Feminism & Psychology

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.

In South Asia, shame is valued as a virtue and a means of social control, particularly for women. For Sri Lankan women, shame (læjja-baya) denotes modesty, purity, innocence, and self-effacement. For unmarried girls, sexual improprieties—rumoured or real—threaten loss of respectability and jeopardise a girl’s marriageability and her family’s honour. We investigated the dynamics of shame and norms of propriety in adolescent girls’ lives by re-analysing a subset of interviews of daughters and mothers (N = 24 pairs) collected in a prior study of nonfatal suicidal acts. Many such acts took place after girls were accused of violating norms of propriety. Other such acts served to ‘blame and shame’ wrongdoers. Girls and their mothers reported further that public knowledge of a suicide-like act sullied a girl’s reputation because onlookers ascribed sexualised meanings to it. We point out the incommensurability between parents’ goals and aspirations for their daughters’ educational and occupation attainments and the rigid demands for respectable comportment to which they must conform.

This paper explores how shame is constructed in working-class “coloured” men’s talk about their violence against women partners in Cape Town, South Africa. It examines how men who are violent toward their partners attempt to dissociate from their shamed identities and their perpetration of violence at the intersection of their gender, race and class identities, and how these processes allow men to produce subjectivities as “respectable coloured” men. Ten individual interviews were conducted with men who had perpetrated violence against their partner(s) residing in a predominantly working-class “coloured” community on the peripheries of Cape Town, South Africa. A Foucauldian discourse analysis tracks the complicated processes followed by men in dissociating from shamed subjectivities towards ones that encompass pride. The men talk about the battle for subjectivity in their pursuit for a “respectable”, “good” masculinity, which is commended in specific pro-feminist spaces while being reportedly questioned or denounced by their fellow community members. The article concludes by considering the usefulness of shame in this sample of South African “coloured” men, and its capacity to mobilise men towards a pro-feminist politics.

Iceland's performance on the Gender Gap Index has been outstanding in the last nine years. It now has a reputation for being one of the most gender equal countries in the world. However, local feminist activists argue that challenges to full gender equality remain. Underlying both the dominant gender equality rhetoric and feminist activism is a neoliberal, postfeminist sensibility that all are free to choose their most preferred body practices and that empowerment is a fact. There are, however, more subtle indications that young people's views of body hair practices, hinging around binaristic gender norms, are more ambivalent than that. This paper investigates how body hair practices are performed among young Icelandic people. The theoretical framework draws on feminist, poststructuralist, and affect theories. The data was collected between 2012 and 2016 and consists of semi-structured interviews with young women and men, group interviews with five young women based on co-operative inquiry, and an instrumental case study focusing on the issue of body hair practices. The analysis shows that shame and disgust remain entangled with practices around body hair among both men and women. It is gendered in that women's bodies are under more surveillance than men's. The paper concludes that, notwithstanding feminist activism and gender equality rhetoric, policing around body hair practices still exists in contemporary Icelandic society.

This paper seeks to understand the social power of maternal shame, using a framework that integrates feminist criticism of contemporary motherhood ideologies with philosophical theories that discuss shame in the broader context of visual perception. By using Lionel Shriver’s (2005) novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, the paper illustrates how shame operates in the interplay between the socio-cultural, gendered ideals of motherhood and mothers’ representations of these ideals. Specifically, the paper suggests that today’s mothers operate under a social gaze that expects them to meet the cultural and moral standards of “good” motherhood. This internalized societal judging gaze and the perception of failing to meet these standards are often the source of maternal shame. In line with philosophical accounts which focus on the primacy of vision in shame, I argue that empathy (“seeing with the eyes of the other”) is the most powerful antidote to shame. While shame is induced by a judging gaze, empathy develops through connected gazes, each acknowledging the other’s subjectivity. Locating shame within a socio-cultural context can provide invaluable insights for psychological research and practice that pay critical attention to positionality, reflexivity, and the power relationships inherent in contemporary motherhood.

This article discusses the formation of shame in a group of white heterosexual British women originally from middle-class backgrounds. Narrative interviews convey how participants perceive their lives to have been “spoiled” and stigmatised through becoming single mothers. They articulate perceptions of how their lives have fallen short of idealised heteronormative, middle-class trajectories of neoliberal success and adopt a range of narrative strategies to counter this, informed by the politics of shame in relation to single motherhood in contemporary Britain.

The productivity of shame as an affective-discursive practice implicated in the neoliberal governance of “healthy pregnancy” is examined in the narratives of 27 ethnically diverse, cis-gendered, self-identified fat pregnant people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Shame is identified as a dominant affective-discursive practice produced in response to the problematising medical discourses surrounding the fat pregnant body, leading to the constitution of shamed maternal subjectivities. Seeking reparation in order to restore their maternal identities, participants adopted a range of self-governance strategies. However, fat shaming, while productive in constituting self-governed maternal subjects, was not constructive. We demonstrate how shame induced self-governed action, rather than improving maternal and infant health, instead led to a range of unhealthful behaviours and negatively impacted how participants experienced their pregnancies, emerging maternal selves, and newly born children. We call for attention to affect in feminist governmentality studies of reproduction and fatness.

As an academic with a chronic illness, it has taken me a while to understand shame’s impact on my academic identity and choices. In this article, through a process of narrative recuperation, I consider the challenges and contradictions of living as an academic with chronic kidney disease, an incurable and often debilitating illness that, for the most part, is invisible to others. By means of evocative autoethnography, I trace the trajectory of silencing shame I experienced around my condition in academia and I show how and why this changed over a number of years. My aim in doing this is to uncover subjugated knowledge of what it takes to live as a chronically ill academic and to be an advocate for other academics living with chronic illness. I theorise my study using Garland-Thomson, Shildrick and Leder, all of whom have worked with the othering effect of shame on the nonconforming body. These theorists have described ways of resisting shame and, partly thanks to them, I was able to find ways of fighting back and recovering. My intention in sharing these illness narratives is to speak back to a dominant discourse that favours invulnerability and a masculinised, disembodied way of being academic.

The role of shame in feminist activism has been debated lately, where scholars particularly have discussed whether shame could enable individuals with privileged positions, such as heterosexual men, to align with vulnerable groups or prevent them from political action. Drawing on written stories submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign, this paper explores young men's shame of having been sexist or sexually violent. Through displaying shame, they distance themselves from problematic past violent or sexist actions, producing or reconstructing a respectable masculine subjectivity. In their narratives, the young men at times embrace and adopt a “chafing masculinity”, that is, an uncomfortable and troubling heteromasculine position. Drawing on these narratives, the paper discusses how shame – by exposing heterosexual men's uncontrolled discomfort and helping men to unlearn privilege – may be a politically progressive emotion and contribute to pro-feminist politics.

Feminist theorizations have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that shame operates not only as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion but also as a primary affect of intersubjective life. This paper argues that this theorization can be enriched by putting into conversation Agamben’s and Deleuze’s interactions with Primo Levi on shame as an ambivalent affect. What is shameful, for both Deleuze and Agamben, is not simply the sense of being judged by others as unworthy, unwanted, or wrong, but rather the awareness of one’s complicity in Others’ suffering. This essay explores the pedagogical openings of shame as the inability of the self to respond to Others’ suffering. The paper concludes by suggesting that certain experiences of shame can be transformative in that they create pedagogical possibilities that could subvert negative referents of shame. What the author terms critical pedagogies of shame pay explicit attention to the affective complexities of the narratives of oppression and suffering that enter the classroom and interrogate in particular the trappings of normative narratives of shame.

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.