A feminist politics of shame: Shame and its contested possibilities

Abstract

This editorial piece introduces a special issue on the feminist politics of shame. It locates the special issue in the larger framework of scholarship on feminist approaches to shame and specifically feminist psychological emphases, and contextualises the foregrounding of the productive possibilities of shame for feminist social justice projects. The introductory piece overviews the contributions to the special issue through a thematic lens.

Keywords

shame feminist politics gender productive possibilities stigma

This special issue of Feminism & Psychology aims to contribute to a growing body of literature on the politics of shame (see also Fischer, 2018). The renewed engagement with a feminist politics of shame is enhanced by “the affective turn” and by new materialist and post-humanist thinking that challenges the ongoing erasure of affect, emotion, and embodiment which remains endemic to much of western scholarship. While feminist psychologists have had a long interest in shame, there has been less engagement with a larger politics of shame, particularly in considering shame and its productive possibilities, as foregrounded by this contribution.

Shame and shaming processes are personal and political, constituting powerful material and discursive performances of the long-standing and still salient feminist dictum, “the personal is political”. Shame and shaming are also bound up with social inequality, both reflecting and serving to reinforce, reinstate and legitimise social injustice. Shame is closely entangled with gender subjectification and normative gender binarisms, which are raced, classed and enmeshed with other forms of intersectionalities. However, shame also holds multiple possibilities for social justice efforts when deployed for resistance, activism and the critical pedagogies, which feminist, decolonial and critical scholars have elaborated on (for example, Munt, 2007; Probyn, 2005; Probyn with Bozalek, Shefer, & Carolissen, 2019, this issue; Zembylas, 2019, this issue). The contemporary proliferation of online communication and social media notably provides novel and increased spaces for the deployment of shame as a means both for control and regulation and for the political and pedagogical project of challenging injustices (for example, Hall & Hearn, 2017; Munt, 2017; Shewarega, 2018). Indeed, in current neoliberal capitalist global contexts, mushrooming media and online technology of all kinds have intensified pressures for individualised performance and self-promotion. In the face of overwhelmingly multiple layers of pressure and inevitable failure, not to mention cyber-bullying, revenge porn and sexting shaming (see for example, Hearn & Hall, 2017; Ringrose & Harvey, 2015), it is not surprising that shame too is ever present. Nonetheless, recognition through a politics of representation, such as the #MeToo movement, may also serve to disturb normative practices of shaming by disrupting the individualising function of shame.

Feminist scholarship has addressed shame in multiple ways, chiefly by highlighting how shame serves to regulate socially-prescribed femininities (e.g. Bartky, 1990). Psychology has tended to focus on the individualised impact and internal experience of shame, often constructed negatively (e.g. Kaufman, 2004), or on the way in which shame is bound up with psychical processes of development within certain analytical framings, such as psychoanalysis. Considering the powerful ways in which shame is connected to oppressing marginal identities and communities, and the role it plays in policing heteronormativity and the intersectional power relations that sustain traumatic inequalities, it is perhaps surprising that there is a relative lack of critical feminist works interrogating shame and its socio-political effects. Further, whether focused on the personalised or political nature of shame, much of the existing literature has focused on the negative and destructive aspects of shaming. However, there is a minor strand of both older and developing research, particularly within pedagogical spaces (for example, hooks, 1994; Zembylas, 2008, 2019, this issue) and feminist work on the cultural representations of shame (e.g. Munt, 2007; Probyn, 2004), that argues for the value of shame in projects of social justice.

Shame in the patriarchal project

A large body of feminist scholarship flags the way in which shame is imbricated within intersectional gender inequalities, with shame serving as a mechanism of surveillance and policing of gender binarisms in maintaining idealised, “respectable” femininity. Shame is endemic to everyday experiences of being a woman (Brown, 2004). In this respect, while psychology as discipline and profession has tended to focus on individualised experiences of shame and shame within psychical development and dynamics, much of the emphasis in feminist psychological research has been on the way in which femininities are bound up with shame, and how practices of naming and shaming police normative femininities and punish women who “transgress”. Feminist psychological research has made contributions to thinking about shame and gender in a number of key areas, which are briefly flagged here.

