Productive faces of shame: An interview with Elspeth Probyn

Shame has typically been understood as a negative emotion, a view which is prevalent in individualist, psychologising discourses about human experience. Elspeth Probyn's approach to shame departs significantly from these tropes. As interviewers, we share a common interest in feminist ethics and productive affects in teaching and scholarship. Hence, our specific interest in Probyn's Blush: Faces of Shame. Blush is an excellent example of viewing the politics of shame as a productive and relational process. Probyn proposes that shame comes about through an interest in and a connection with another. This connection can result in building care for the other and community through re-evaluations of the self. In this way, shame can be a productive force in postcoloniality, in the feminist political ethics of care and in attempts at reconciliation. This view corresponds with the focus of this Special Issue – an affirmative and relational but political view of shame. The interview provides an illuminative account of the author's thoughts behind the writing of the book Blush, historical, theoretical and personal influences which impacted on the ideas expressed in the book, and how the book relates to past and future ideas and practices.

Ronelle: Elspeth, I wonder if you can elaborate on your interest in shame, what sparked it, and why you felt the necessity for a book on shame.

Elspeth: In part, it came out of a previous book called Carnal Appetites. But it was also very much triggered by moving to Australia. In 1997, the Australian Human Rights Commission released their report on the generations of indigenous children who were taken from their families in the name of assimilation.^1,2 I was privileged to be at the conference where it was launched. The convention hall was packed with indigenous and non-indigenous people. When the then conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who had denied any government responsibility in even recognising the harm done to indigenous people, came on stage, the audience turned their backs on him. It was such a powerful gesture of shame. Turning your back on someone means effectively closing down or cutting off any interest. It was a much more forceful and affective way of shaming than, say, booing. Basically, from when I moved from Canada I lived in Redfern, which is a very important urban Aboriginal centre. At that time in the late 1990s it was a place that was seen by non-indigenous Sydneysiders as a no-go zone. I laugh now that it has become gentrified – well hipster-ised. Of course, the reason why it could be gentrified is that the Aboriginal residents have been pushed out by developers. At the time taxis wouldn't put their lights on, and Domino's Pizza wouldn't deliver, but it was an amazing contact zone of all sorts of bodies thrown together – queers, artists, druggies, etc. In the wake of the Stolen Generations report there was graffiti everywhere about being ashamed to be an Australian. It was a situation where you couldn't not think about shame.

Tamara: Following on from this, Elspeth, could you share how you see your own life narrative and situatedness across different geo-political spaces shaping your interest in and running through your arguments about the politics of shame?

Elspeth: I have a particular way of thinking – I need to juxtapose theoretical ideas with lived situations, with my own experiences. This is, of course, very influenced by feminist uses of the personal to ground theoretical ideas. In my first book, Sexing the Self, I argued that that is not a confessional mode – because as we know, the personal is often dismissed by male academics as such. I also think spatially, or rather I try to enter into arguments by setting the scene, often through personal anecdotes. Once again, this is often dismissed as bad argumentation, but as my colleague Meaghan Morris has argued, the anecdote operates as a sort of mise en abyme, which throws the landscape of the argument into relief. It introduces the reader into the argument in a more grounded way than just using theoretical ideas.

My own life narrative has been quite varied, in part, because I was an army brat and we were shifted around a lot. At an early age, I was very acutely aware of entry into different spaces. I was also aware of class differences – embodied mainly through accents. My father was upper middle class but we were basically white trash – my sister and I attended state schools and our accents became a mixture of Welsh and Midlands or Brum. My father hated this and would try to drum into us “accepted English” – the English spoken by the upper middle classes. So, it was ingrained in me from my father saying how to pronounce certain words so that we didn't sound Welsh [chuckles] which means I'm totally dyslexic – enVElope or Anvelope, ³ type of thing. And on the other hand, my mother was Canadian – so therefore an outsider – and her father had been a staunch socialist. So, yes, a rich tapestry from which to draw.

Viv: You've written about the productive nature of shame. How do we think about shame as a productive ethical practice?

Elspeth: I take the idea that ethics is the ongoing reflexivity of one's actions, speech and thoughts upon others. Writing shame, or writing about shame, then has to be an ethical practice, which is fraught with the deep worry that you're not shaming others as you write. There are small snippets in the book Blush that still make me feel ashamed – where I may have written something that wasn't mine to write. But in terms of writing, one just has to hope that it's an ongoing dialogue. I suppose in its most pure form writing shame is the most demanding ethical form, if you like, because at every moment you may feel yourself being undone in ways that you can't really think about in advance. It is that ongoing ethical accompaniment of one's thinking, writing and teaching.

