How to bring your daughter up to be a feminist killjoy: Shame,accountability and the necessity of paranoid reading in Lene Kaaberbøl’s The Shamer Chronicles

Approaches to shame

Shame is a relatively well-investigated theme within psychological, philosophical, biological and anthropological studies. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to guilt and (to some extent) shame as connected to social patterns of control may be seen as forming an almost common sense understanding of shame today (Freud, 2000 [1905]). Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions of how shame thematises the experience of exposure to and dependence on the Other are also influential (Sartre, 1992 [1943]). Darwin’s description of the human phenomenon of blushing inspires a more biological approach to shame (Darwin, 2007 [1872]) while anthropological understandings of shame often position themselves either in continuation of or opposition to the anthropologist Benedict’s claim that entire cultures may be categorised as either guilt (connected to actions) or shame (connected to identity) cultures (Benedict, 2005 [1946]).

One thinker who has been especially influential in queer approaches to shame is psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins is important for queer theoretical thinking because his descriptions of affect transgress a simplistic understanding of affects as either biological constants or social constructs. Tomkins also offers a non-repressionist approach to shame, which he regards as biologically rooted yet primarily interpersonal. Shame must be found in relationships between (groups of) individuals and has a productive (rather than a Freudian repressive) relationship to identity. Tomkins’s concept of shame offers a non-oedipal conceptualisation of identity that does not let subjectivity begin in (natural) identifications but rather in the individual’s dependence on social recognisability and communication.

According to Tomkins (1995: 133), shame is the affect that most intensely indicates that the individual’s identity is at stake: ‘Shame strikes deepest into the heart of man … shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul.’ Shame is experienced as something that strikes ‘deep’ into the subject because it points to the individual’s absolute dependence on sociality. The fundamental form of shame is thus not prohibition but rather exclusion and the cessation of social communication. The moment of shame is a moment of self-reflection through the social gaze. Shame marks the complex experience of the discomfort of the excluding gaze of others and the fear of the disappearance of the social gaze altogether: that is, the experience of becoming so radically an Other that there is no longer a gaze to meet.

Tomkins’s thinking has been highly influential to Sedgwick’s understanding of shame. Shame must be understood, Sedgwick argues, as both a physical-biological reality and as a social phenomenon with simultaneous socialising and individualising qualities crucial to subject formation. Drawing on Tomkins’s investigations, Sedgwick is interested in how shame calls the subject into existence as both included and excluded. The experience of shame highlights the subject as dependent upon recognition from others and therefore as vulnerable to the threat of social expulsion (Sedgwick, 2003: 35ff.). As such, shame is connected to the individual’s sense of dignity and integrity. But since shame is fundamental to identity formation, integrity cannot be secured by severing oneself from shame. To Sedgwick, shame reminds us of our relationality. Shame holds potential for establishing solidarity with other shamed subjects and for thinking of identity in terms of becoming and transformation (Sedgwick, 2003: 35).

This mode of thinking about shame has inspired queer scholarship, notably the influential conference and later anthology Gay Shame (Halperin and Traub, 2009) and Elspeth Probyn’s Blush (2005). While Gay Shame tends to place its faith in shame because of its affiliation with the excluded Other, Probyn (2005: ix) points to shame as a self-evaluating and potentially transformative affect of fundamental importance to ethics: ‘[W]e cannot live without it, nor should we try’. In particular, it is shame’s connection to the possibility of self-transformation that I will use as a guide for my reading of The Chronicles.