Research on heterosexualities, and young women’s sexualities in particular, illuminates the complex ways in which binaries like whore/madonna operate to shame women and police their sexuality within patriarchal and heteronormative boundaries, across differing geopolitical contexts (for example, Crawford & Popp, 2003; Farvid, Braun, & Rowney, 2017; Gavey, 1993; Shefer, 2016). Notions of ‘respectability’, hinging around sexual restraint and containment, have been documented in this larger body of work across diverse cultural contexts (see, for example, Abeyasekera & Marecek, 2019, this issue; Van Wyk, 2015). Gendered shame has been researched as key to the surveillance of sexuality and gender at school, for example through sexuality education and in responses to teenage pregnancy and parenting (for example, Bay-Cheng, 2010; Bhana, 2014; Morrell, Bhana, & Shefer, 2012).

In this issue, the paper by Asha L. Abeyasekera and Jeanne Marecek represents a data-rich contemporary example of shame in the project of situated gender surveillance. Located in the global southern geopolitical context, this Sri Lankan-based study viewed shame through the lens of suicide-like acts among young women, and generates arguments about shame as a key device in practices of self-governance. The authors argue that the notion of læjja-baya (translated as ‘fear of a sullied reputation’) figured regularly in participants’ accounts of suicide-like acts. Both the young women and their mothers orient themselves according to the judgement of others, resulting in self-policing behaviours. The authors argue that more gender-equitable access to public realms has resulted in a heightened public scrutiny and surveillance over young women and an increased hegemonic vigilance for perceived sexual transgressions. The paper also discusses the additional pressures on young women that arise because the loss of individual “reputation” is viewed as damaging to the entire family. The paper adds insight into the multiple socio-cultural meanings of shame and shaming of young women, as well as into how suicide-like acts in this particular context are linked to subjective disciplinary practices.

Research on the silencing and “othering” function of shame in relation to experiences of gender-based violence represents a key terrain where feminist psychological work has contributed to social justice agendas and evolving policy. Here, a focus has been both on women’s narratives of the stigma and shame of rape, as well as cultural narratives regarding gender, sexuality, and sexual crimes “that shape the overriding entanglement of rape with shame” (Weiss, 2010, p. 287). Feminist psychological researchers have documented the persistence of restrictive norms that regulate and police women, exacerbated by neoliberal governmentalities, which set women up as responsible for their own protection and therefore to be blamed in the event of violence and abuse, often inhibiting reporting of rape (e.g. Gordon & Collins, 2013; McCleary-Sills et al., 2016; Weiss, 2010). The entanglements of race and gender in “colouring” shaming discourses of rape have also been discussed within postcolonial contexts (Boonzaier, 2017; Dosekun, 2007, 2013).

The article by Taryn van Niekerk in this issue opens up such a dialogue around the intersections of race, gender and shame in postcolonial contexts, with a focus on the narratives of a group of working-class coloured male perpetrators of violence against women partners, who participated in a community-based men’s programme in Cape Town, South Africa. Van Niekerk shows how participants are torn between the pursuit of “respectable”, “good” masculinity as prescribed in specific pro-feminist spaces, whilst avoiding the shame of being “othered” by their peers for not conforming to hegemonic notions of masculinity, within a context where racialised and classed shame is also ever present. The author argues for the centrality of racial shame in understanding these men’s progression towards non-violent masculinities, and invites the larger scholarship on shame to better acknowledge the complex nexus of race, gender and shame in postcolonial contexts.

Given the preponderance of psychological work on the social imperatives of body image, feminist psychological work has weighed in on the links among women’s self-image, bodily experiences and shame. Social and cultural “beauty” imperatives have shaped women’s experiences of shame and its somatisation in problematic eating and self-harm (e.g. Bessenoff & Snow, 2006; Ferreira, Pinto-Gouveia, & Duarte, 2013; Markham, Thompson, & Bowling, 2005). Shame is deployed around the hormonal, biological and physical materialities of femininity to police femininity and constrain women’s sexuality. Feminist psychologists have emphasised the construction of the fertile female body as “monstrous”, requiring regulation and control in patriarchal societies (Ussher, 2004, 2006) and researched the shame of menstruation within the construction of the female body as “dirty, disgusting, and in need of sanitizing, deodorizing, medicating, managing, exfoliating and denuding” (Fahs, 2011, p. 57; for example, Chrisler, 2011; Jackson & Falmagne, 2013; Johnston-Robledo & Chrisler, 2013).