Viv: A sort of non-innocent type of position I should imagine.

Elspeth: Yes, absolutely. Blush was the hardest book to write physically and emotionally – in other words, it was a painful embodied experience. And I didn't publish another book for 10 years, which hadn't happened before. The quandaries it raised were at times excruciating. I invest a great deal in terms of the practice of storytelling and writing, and often people remark on my writing in a positive way. But I was viscerally aware that in that book my writing could not be a soothing interface, if you like.

Ronelle: The next question is probably an extension of the one you have just answered: to think about how shame can be productive in social justice and transformation efforts across different geopolitical contexts, say, for instance, in the South African situation where we are still engaged in the challenges of centuries of colonization and decades of apartheid.

Elspeth: I use “productive” in the Foucauldian sense, that is to say generative, neither good or bad. But shame is contextual. So, in preparation to talking to you, I've done some reading to try to understand a very little bit about the South African situation. Of course, I would never ever presume to talk about it, but I just wanted to try to understand some of the extraordinary clashes that are ongoing in South Africa. In places like Australia or Canada it is perhaps somewhat easier to sweep away the past – well, different governments have tried to do that. I get the sense that there is an ongoing affective wrenching of the entire nation in South Africa. Some of the things I've been reading is the difference between shaming and shame. Again, from my very limited perspective there seems to be a lot of shaming going on. That for me is quite different than shame. When one feels shame it is a profound intra-subjective moment that has the capacity to undo something of the person – that provokes a deep psychic emotional disturbance, which is productive in every sense. Feeling shame produces a new sense of self even if it is only momentary; it produces a profound reflection on the self. However, the act of shaming is quite different. It is someone or some institution telling you that you ought to be ashamed, but if you are not, then nothing happens. I think this happens in our institutions. It is very hard to shame an institution so that they actually feel shame.

Tamara: Earlier you clarified that you're using productive shame in a Foucauldian sense, which is generative, rather than a judgement of good or bad, and I want to link this to my question. There has been writing that reflects quite critically on white shame, for example, a privileged shame in writing narratives about the past, memory narratives. There has been one project in particular that I've been a part of – an apartheid archive research project, where members of the research team began with writing their own stories and then began collecting further stories, more quotidian stories of living under apartheid. In this project there have been quite a lot of stories from white people articulating guilt, shame, discomfort about what they see as past investments in apartheid. One of the researchers on this project, Gill Straker (see, for example, 2011) who incidentally is located in your current nation-state, writes about ‘promiscuous shame’ and argues how shame can be deployed as a strategy to erase guilt and discomfort and present the author in a more positive light to herself and others. So how do we decide which are more helpfully productive notions of shame and which less? And what are your thoughts about this challenging concept of how shame can be deployed in quite problematic ways?

Elspeth: Yes, I was just reading her piece on promiscuous shame, and about your archives project, which sounds like an extraordinarily interesting, productive and useful exercise. White shame is a hard thing to deal with. As I said when I wrote the book, I/we/non-indigenous people were made to feel our shame at what had been done to generations and generations of Aboriginal people in this land. For me it didn't matter that I am not from Australia – much the same legacy of cultural and bodily destruction happened in Canada. I found the ideas of the Australian psychologist Graham Little very useful and inspiring. He writes about the duty of leaders to metaphorically “hold” their nations in order to burn away the shame. ⁴ In a similar way, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (2003) describe how for Silvan Tomkins “a potentially terrifying and terrified idea or image is taken up and held for as many paragraphs as are necessary to ‘burn out the fear response,’ then for as many more until that idea or image can recur without initially evoking terror.” This is what is needed to happen when non-indigenous Australians seemingly spontaneously spoke of their shame. But at a political level nothing happened to this potentially incredibly important moment and it slipped away.

We have these instances where the political will fails, fails again, where institutions could step in and effectively try to hold, to bleed out some of the intensity and to direct that in different and more productive ways.

Viv: My question is about shame and guilt, and I wanted to ask why you feel shame is more productive, and how you distinguish shame from other affects? For example, how do guilt and disgust, which Nussbaum (2006) refers to, and anger all relate to shame?

Elspeth: Nussbaum's (2006) privileging of guilt as a reparative emotion is at odds with my argument, and those I draw on. But there is, of course, a range of distinct yet articulable affects. However, I'm just not convinced theoretically or politically that guilt does produce reparation in people. One rarely sees this in a day-to-day way – organisations, countries, people are often the object of guilt but seemingly do not feel remorse for their actions. However, different forms of programmes have emerged around restorative shaming by John Braithwaite (1989), which sometimes does work and certainly has been taken up by numerous institutions. Braithwaite's idea comes from Mãori culture where individuals who have done wrong are not shunned – or made to feel guilty. Rather, they are encouraged to feel the shame and to feel ashamed at what they have inflicted on others. This acts to draw them back into the group, whereas guilt tends to push them away. I really don't think guilt is the way to go in persuading anyone.