The queer-feminist potential of The Shamer Chronicles

Rather than being external to subjectivity, shame can thus be viewed as constitutive of identity and as a condition for ethical transformation and responsibility. Such an approach to shame may be read as an overall theme in The Chronicles, in which shame is figured as a basic condition for a socially just society. The Chronicles consist of the tetralogy The Shamer’s Daughter (2006 [2002]), The Shamer’s Signet (2005 [2003]), The Serpent Gift (2005 [2003]) and The Shamer’s War (2005 [2004]). Its narrative takes place in the fantasy world of the Skay-Sagis Isle, a Scandinavian-Scottish Mediaeval universe infused with fantastic elements such as dragons, sorcerers and sea serpents. Ten-year-old Dina, her brother Davin and their baby sister Melli live in a small village with their mother, who is a ‘Shamer’: a person able to solve crimes by looking into the conscience of a suspect to see if he or she carries shame over certain guilty deeds. As the Shamer’s daughter, Dina has (much against her will) inherited her mother’s shaming ability. The drama begins when Dina’s mother is summoned to the castle city of Dunark to pass judgement on the young lord Nico Raven, who stands accused of having killed several members of his family. Using their Shamer powers, Dina and her mother soon realise that the murders are part of a conspiracy against Nico arranged by his half-brother Drakan, of the totalitarian Dragon Order, with the aim of taking over the Lordship of Dunark. Dina and her mother refuse to commit perjury and consequently find themselves on the run from the Dragon Order’s persecution. Together with Nico and the clans of Skay-Sagis, Dina and her family embark on a long journey that finally leads to the overturning of the Dragon Order and the birth of a new form of government. Nico renounces his title as Lord and instead arranges for his ex-lover Carmina to become Lord of Dunark, overseeing Skay-Sagis Isle’s transformation into an emerging democracy.

The Chronicles have received several Nordic and international prizes (including the Nordic Children’s Book Prize, Best Disney Novel Writer of 2001 and two nominations for the Marsh Award) and premiered as a musical theatrical play. While Kaaberbøl’s literature is thus well known among a European youth audience, academic literary studies have paid the books little attention because the fantasy genre is traditionally considered to be a somewhat inferior form of literature. However, exclusion from the ‘fine arts’ is also what makes fantasy literature inspirational for radical thinking. In her queer readings of shame, Sally Munt (2007: 185) highlights fantasy’s connection to the adolescent, kitsch, illogical and unreasonable (aspects that have a tradition of stereotypical association with the feminine) as precisely what makes the genre a possible reservoir for imagination: ‘Fantastic writing provokes readers to think differently, it reveals the silent truth of hegemony … perhaps the fantasy genre at best could be a Foucauldian episteme that pushes open human knowability.’ As Jacqueline Rose (1993) suggests, children’s fiction is always also about and ‘for’ adults since it reflects an adult construct of childhood and (through this) a construction of adult subjectivity. Indeed, The Chronicles can be seen as narrating an image of the adult that the narrator would like the child to grow into. In the spirit of Sedgwick (1991), who asks for more affirmative psychoanalytic literature on ‘how to bring your kids up gay’, I will suggest the Shamer books as a fantasy guide for bringing kids up (to be) feminist killjoys who insist on shame as a pointer to accountability.

In other words, I see a queer-feminist potential for The Chronicles. One most obviously encounters this potential in the books’ criticism of patriarchy as well as in their representations of gender. Even though the narrative’s loyalty is on the side of the Ravens, it also exposes the Ravens’ Lordship as built on an unjust patriarchal ideology. The macho ideals of Lord Raven cause his son Nico (whose abilities as a swordfighter leave much to be desired) to feel shamefully incapable. Moreover, it is the Ravens’ patriarchal inheritance system that has deemed Nico’s half-brother Drakan an illegitimate heir, providing the direct reason for the book’s master conflict – namely Drakan’s hatred of the Ravens.