A number of the articles in this issue speak to the recalcitrance of the entanglement of female bodies with shame. Ásta Jóhannsdóttir (2019, this issue) focuses on gendered body hair practices in Iceland. Drawing on a large body of qualitative data, she argues that shame associated with body hair for women is intransigent and normative, despite Second Wave Feminism. The paper includes a pedagogical case study in which students who enrolled for a credit-bearing project were required to engage in leaving body hair “natural” and uncut. The students reported experiences of disgust, both from others and from participants themselves, which revealed important aspects of the productive possibilities of shame, serving to raise their political consciousness of gendered and normative body practices. The article highlights the salience and recalcitrance of continued gender regulatory norms even in national contexts like Iceland, a nation that rates highly on global gender equality indicators and where young feminist activism is publicly evident.

Another key area which highlights a politics of shame is motherhood, including pregnancy and breast-feeding, as represented by a number of articles in this special issue. Guilt and shame in relation to motherhood roles is “the most prevalent finding in mothering research” (Sutherland, 2010, p. 310); “good mother” discourses are implicated in the surveillance and discipline of women during pregnancy, birthing and parenting (Kruger & Lourens, 2016; Liss, Schiffrin, & Rizzo, 2013). Similarly, current dominant discourses on “natural childbirth” and the promotion of breastfeeding globally have been shown to be linked with guilt, failure and shame amongst women who are unable to or choose not to breastfeed (Crossley, 2009; Dykes, 2005). These prescriptions are also raced and classed (Freeman, 2018. It is evident that psychology as a profession and authority on early childhood development and gender identity, implicated in both reflecting and reproducing dominant discourses of raced, classed, heterosexual and gendered motherhood, has played a role in the promotion of shame and guilt amongst women (Kruger, 2006).

In this issue, Ortal Slobodin (2019) engages with a novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2006), in which the protagonist’s agonised self-reflection on motherhood reflects and interrogates social mores. Slobodin argues that it is the internalised response to socio-cultural gendered ideals, and the failure to “live up” to these ideals, that triggers maternal shame. Whilst primarily identifying the ways in which shame regulates normative gender practices of mothering, Slobodin also speaks to the project of shame for social justice by arguing for empathy through the “connected gaze” as a powerful “antidote” to shame.

Charlotte Morris and Sally R Munt (2019, this issue) explore a different form of shame related to motherhood, that of single motherhood, through a life history study of a group of white heterosexual middle-class (at least originally) British women. Participants’ narratives expose the power of the classed, heteronormative discourse of single motherhood as a “failed identity”. Importantly, the article also provides insight into the nuances and contestations of a politics of shame, foregrounding how the inter-subjective and discursive negotiation of shame may in turn deploy class, ethnic and citizenship privilege through “othering”. The authors examine how a group of white middle-class single mothers negotiate their own shame in relation to “failure” with respect to achieving middle-class heteronormative ideals, by distancing themselves from what they construct as “irresponsible” working class, frequently non-white, single mothers.

Also within the theme of motherhood, George Parker and Cat Pausé (2019, this issue) focus on shame in pregnancy and the way in which dominant discourses and practices of contemporary reproductive healthcare deploy shame in tasking pregnant women, constructed as fat, with the individualised project of her child’s health and idealised maternal identity. Drawing on qualitative research, the authors examine how shame is deployed within a neoliberal governmentality of “healthy pregnancy”, revealing participants’ ongoing fraught struggles, which, the authors argue, actually work to undermine health and reinstate a “failed” and abject fat maternal identity.