Viv: Can you explain in more detail how you see guilt and shame?

Elspeth: To be theoretically obtuse, guilt is not an affect per se, or at least in the Tomkins/Sedgwick paradigm in which I was working. But more generally one could say that guilt is freighted with so much baggage, especially in Judeo-Christian contexts, that it's extremely messy. And I talked before of being productive in the Foucauldian sense in terms of it generating things, but for me guilt doesn't generate any openings, if you like, either intra-subjective or inter-subjective.

Viv: I was just wondering if the Spinozist view of affect, which Brian Massumi has taken forward as being productive, is also the way in which you regard shame.

Elspeth: Yes, I have taken on some of Massumi's ideas and more profoundly the arguments Deleuze makes via Spinoza. One of my colleagues, Moira Gatens, at the University of Sydney, is a brilliant Spinozan philosopher. I tend to want the theoretical work with which I engage to have traction in issues that you all deal with – social justice, pedagogy, etc., rather than purely at an abstract level, at which Massumi works again brilliantly. However, at times it is hard to pin down how exactly these ideas work on the ground, so to speak. That said, Blush was highly influenced by Deleuzian ideas about affect, which are taken from Spinoza. One of my earlier books, Outside Belongings, was very Deleuzian. I guess the title tried to encapsulate it – the wanting to belong when you can't ever quite fully. And you could take that in a more psychoanalytic realm or into some of Judith Butler's (1993, 2006, 2015) ideas. The impetus that I seek in philosophical ideas I work with is that kind of outwardness of thinking about how shame connects in the real world and that forms that vital thread, I guess, between and amongst us all. Viv, I was watching your video at Utrecht University about the ethics of care. I love the way that you brought together black and white students. It was starkly obvious that the black students had a richness of experience – not all happy, one would imagine – upon which to draw. Conversely the white students seem to be tripping over their privilege. It's an amazing moment where we can clearly see the different affective movements that pull and push people in various ways.

Ronelle: Does shame then always emerge out of an interest in a positive way of connection with the Other in terms of what you have just been saying? Is one always engaging shame in a constructive way?

Elspeth: Well [laughter in voice] probably not, though one hopes so. Again Tomkins' framing is of a potentially positive connection that's broken. And here we see how important the role of interest is. Interest is a little fragile thread of connection, that connection to ideas we hold dear. You cannot be ashamed if you are accused of something you don't care about. Look, for instance, at Donald Trump. You could call him a racist, a sexist, or any number of other things and I doubt he would care.

However, in terms of what's going on in your country, it could be quite shameful for me as an outsider to say that shame is productive. It's also important to see the different forms that are in operation. In the case of rape, the women are ashamed; but that is the power of shaming, of thrusting shame onto someone. In terms of rape it's surely a mixture of anger, rage and shame that women feel, but given the structural/cultural milieu in which we live, that anger is not allowed voice as much as the shame. It has been so drummed into women that we can say we are ashamed but not that we are enraged. But there are many political movements where rage is again being mobilised as a shield, as reparation against the idea that women should feel ashamed of being raped – an idea that is so repugnant.

Ronelle: Could you talk a little bit more about the anger – because I think it is in many ways quite an underrepresented affect, and one should think a little bit more about it and how it connects with shame.

Elspeth: I have written quite a lot about emotions in research – how to recognise them, how to work with them – and across my entire writing I have extensively used different emotions. Some years ago, I was forced to think about the role of anger, which was published as “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity and the Research Process” (Probyn, 2011).

This paper came about from my experience in a research project I was involved in with a colleague, and a paediatrician in a children's hospital with recovering anorexics. I recount how I said to the girl patients – and they were all girls who looked so bright but so lost – in the focus group: “Not that it matters, but when I was your age I was anorexic and I was in hospital too”. The paediatrician let it be known that she thought that was extremely unprofessional. I was furious – at the paediatrician and the medical institution, and for the girls. But I also felt ashamed, as if my experience of having had anorexia was made to be a dirty secret (Halse et al., 2010). This scene resonated with a phrase from a chapter I wrote entitled ‘Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity and the Research Process’ in a book edited by Shaun Gallagher (2011) called The Oxford Handbook of the Self. I cite an interviewee who said: “I feel like a glass self, everybody can just see in me; I feel so angry”. This galvanised my writing with rage and anger at the ways in which these young anorexics feel that they are seen through all the time, as if they had no subjectivity. I also engaged with Elizabeth Spelman's (1999) wonderful piece called ‘Anger: The Diary’. Spelman (1999) reminds of us how important anger and rage have been as affects within feminism, and continue to be. As senior academic women, we all know: you get angry, or, you display anger [chuckles], then you are going to be the object of shaming. So yes, anger and shame are intimately connected.