The books’ gender representations form alternatives to those of traditional fantasy literature. They figure several strong women heroes and leaders capable of competing with men on their own terms. Forms of femininity that are independent of men’s approval are generally celebrated: Carmina, the soon-to-be Lord of Dunark, dresses and fights as well as any man; Dina and her best friend Rose are characterised by their sharp tongues, defiant tempers and strong dislike for social injustice; and a number of women clan leaders and sages become indispensable helpers on Dina’s journey. But The Chronicles also investigate and value alternative masculinities: Nico Raven is a pacifist who wants to become a school teacher instead of a Lord; Dina’s brother Davin dreams of fighting like a man – but learns that killing is a disgusting business; and the blacksmith boy Tano eventually wins Dina’s heart – not by being brave and manly but by fashioning a pretty clasp for her rebellious hair. A sensitive boy assisting his girlfriend with fashion tips (‘a queer eye for the straight girl’?) represents a more idealised form of masculinity than that of the books’ swordsmen who come off as somewhat brutish.

This appreciation of alternative gender roles is also reflected in The Chronicles’ portraits of alternative family structures: Dina herself is the biological offspring of the mother’s relationship with her former lover Sezuan, but her two siblings are the donor children of a friend. Dina’s mother raises her three children as a single mother, and she eventually adopts Dina’s friend Rose (and, to some extent, Nico) into the family. Nico’s ex-lover Carmina is led to believe that Nico (who she loves) is dead so that she may concentrate fully on her role as leader rather than ending up in marriage. This idealisation of alternative gender roles, romantic alliances and family forms can be read as a queer opening that provides alternatives to traditional heteronormative plots, though, as I shall consider later, they may also be read as part of a homonationalist discourse.

Reclaiming shame

The most queer-feminist feature of The Chronicles, however, consists of the books’ re-evaluation of shame. In this respect, the books can be understood as addressing traditional affiliations between shame and femininity. As feminist scholars have argued, shame itself can be seen as socially and conceptually connected to the feminine. Bartky (1990: 92–93, 85) argues that ‘[w]omen, more often than men, are made to feel shame in the major sites of social life’ and that shame comes to constitute women’s ‘affective attunement to the social environment’. In a reading of the shamed female body in contemporary women’s writing, Bouson connects shame to Kristeva’s concept of the abject and argues that shame and disgust are ‘associated with the abject maternal – and female – body of our culture’ (Bouson, 2009: 4; Kristeva, 1982). Biddle (1997: 231) argues through Bataille that, with respect to the sexual act, ‘it is women’s position alone to signify shame’, and Halberstam (2005: 226) stresses that shame is ‘a gendered form of sexual abjection: it belongs to the feminine’. In contemporary popular (anti-feminist) mythology, we are also presented with the claim that women and shame are connected, namely, that women are able to shame men into obedience. A quasi-misogynist belief would have it that mothers hold a particular ability to manipulate children by causing them to feel shame: ‘Mummy isn’t angry – she’s disappointed!’ as a popular Danish phrase goes, sarcastically mimicking this presumed feminine talent for shaming.

Rather than rejecting these historical and popular fantasies, however, Kaaberbøl takes them seriously and investigates their subversive potential. The Chronicles suggest the ability ‘to shame’ as a capacity that can reappropriated and celebrated as an ethical-political superpower. This shaming power is highly valued as an indispensable part of the clan world’s juridical system as the Shamer is able to determine with certainty the guilt of a suspect:

Mama sighed. ‘When something has been stolen. Or when some man or woman has hurt another, perhaps even killed … that is when they send for the Shamer. There are people in this world who are capable of doing evil without feeling much shame. And there are people so good at hiding their shame, even from themselves, people who can think up a thousand excuses, until they actually believe they have a right to hurt, steal, or lie. But when they come face to face with me, they can no longer hide. Not from themselves, nor from others. Most people possess some sense of shame. And if I come across one of the very few who don’t … well, I can make them ashamed if I have to. Because I have a gift that I have learned to use.’ (The Shamer’s Daughter: 13–14)

Thus, where as feminist theory has criticised the socially established connections between femininity and shame, Kaaberbøl celebrates this connection and replaces the shamed female body as a site for social control with women Shamers as the guardians of social justice.