The contested productivity of shame

A key focus in this special issue is the productivity of shame within the larger politics of shame. Probyn (2004, p. 329) argued that “shame is immensely productive politically and conceptually in advancing a project of everyday ethics”. Such productivity is linked to the importance of “everyday stories of shame” and how they facilitate empathy at both an interpersonal and wider political level, allowing us “to develop a wider notion of the everyday – of what is personal and what is social” (Probyn, 2004, p. 336). The deployment of shame towards productive social justice projects appears to have had particular traction in feminist and social justice pedagogical thinking and practice, where a rapidly growing body of work is foregrounding strategies of affective work in social justice pedagogies (for example, Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2013, 2019, this issue). In South Africa, with its postcolonial and post-apartheid legacies, research and practices towards transforming higher education and critical social justice pedagogies have proliferated (for example Bozalek, Braidotti, Shefer, & Zembylas, 2018; Leibowitz et al. 2013). Beginning with the #Rhodesmustfall movement in 2015, it is young people who have engaged creative and performative activist practices towards a powerful shaming of governmental and university authorities in the project of transforming higher education and the larger terrain of post-apartheid social inequalities.

On the other hand, articulations of shame, at public and interpersonal levels, are also contested and regarded with some scepticism in scholarly engagements with shame and memory, particularly within post-conflict societies. For example, writing about post-apartheid South Africa, Straker (2011a, 2011b) asks pressing questions about the public performances of shame by white South Africans in recalling their privileges. Arguing against what she termed “promiscuous shame” (2011b), she points to the ways in which displays of shame may be deployed to “save face” and reinscribe a more acceptable self. Straker suggests that, for those in power, “owning a global sense of shame” may simply open up the space to “avoid the actual experience of shame that would accrue if we owned guilt, not for the general actions of our race but for our own more personal racism” (Straker, 2011b, p. 14). Not surprising then, is Probyn’s commentary (2019, p. XX, this issue) that “writing shame is the most demanding ethical form”. This is due to the dangers of writing shame that shames others or, as has been argued above, that serves the problematic effect of distancing oneself from acknowledging shame and responsibility.

A selection of the papers in this special issue argue that there is value to be found in drawing upon such contestations. Ambivalence and unpredictable effects hide within shameful and shaming narratives that can be appropriated for pedagogical and social justice purposes (Shefer, 2012; Zembylas, 2014). Arguably, such narratives may serve as resources for critical theorists and those engaged in social justice pedagogy, in the project of unpacking the workings of oppression and in opening up our understandings of collective responsibility for maintaining inequality. The challenge for feminist psychology is perhaps to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) in the pursuit of an ethics of writing and thinking about shame, as well as in self-reflexive political activism and other public deployments of shame. Clearly shame is valuable, if not essential, for an ethics of care and collective responsibility that opposes real and symbolic violences, globally and locally. Yet shame and shaming can also serve problematic, conservative ends, sometimes in nuanced and manipulative ways. As Probyn (2004, p. 346) reflected on the workings of shame:

Sometimes it leads to reactionary acts, sometimes it compels close inspection of how we live, and becomes the necessary force to catalyse an ethics of the everyday.

In line with this sentiment, a number of the papers in this issue, whilst articulating the intersectional gendered politics of shame in different terrains, also speak to a productive yet contested deployment of shame. Rose Richards (2019, this issue) contributes what she terms an “evocative autoethnography” to explore the impact of the shame of living with a chronic illness, via a narrative of her own academic career path. She reveals both her compliances and resistances to the “othering” effect of illness, and to the shaming of those who do not conform to assumed norms of health, strength and well-being in higher educational institutions. Richards argues the importance of sharing such shame narratives in order to challenge dominant masculinist academies in which bodies, and especially minoritised bodies of women, have been historically excluded.

Also offering a contribution to thinking through the productive and contested possibilities of shame, Lucas Gottzén (2019, this issue) explores different articulations of young Swedish men’s shame at having engaged in sexism and/or sexual coercion/violence. The paper draws on written narratives submitted to a feminist anti-gender-violence campaign, in order to uncover how shame may be used by men to distance themselves from a misogynistic or sexist past in order to produce a “respectable” masculinity. At the same time, some of their narratives reveal what Gottzén (p. XX) terms a “chafing masculinity”, which refers to the experience of a more enduring, less controllable discomfort. Gottzén argues that this form of engaged and ongoing shame might be helpful as a resource for assisting men to “unlearn their privilege” (p. XX) and thereby contribute more authentically to a pro-feminist politics.

