise of understanding the textures of hidden transactions and devious narratives, and of providing sufficient oxygen to navigate the claustrophobia of living with deceptions in plain sight. To read between the lines and to see beyond appearances was to contradict the attribution of anxiety to individualised failure, and to undo the personalisations of those practices of disavowal: in other words, to hold out the hope of undoing the structures of feelings to which I struggled never to become fully accustomed. With the now taken-for-granted language of feminism, the costs that governed the contradictions of sexual respectability for the baby boomer generation were