The shaming gaze as paranoid reading

My ambition in the following is to connect three queer and feminist concepts in the reading of Kaaberbøl’s books, namely shame, paranoid/reparative reading and the feminist killjoy. My claim is that the Shamer can be read as a feminist figuration that allows us to imagine, through the means of fantasy literature, how these three concepts may inform one another. I suggest a relationship between shame, paranoia and killjoyism because they each in their own way concern the possibility of social criticism and accountability. If shame is about the relationship one has to the ethics in which one is personally invested, both paranoia and killjoyism are about calling attention to social injustice. I will begin by considering how paranoia and killjoying may be connected to ‘shaming’ before turning to the books’ suggestion for a reparative utopian imagination.

It is particularly the Shamer’s gaze that offers a way of thinking about paranoid reading as a form of vision connected to accountability. When a Shamer looks someone in the eye, she sees everything of which the person is (consciously or unconsciously) ashamed. The Chronicles describe the Shamer’s gaze as an automatised, involuntary and painful act that the Shamer cannot control by any means other than looking away. Re-experiencing the shameful moments together with the suspect, the Shamer browses through his/her shameful memories to investigate whether there is guilt beneath the suspect’s shame. The idealisation of the truth-seeing gaze may be understood as a claim to objectivism since the gaze has traditionally functioned as the symbolic tool of masculine knowledge production within (for example) science and medicine. I will suggest, however, that the Shamer’s gaze should be seen as reclaiming access to truth and as such that the books insist upon a ‘non-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world’ (Haraway, 1991: 187).

It is the involuntary character of the Shamer’s gaze, however, that makes it tempting to think of it as a form of paranoid reading. Here, I draw on Sedgwick’s characterisation of two different modes of analysing: the paranoid and the reparative. The paranoid mode tends to be that of the deconstructivist, who anticipates given power structures (e.g. heteronormativity) and therefore also continually finds and repeats her criticism of those very structures. Although paranoia usually refers to seeing something that ‘is not really there’, Sedgwick does not claim that the structures one criticises are just personal delusions. Rather, she suggests that the ‘paranoid’ identification of actual oppressive realities must be supplemented by a more ‘productive’ mode of reparative reading that presents the reader with non-normative narratives and alternative possibilities for identification (Sedgwick, 2003: 123–152). Sedgwick does not suggest the two modes as oppositional, but she does point to them as different optics that supplement each other rather than overlap. Regarding The Chronicles, I suggest that we understand the shaming gaze as a form of paranoid reading since it almost always finds shame where it looks for it. As I shall return to, The Chronicles also contain an image of reparative reading to supplement the paranoid but without dichotomising the two as Sedgwick tends to do.

In linking paranoid reading with shame, I suggest the Shamer’s gaze as an instrument of analysis that shows the ethical implications of a subject’s actions. It allows us to imagine shame as the foundation of a socially just society and as something to appreciate and honour. This appreciation can be seen as connected to what we may term accountability (Collins, 2000). Kaaberbøl’s books can be said to reclaim shame as that which holds people and institutions socially accountable. The Chronicles try out and criticise different modes of connecting shame and sociality without rejecting the connection as such. Instead, they point to the Shamer’s ability to hold someone accountable to his or her actions as an ethical and politically preferable way of connecting sociality and shame. Looking a suspect in the eye, the Shamer and the person in question share a social gaze on the suspect’s actions: ‘ “You are a merciless mirror …,” he whispered. But the image is very clear’ (The Shamer’s Daughter: 63). In shame’s merciless mirror, the Shamer brings about the experience that ‘by the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other’, as Sartre (1992 [1943]: 302–303) puts it. Probyn suggests that one of the reasons shame can be considered transformational is precisely that it makes one an object of one’s own gaze. Just as shame may call a subject into existence as unworthy (for instance when one is hailed through shaming names), shame may also present a possibility for change: ‘shame puts one’s self-esteem on the line and questions our value system’ and can, for instance, ‘have to do with a strong interest in being a good person’ (Probyn, 2005: x). Shame may serve as the cause for transformation so that one is retuned to the type of ethics in which one is otherwise invested.