Michalinos Zembylas’s article (2019, this issue) provides a philosophical entrée to a larger debate about the productive potential of shame in its entanglement with a feminist project for social justice, specifically in thinking about pedagogical practices. The author argues that feminist possibilities for shame are founded upon an acknowledgement that the patriarchal project is bound up with the repression of affect, and a related devaluation of the feminine, conflated with the irrational. Zembylas poses the question whether educators can engage pedagogies of shame that “are both critical and make a difference” (p. XX). He responds to his own provocation by engaging Agamben and Deleuze in a reading of Primo Levi’s narrative of shame as an “ambivalent affect”. He observes that shamefulness is present not only in being negatively judged and “othered”, but also in becoming aware of one’s own complicity in such practices, as the subject is both witness and victim of shameful practices.

The special issue includes an interview with feminist cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn, who is author of a key text within the larger body of feminist work on shame, Blush: Faces of Shame (2005). Vivienne Bozalek, Tamara Shefer and Ronelle Carolissen, three of the editors of the special issue, engage in dialogue with Probyn on her contribution to theorising the gendered and intersectional politics of shame (Probyn et al., 2019, this issue). Drawing on her own life history, her scholarship and her pedagogical practices, Probyn highlights shame as a powerful resource for social critique, and her commitment to thinking about shame through connections with others, and within an ethics of care in postcolonial and globally unequal contexts. The interview adds emphasis to the editors’ commitment to an affirmative, relational and political approach to thinking about and working with shame.

Conclusion

The papers in this special issue speak to many current thematic areas within an intersectional gendered politics of shame, both within psychology and across disciplines. The articles also foreground new areas of thinking about the politics of shame, within shifting and increasingly entangled global and local contexts. Importantly, this edition is characterised by and acknowledges what Fischer (2018) calls the “slipperiness” of shame, in acknowledging both the multiplicity of ways in which shame is deployed and functions and the contested ways in which it may or may not contribute to social justice, in this case intersectional gender and sexual equalities and freedoms.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to co-editors Prof. Ronelle Carolissen and Viv Bozalek for their input on this piece, and to Karen Graaff for editorial and literature review assistance. This special issue emerged out of an international Politics of Shame Colloquium, held on 30 November 2015, hosted by the University of Stellenbosch, the University of the Western Cape and the NRF Reconceptualising Social Justice in Higher Education Project (project no: 105851).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Tamara Shefer is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape. She has researched primarily in areas related to intersectional gender and sexual justice, including research on young sexualities, masculinities, memory and apartheid, gender and care, and social justice, decolonial and feminist pedagogies and research in higher education. Most recent edited books include Engaging Youth in Activist Research and Pedagogical Praxis (2018, with J. Hearn, K. Ratele, & F. Boonzaier) and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education: Critical Posthumanist and New Feminist Materialist Perspectives (2018, Bloomsbury, with V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, & M. Zembylas).

Sally R Munt is Professor, and Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, at the University of Sussex, UK. She has published widely on shame, including her monograph Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Ashgate 2007), which theorizes how shame becomes embedded in cultural identities and social practices, and more recently several articles on shame and victimhood, and shame, aggression, and gay racism. Munt is also a BABCP accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist in private practice, and the Director of the Sanctuary Project, which provides trauma therapy for refugees, asylum seekers, and destitute migrants in Sussex, UK.

Vivienne Bozalek is a Professor of Social Work and the Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of the Western Cape. She holds a PhD from Utrecht University. Her research interests and publications include the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practices in higher education. Recent publications include the following co-edited books: Discerning Hope in Educational Practices, Theorising Learning to Teach in Higher Education and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education: Critical Posthumanist and New Feminist Materialist Perspectives.

Ronelle Carolissen is a clinical psychologist and Professor of Community Psychology in the Department of Educational Psychology, as well as the Vice-Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University. Her research expertise and publications interweave two interconnected strands. Her work explores feminist social justice approaches to teaching and learning and critical community psychology perspectives on youth citizenship, belonging and community engagement in educational contexts. Her recent co-edited book is Transforming Transformation in Teaching and Research at South African Universities (AfricanSunMedia, 2018).

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