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Edited byErica Johnson and Patricia Moran Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2013, 280 pp., $26 paper, ISBN-13: 978-0253008633
As academic interest in the study of affect has flourished in recent decades, feminist inquiry on the psychology of shame generates particular anxiety. Unlike guilt, sadness, and many other emotions that find a dignified place in the emotional grammar of liberation, the experience of shame seems to mark the sufferer in a distinctive way. From a classical psychoanalytic perspective, shame is viewed as less developmentally advanced than guilt, more characteristic of the moral responses of young children and domesticated animals (since you can make dogs feel ashamed, but you can’t make them feel guilty). Thus the coupling of shame and femininity risks reproducing the very hierarchal dualisms feminists seek to transcend.
The Female Face of Shame (2013), edited by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran, enters into this tricky terrain by widening the interpretive lens – both politically and psychologically. If shame is a suffocating emotion, the contributors seek relief by expanding the breathing space. The book works with the idea that shame is a complex and politically contextual emotion, productive of both debilitating and transformative effects. Further, they show how this emotion, most specifically, carries a long history of affective currency among oppressed people. In a range of works from anti-colonial and abolitionist texts through contemporary political novels, writers concerned with subjugated lives – whether oppressed through race, gender, sexuality, class, or physical ability – have produced a rich literature on the phenomenology and politics of shame. In capturing many of the insights of this literary legacy,