The Chronicles present the Shamer’s gaze as an invitation to such personal transformation (if the convicted so chooses) and connect shame to accountability, understood as a willingness to accept one’s guilt. Although shame is presented as the window through which the Shamer accesses a person’s potential guilt, this does not mean that guilt and shame must be understood as the same thing. Both anthropological and psychoanalytic studies have suggested guilt and shame to be two principally distinct phenomena. Traditionally, guilt is connected to a subject’s actions (what one has done), whereas shame relates to identity (what one is) (Lewis, 2008; Natanson in Ahmed, 2004: 105; Sedgwick, 2003: 37). Tomkins, however, does not principally distinguish guilt from shame. Rather, he treats shame, guilt, shyness, embarrassment and humiliation as parts of a continuum of ‘shame–humiliation’ that thematises the question of the personal identity’s relationship to sociality (Tomkins, 1995: 133–134). The Chronicles can be read along Tomkins’s understanding of shame–guilt as they do not portray guilt and shame as two disconnected phenomena but rather point to their possible connection as an important ethical matter. Shame without guilt and guilt without shame are portrayed as two opposite but equal forms of evil. Dina’s friend Rose, who is ashamed that her brother beats her, acts as the books’ counterpoint to Drakan, who feels no shame over being guilty of murder. The Chronicles seem to suggest that a certain amount of shame is necessary in order to accept one’s guilt and undergo ethical transformation whereas shame that is solely connected to matters for which one is not responsible (e.g. being the object of violence) is portrayed as disempowering and destructive. ‘Good’ shame, however, calls a person to social and ethical accountability by making one an object of one’s own gaze.

Thus, The Chronicles may suggest alternatives to shame’s role in contemporary affect theory. Most significantly, the books resist the temporality of shame suggested by Tomkins, Biddle, Sedgwick and Probyn, who tend to locate the origins of shame in infanthood. Instead, The Chronicles figure shame as connected to the awakening of adulthood (Dina’s shaming abilities only present themselves at around the age of 10) and as dependent on a continuous social doing. In this respect, the books also differ from another commonly held truth of shame theories: both advocates for and critics of shame seem to agree that shame is nearly impossible to escape – either because of its existential qualities (Tomkins, Sartre, Sedgwick, Probyn) or because shame sticks to hierarchically subordinated bodies (Bartky, Bouson, Biddle, Halberstam, Hemmings). The Chronicles, however, suggest the reverse, namely that shame must be understood as a precarious affect that could easily be lost if societies do not struggle to hold on to it: without Shamers, society would lose its sense of shame.

Shame and the feminist killjoy

Shame is thus suggested as something valuable, but as explained, not all forms of shame are presented as ‘good’. In order to unpack the forms that The Chronicles idealise, I propose to read the Shamer as a killjoy figure. I am interested in how the Shamer allows us to think of paranoid reading and the insistence on accountability as connected to the act of disturbing the affective comfort of the normative. I rely here on Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy (2010). Ahmed suggests the feminist killjoy as a figure with political potential. The killjoy exposes the inequalities, unfairness, or unhappiness of others as a precondition for the happiness of the privileged, making the norm momentarily uncomfortable for those who otherwise never notice the privileges they enjoy.

