In the midst of the World Trade Center criminal acts, I was riveted to Sedgwick's conceptions of shame.  A shame-prone person, I think I am.  Shy, yes. Sometimes can't seem to figure out a way to eye contact. And currently overwhelmed by the stories of people holding up descriptions of their loved ones, murdered at the WTC and now the mourning.  And terribly scared about attacks against people of middle-eastern descent.  I am filled with the emotions, share, recognize the issues, worry over their dreams at night, their waking in this world.  The issues of horror, of trauma.  What would it mean to recognize amongst ourselves, a collective of people who identify as shame-prone?  How might we approach social justice concerns, if first we figured out our individual and collective responses to (and of) shame. 

"But in interrupting identification, shame, too, makes identity. In fact shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational, because shame is both peculiarly contagious and peculiarly individuating. One of the strangest features of shame--but perhaps also the one that offers the most conceptual leverage for projects like ours--is the way bad treatment of someone else, bad treatment by someone else, someone else's embarrassment, stigma, debility, bad smell, or strange behavior, seemingly having nothing to do with me, can so readily flood me--assuming I'm a shame-prone person--with this sensation whose very suffusiveness seems to delineate my precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way imaginable."  (on-line text)
 

I have clasped on to this issue of shame because the notion allows me access to hope, to what other people might define as redemption, transformation.  Because I recognize her way of marking queer, where she theorizes its energy, I figure there has to be some way to that familiar in the horrors that overwhelm.  To gaze into the horror of the abject, to resolutely decide to challenge that abject horror, precisely at the gaps that it marks, to gather a strength.  That seems essential to me.  Somehow a way through horror.  but first the complications of identifying the horror.  Reconstructing narrative, shaping a story that gathers one, that, I often think, is the work of therapy.  But in this case, I think that it's collective work.  Truth, reconciliation, yes.  a commission of sorts.  But with an aggressive agenda, to take the horrific, to acknowledge the scenes of shame, and from those draw a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy.  "conceptual leverage."

"the main reason why the self-application of "queer" by activists has proven so volatile is that there's no way that any amount of affirmative reclamation is going to succeed in detaching the word from its associations with shame and with the terrifying powerlessness of gender-dissonant or otherwise stigmatized childhood. If queer is a politically potent term, which it is, that's because, far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy. There's a strong sense, I think, in which the subtitle of any truly queer (perhaps as opposed to gay?) politics will be the same as the one Erving Goffman gave to his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.(12) But more than its management: its experimental, creative,performative force."  (Sedgwick on-line)

"The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy" (Tomkins qtd in Sedgwick's On-line text).   The disruption of relation, the ways in which one might have anticipated always having, always participating in a sort of delightful joy/interest. 
disruption of relation, of connection, 
and shame a sort of self protection,
reducing "further exploration or self-exposure" by the physical markings of shame, "the lowering of the heads and eyes."  god.
 

"Like disgust, [shame] operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated, and inhibits one or the other or both. The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy. Hence any barrier to further exploration which partially reduces interest . . . will activate the lowering of the head and  eyes in shame and reduce further exploration or self-exposure. . . . Such a barrier might be because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger."  (qtd in Sedgwick's on-line text)

 Are there people who find shame a defining
 self-characteristic?  Do they know how to transform that
 emotion, the frustrations of disruption of interest.  How related
 is shame to one's sense of curiosity,or to the entitlement
 necessary to remain curious?  What is shame's role in
 literacy?  In activations, in revelations of one's difference. 

 "Everyone knows that there are some lesbians and gay men
 who could never count as queer, and other people who vibrate
 to the chord of queer without having much same-sex eroticism,
 or without routing their same-sex eroticism through the identity
 labels lesbian or gay. Yet many of the performative identity
 vernaculars that seem most recognizably "flushed" (to use
 James's word) with shame-consciousness and
 shame-creativity do cluster intimately around lesbian and gay
 worldly spaces" (Sedgwick on-line)

 Is it possible that a primer on queer issues--for those of us in
 computers and writing, might have to first start by suggesting
 that there are plenty of queers amongst us, though they are
 not recognized by the labels the dominant culture attaches. 
 Of course.  The recognition of kindred companions, for me, if
 often outside the gaze of traditional categories.  The
 vulnerability, the open assessment/awareness of shame, or
 the wicked wicked playfulness of those who recognize the
 shame, draw on its force, and insist on relation, despite the
 dangers, despite the knowing assessment of vulnerability by
 others.  I sometimes wonder if social justice advocates start
 here.  Perhaps.  Certainly the ones I recognize share these
 features. 
 
 

return to invitation  |  return home

" if the structuration of shame differs strongly between cultures, between periods, and between different forms of politics, however, it differs also simply from one person to another within a given culture and time. Some of the infants, children, and adults in whom shame remains the most available mediator of identity are the ones called (a related word) shy. ("Remember the fifties?" Lily Tomlin asks. "No one was gay in the fifties; they were just shy.") Queer, I'd suggest, might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to this group or an overlapping group of infants and children, those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame. What it is about them (or us) that makes this true remains to be specified. I mean that in the sense that I can't tell you now what it is--it certainly isn't a single thing--but also in the sense that, for them, it remains to be specified, is always belated: the shame-delineated place of identity doesn't determine the consistency or meaning that identity, and race, gender, class, sexuality, appearance and abledness are only a few of the defining social constructions that will crystallize there, developing from this originary affect their particular structures of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle. I'd venture that queerness in this sense has, at this historical moment, some definitionally very significant overlap--though a vibrantly elastic and temporally convoluted one--with the complex of attributes today condensed as adult or adolescent "gayness." Everyone knows that there are some lesbians and gay men who could never count as queer, and other people who vibrate to the chord of queer without having much same-sex eroticism, or without routing their same-sex eroticism through the identity labels lesbian or gay. Yet many of the performative identity vernaculars that seem most recognizably "flushed" (to use James's word) with shame-consciousness and shame-creativity do cluster intimately around lesbian and gay worldly spaces: to name only a few, butch abjection, femmitude, leather, pride, SM, drag, musicality, fisting, attitude, zines, histrionicism, asceticism, Snap! culture, diva worship, florid religiosity, in a word, flaming . ." (Sedgwick's on-line text).