Tamara: Elspeth, can you talk a little bit about how you see feminist activism and feminism as a scholarly and material movement for social change? As both theory and practice, feminist movements have arguably drawn on shame in multiple ways that are also entangled with anger against patriarchy and gendered violence. One could say that shame and shaming have been deployed as a mechanism to articulate anger in women's movements and activism as well as strategically to make a political point. In your opinion, how do we do a politics that is a social justice politics, feminist or decolonial activism without engaging in practices of shaming that are not helpful? Or are they?

Elspeth: It certainly is tough, isn't it? I’m presuming we're all around the same generation, if not of the same experiential background, political background, which is to say we’ve lived through waves and waves of activism and different forms of feminist politics. In Blush I have a chapter on the shamer and the shamed, which is precisely about how shame has been used within certain feminist and other supposedly progressive forms of politics. One of my former PhD students, Kate O’Halloran, did a very good thesis about how queer student activist groups on campus use shame all the time; it's used to call out behaviour ‘that's not queer enough’. I find that the student body itself today has changed, as well as the politics it generates on campus. My university is becoming ever more privileged – there seems to be a direct route from the private schools to our beautiful faux Oxbridge campus. But when we started the department and developed it from a women's study centre, we had lots of mature age students, lots of students from culturally different backgrounds – students with very different life experiences from which to elaborate more nuanced politics. Now we have a more homogeneous body that throws around terms like “heteronormative”, which of course they have learned from feminism. But it also becomes a way of shaming those not deemed to be “queer enough”. I find the whole politics of “calling out” very problematic – who is the judge here?

Viv: There's a lot of that here now.

Elspeth: I have a Masters course called ‘Gender and Cultural Theory’. I teach it as a history of the debates that have been going on, say, since the mid- to late 1980s. They read, for instance, Teresa de Lauretis on Althusser and Foucault, to understand the structural and subjective mechanisms of power and the state, about how feminism has grappled with questions of race, ethnicity, class, etc. For some students, it is all new – especially the international Chinese ones, but for others it serves to rectify in some small way a kind of cultural amnesia. They seem to like it and come to understand the history of how hotly disputed different ideas were then, as now.

Viv: But it's being reconfigured now. There seems to be a revival of quite essentialist identity politics. I know my own daughter has just done a gender studies project on whether men could ever be feminists, and she said to me that they were quite confused because some of them were under the illusion that they could be feminists [laughter in voice]. So, within my own household there's this sort of talk.

Ronelle: I have a very similar experience.

Elspeth: Yes, it's enough to make you feel really old! And yes, I've looked at some of the courses you do in the Western Cape too, which are along the same lines. It's tough because it's not easy reading, as you know. I mean, crikey, I can't even read the stuff that I wrote early on [others laugh]. But it's important to understand that these are not new questions; and if you are to understand the real richness of being a feminist you need to understand some of this history – and try to open it up obviously, the women of colour writers, who were also very involved and indeed instigated many of those debates. This isn't to say that the issues are framed in this same way today or that we had the answers back then. But recognising those connections should make us and younger scholars feel less lonely.

Ronelle: If you had to write another book about shame and given what you have been saying, how would you take that argument further, if at all? I feel it's a bit of an unfair question given that some of your other work has taken another direction. But, you know, just as a thought experiment.

Elspeth: I'm not sure I could write another book on shame per se. My books seem to lead to the next, albeit not in the most obvious ways: so, Sexing the Self (Probyn, 1993) led to Outside Belongings (Probyn, 1996), led to Carnal Appetites (Probyn, 2000), led to Blush (Probyn, 2005), and then Eating the Ocean (Probyn, 2016) – I'm not sure where that one is going to lead me. There is a bit about shame and shaming in Eating the Ocean, or at least my argument is that we've got to stop simplifying and moralising the politics of sustainability – you know that the moral high ground that some NGOs take in terms of: you shall not eat this, you shall not do that. That is a position of shaming. And what I love about the fisheries is that I can argue that you cannot say, no, I won't eat fish – because 25% of the global catch goes to things you don't even know, like your white bread that's augmented with Omega 3, or the organic fertilizer for your vegetables. I've had a running battle for a long time with the politics of identity, and increasingly there's a position in food politics that states: “I am a vegan so therefore I don't need to engage with the complexity of how I am implicated into the global local North–South circuits of power around food.” I'm overstating but I do find the politics of food quite essentialist – just as you were saying about some of the current essentialist versions of feminism.