Although Ahmed criticises the tendency within queer theory to celebrate shame (see below), I suggest that The Chronicles open up a possibility for combining appreciation of the transformational and ethical implications of shame with the figure of the killjoy. Indeed, we might think of the feminist killjoy as a Shamer inasmuch as she interrupts the good mood of consensus and insists on staying with bad affect (shame) in order to examine the underlying injustice to which it points: meeting the Shamer’s gaze forces one to examine one’s own faults and complicities, making one immensely uncomfortable. Dina is a feminine killjoy and also a feminist killjoy who criticises patriarchal structures and insists on accountability. One may indeed recognise the faith of the Shamer as parallel to that of the feminist: one whose particular gaze cannot be turned off but is involuntarily activated in the face of what is considered to be injustice. This makes the Shamer a perpetual carrier of bad news that spoils the good mood of consensus. Being a Shamer/feminist killjoy provides one with eyes that inevitably detect all of the wrongs of the world and prompts one to point them out to people who would rather not hear about them, What is significant about The Chronicles, however, is how they idealise this gift of shame. Although uneasy around her, the clan society acknowledges its need for the Shamer’s killjoy vision in order to function as an ethical society. The Chronicles thus imagine a world where being a Shamer/killjoy is respected and even made the basis of the juridical system.

The books, nevertheless, consider the social consequences of being a Shamer, and the Shamer’s path is depicted as painful and somewhat lonely. To spare common folk the pain of unintentionally meeting the Shamer’s gaze, Dina and her mother are forced to live at the village edge in the intimacy of the chosen few who can bear to look them in the eye. The books maintain that, in spite of the loss of happiness involved in being a Shamer, one must choose this path. The story’s ending is thus not ‘happy’ per se in the sense that it suggests an escape from discomfort. The Chronicles never suggest that Dina’s life as the village’s future Shamer will be easier than if she were not a Shamer. But the Shamer’s duty is not a ‘happiness-duty’ (Ahmed, 2010: 127ff.). Rather, her duty is to use shame to create more discomfort in order to secure a more just society. By orienting herself toward shame at the expense of social happiness, Dina insists on being an ‘affect alien’ (Ahmed, 2010: 41ff.) whose affect is not in line with others and who brings affective disturbance to the social order.

This idealisation of shaming, however, also entails a problematic paradox: is the Shamer to be understood as someone who stands outside the normative order to keep an eye on the potential injustices of normative society? Or is she rather to be understood as securing the good mood of consensus by restoring moral and societal order? Her position on the border of the village suggests that she is an outsider to normativity, but her taking part in the clans’ juridical system suggests that she is also situated inside of normative society. The Chronicles thus seem to want the Shamer to be at once inside and outside of normative order, and Kaaberbøl’s rigid dichotomisation of the Shamer’s good shame with the Dragon Order’s evil shame may be understood as her (somewhat unconvincing) means of balancing this paradox.

Reparative readings: Imagining otherwise

Another way in which The Chronicles handle the paradox of being at once inside and outside the normative is by suggesting Dina as a new form of Shamer. Unlike her mother, Dina is gifted with the capacity to combine her Shamer vision with the ability to imagine something that lies beyond the existing order. As I have argued, the Shamer’s gaze may be seen as a form of critical paranoid reading. Dina is not, however, solely a paranoid reader. Her abilities also include a more creative reparative reading: in addition to having inherited her mother’s shaming abilities, Dina has received ‘the serpent gift’ from her otherwise-unknown father, Sezuan the magician. Sezuan is a ‘Blackmaster’ – a Pied Piper of Hamelin character who mysteriously appears in The Chronicles’ third book, insisting on forming a relationship with his daughter. Although Sezuan is also linked to problematic orientalising narratives (see below), I wish to focus for now on Sezuan’s more positive possibilities of radical imagining.

Sezuan’s magical gift is presented as complex. The serpent gift essentially consists of the power of suggestion by which the Blackmaster manipulates the perceptions of others. Sezuan does not hesitate to pay for dinner with cheap copper coins that the receiver believes to be pure gold. He explains away this deception by suggesting it as simply a different kind of payment: ‘He will remember that his inn had a visit from fine gentlemen who prised his food and paid him royally. He will remember it with happiness and pride, and he will boast about it to his neighbours. That is a form of payment too’ (The Serpent Gift: 227). Dina’s analysis is more realistic: ‘But … that won’t feed his family’ (p. 227). It seems that if the mother’s gift is seeing and speaking the truth, the father’s gift is that of deceiving. Sezuan grants brief pleasure over something that is not really there.

In spite of her reluctance toward Sezuan, Dina eventually acknowledges that her father truly loves her, and as he dies, she recognises that she cares for him, too. Dina also comes to realise that the serpent’s deceptive power may make one see things that are not there but that this gift is not all bad. On Dina’s request, Sezuan frees prisoners and children from a school-prison-castle by making the guards and schoolchildren simply walk off during dreams of something beyond the castle. If the gift of shame is the ability to see things as they are, the gift of the serpent is the ability to dream up the not yet. As such, the books supplement the Shamer’s gift of paranoia with the Blackmaster’s gift of reparative readings. The oppressed are set free by the power of imagining that something else is possible.

When fused with the Shamer’s gaze, the serpent gift promises the power of imagining a different future while simultaneously maintaining an obligation to the truth as it looks through the eyes of the Shamer. The Chronicles do not figure imagination as a solution to social problems in itself. Rather, they show reparative reading as a precondition for change while maintaining paranoid reading as a necessary condition for the reparative imagining of alternatives. Whereas Sedgwick tends to criticise paranoid readings and argues for valuing reparative readings, The Chronicles might be read as an argument for the value of paranoid readings and of the Shamer’s gaze as ‘good’ paranoia without which social responsibility is impossible. One could indeed see Kaaberbøl’s books as a reparative reading of paranoia, suggesting paranoid reading as a highly reparative undertaking.

Left behind

What The Chronicles present as their identification model for the tween reader, then, is a feminist figuration in the shape of the Shamer who stays with the uncomfortability of shame’s paranoid gaze and even insists on it as a condition for the reparative possibility of imagining otherwise. In other words, I suggest reading The Chronicles as a utopian imagining of shame as an instrument of critical killjoyism and of paranoid reading as a claim to accountability. These positive possibilities do not, however, mean that Dina’s story does not contain pitfalls. Moreover, the pitfalls it does contain seem to reflect some of the feminist and anti-racist criticisms that have confronted queer idealisations of shame. Whereas some queer affect theorists such as Sedgwick and Probyn see a political and ethical potential in shame, others such as Ahmed (2006: 175ff.) point to the potential circularity of how parts of queer theory seem to argue for a celebration of shame:

I am not sure how it is possible to embrace the negative without turning it into a positive. To say ‘yes’ to the ‘no’ is still a ‘yes’. To embrace or affirm the experience of shame, for instance, sounds very much like taking a pride in one’s shame – a conversion of bad feeling into good feeling.

Ahmed argues that the problem with the proposed ‘yes’ to shame is that this ‘yes’ presupposes the possibility of a ‘no’. However, such a ‘no’ is not necessarily available to everyone. Ahmed emphasises that shame is closely connected to specific gendered, sexualised, classed and racialised subject positions. Indeed, this is the case in some public displays of national shame that sustain racial hierarchies through the idealisations of shame as a political tool (Ahmed, 2004: 101–122). Hemmings (2005: 561) likewise highlights gender and race when she points to how social categories make some subjects already ‘so over-associated with affect that they themselves are the object of affective transfer’. Bartky (1990: 97) states that transformative experiences of shame may be salutary to a person only insofar as ‘he is not systematically impoverished by the moral economy he is compelled to inhabit’. The wish for more shame seems to entail a privileged (often masculine) subject position. As Halberstam (2005: 226) argues, ‘when men find themselves “flooded” with shame, chances are they are being feminized in some way and against their will’.