Viv: Have you read Haraway's Staying with the Trouble (2016)? Because there's a chapter in it called ‘Awash in Urine’, which is quite similar to this sort of argument that you're trying to make, I think. ⁵

Elspeth: That's very interesting. No, I haven't. I've been drowning in fish research for a long time.

Viv: Which is very important also in bringing together social and natural science, which I think is an interesting project.

Elspeth: Yes, as I said, I've been frustrated with some of the politics and the silos that claim disciplinary proprietorship over different aspects of food or the environment. There has been so much lip service about multidisciplinary research, but it seems again and again the hard sciences lead and we are supposed to follow.

Tamara: We're all involved in pedagogical practices as scholars in higher education – and I think you may have noticed that the three of us are involved quite a bit with thinking about feminist and social justice pedagogies. You mentioned teaching shame – and of course writing books is a pedagogical practice and has a pedagogical impact, but in teaching and working with students, can you maybe say a little bit more about how you teach shame and how you use it or don't use it in the classroom?

Elspeth: As I've mentioned I have always used the “personal” in my writing and my teaching. I find it helps to ground discussions of hard ideas with students. Whether I am teaching in media studies, or sociology or in gender and cultural studies, I want them to feel able to use their own experiences. I am still shocked that many undergraduate students have to ask me for permission to use the first person singular in their papers. But I am also very aware that students sometimes want to take on very hard projects that stem from their hurtful personal experiences, and I often tell them it's really important that your self doesn't splinter. Reflexivity is good but you still have to keep yourself together. I suppose it goes back to that notion of holding. Talking about shame in my teaching – I use a lot of everyday examples, bad jokes, all the rest of it. I think it helps that I've been teaching for so long. You tend to feel more at ease in the classroom than when you are newer to teaching. So, I will certainly tell them about moments when I have felt shame – within that framework of when I have betrayed something I think is important. For instance, I'll say I've always wanted to be a nice person, and when I've done something that goes against that, I felt shame about it. Some of the students who know me laugh because perhaps the first thing they think about me isn't that I'd necessarily want to be a “nice person”. But I think it raises what's really important – the things we hold dear.

Viv: In our project on post-humanism, new materialism and social justice pedagogies, I've been looking at diffraction rather than critique – reading one thing through another rather than pitting one thing against another. There's a lot of shaming and shame in academic work which is not spoken about. The reviews – people hiding behind anonymity and then just ripping through somebody's work and what Barad would call epistemological damage that one does as an academic. It's very entrenched in the ways in which peer review is being done; and also I've seen it at conferences with PhD students presenting and established academics ripping into them. So, for me that's interesting in terms of shame, and I wondered if you had thought of alternative practices, for example.

Elspeth: Yes, senior people attacking PhD students makes my blood boil, and I will go for the jugular when it happens. One of the things that I hold dear, and I'm very proud of, is our postgraduate research culture. For over 20 years our department has held to a politics of generosity, of intellectual generosity, and that means that you do not use negative critique. Even so, many students are still trained in that mind-set. I explain that negative critique is actually facile; you mount an argument and you knock it down and you mount another. It's much more difficult to mount a generous argument – through, as you say, diffraction. And over the years, generations of student cohorts perform that intellectual generosity all the time – they spontaneously help each other whether it be reading through entire theses, helping out with references or guiding new students into our culture. At its core, we have a weekly seminar or work-in-progress from 2 pm to 4 pm every Friday. Students learn how to ask questions of their peers and of established scholars, how to properly chair – such an important skill – how to introduce visiting speakers and so on. And then we go out for a drink and talk and laugh, and all the rest of it, and over time it produces this thickness of a generous research culture. Then students try to reproduce this in their own ways when they get their teaching jobs in Shanghai or Nottingham or wherever. It makes me smile just thinking of a little experiment in intellectual kindness that keeps popping up in others around the world.

Tamara: Elspeth, thanks so much for your generosity – not only making the time for the interview but also your thoughtful engagement with our local context, as evident in your preparatory reading. We really appreciate that. It's been a really lovely dialogue!

Elspeth: And I want to thank the three of you. It means very much to me that in any small way my work can help, and it's been wonderful to hear about what the three of you are doing and to begin to understand the fabulous work you are doing under difficult circumstances. So, bravo to all of you.