As previously explained, The Chronicles engage with this gendered problem by reworking the connection between shame and femininity. Rather than rejecting shame’s relationship to women and femininity, Kaaberbøl seeks to negotiate this affiliation, to resignify it, and to offer a different interpretation of what shame might mean. But if The Chronicles thus offer a positive revoking of gender’s relationship to shame, they do significantly less so with respect to shame’s relationship to racialisation. This seems particularly reflected in Sezuan, who The Chronicles subtly but unmistakably orientalise. Sezuan’s title of ‘Blackmaster’ both indicates a warning and hints at racial markers. Dina’s father is ornamented with unmistakable traits of old and new Western fantasies of the Oriental: his snake-charming flute and dark hair, his opium-like ‘dream powder’, the pseudo-Arabic names of him and his brothers (Azuan and Nazim), and their insistence on greater importance of ‘the family’ relative to its individual members. Dina’s mother’s fear of and continuous flight from Sezuan adds to the third book an air of Not Without my Daughter (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991, director Brian Gilbert), albeit suggesting a rather different ending that counters the portrait of the father as stereotypically evil. Although Dina’s father is thus rehabilitated, this does not mean that The Chronicles escape the trap of colonialising and othering. The books’ conflict resolution does not consist in her joining his family (as is her father’s wish). Instead, Dina’s orientalised father eventually dies, allowing Dina to return to live with her (white) village family after having absorbed her father’s exotic magic abilities.

This logic of death and survival must be seen as connected to the books’ vision of the future and how these build upon ethnic othering narratives. Sezuan becomes the bearer of a specific form of racialised shame through which hegemonic fantasies of Western modernity’s prevalence over the Orientalised other are reiterated. This happens through Dina’s journey that mimes and idealises a development from European rural premodernity (over urbanisation and industrialisation) to a rudimentary democracy as the ideal form of social order. This narrative functions as a pointer to which societies must (not) be seen as destined for the future: if the fascism of the Dragon Order is rejected as a viable future, what is left behind is the Ravens’ patriarchal order of lordship and the Oriental Blackmasters’ familial system, which functions as a matriarchal version of a patriarchy. Thus, both the Mediaeval Lordship and the Oriental Family are figured as the past while the Democratic Order and the Modern Family are constructed as destined for the future and thus for life. As an alternative to these outdated social formations, The Chronicles present the modern, democratic family as consisting of self-chosen relations (e.g. adoptions, donor children and lovers). It is tempting to see Dina’s family as reflecting a ‘homonationalist’ fantasy of Western tolerance toward new family forms and alternative masculinities/femininities as a sign of its modernity (Puar, 2007). In contrast, the death of Sezuan can be seen as a rejection of the Oriental/Arab family culture that he implicitly comes to represent. One could ask whether Sezuan must die because a new Orientalism imagines ‘the Arab family’ as synonymous with a culture of ‘shame and honour’ with which The Chronicles do not want to risk having their conceptualisation of shame associated. Instead, part of the Orient (the serpent gift) is allowed to survive through Dina’s colonialising appropriation while the Oriental himself must die.

Conclusion

My reading of The Shamer Chronicles suggests that a shame theoretical framework enables a view on Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy as a reservoir for imagining how shame, paranoid/reparative reading and the feminist killjoy may be linked. The Chronicles can be read as a meditation on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic figure who insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination. However, in its portraits of various shame cultures, the narrative tends to fall back on Orientalist imaginations that are subsequently discarded as obsolete forms of life. The gender non-stereotypical possibilities that the story offers thus seem to form a problematic alliance with the books’ Orientalist inspiration. We may conclude that idealising shame is not unproblematic – either in fantasy literature, or in queer theory. Indeed, we may, like Hemmings, consider the deep connections of shame to racist subjectification. Citing Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon, Hemmings (2005) criticises the idealisation of shame’s transformational possibilities as conditioned by the luxury of being spared everyday racist modes of shaming. This should serve as a warning against the uncritical embracing of shame whilst also pointing to the need for an understanding of shame as something that should neither be rejected, nor idealised, but instead carefully scrutinised. As such, although the image of shame in The Shamer Chronicles is not without its problems, it offers inspiration for ways of thinking about shame as a call for accountability. Kaaberbøl’s popular teenage fiction may thus serve as inspiration for how to bring one’s daughters (M/F) up to be feminist killjoys.