This article both defines and shows the limits of settler shame for achieving decolonialized justice. It discusses the work settler shame does in “healing” the nation and delivering Canadians into a new sense of pride, thus maintaining the myth of the peacekeeping Canadian. This kind of shame does so, somewhat paradoxically, by making people feel good about feeling bad. Thus, the contiguous relationship of shame and recognition in a settler colonial context produces a form of pernicious self-recognition. Drawing on the (...) work of Sara Ahmed and Glen Coulthard, this article shows that a politics of recognition informed by settler shame has done little to actually see or hear Indigenous peoples on their own terms. Since settler shame is a self-directed emotion that seeks to be discharged through reconciliatory processes that are dependent on liberal recognition, it remains a mere optics of justice wedded to settler ignorance. The dependence on insufficient recognition renders the reconciliatory drive in Canada similarly insufficient, even harmful. Settler shame, then, is dangerous in relationship with recognition and reconciliation in Canada today, maintains settler colonialism, and forestalls Indigenous futurity and resurgence. (shrink)

In 2018, Irish citizens voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution to allow for the introduction of a more liberal abortion law. In this article, I develop a retrospective reading of the stubborn persistence of the denial of reproductive rights to women in Ireland over the decades. I argue that the ban’s severity and longevity is rooted in deep-seated, affective attachments that formed part of processes of postcolonial nation-building and relied on shame and the construction of the (...) Irish nation as a particular, gendered place. The article develops the notion of ‘gendered displacement’ to conceptualise abortion travel in the context of the history of women’s coercive confinement, and provides an affective, feminist reading of the interlinkages between place and nationhood. It also draws on three cases—the X, Y and Z cases—to illustrate the centrality of place and women’s occupation of space to the analysis of Ireland’s abortion ban, which should be read in the wider context of the legacy of what I term the ‘affective politics of place’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper examines the role of shame as a motivator to engage in social struggles. The author first introduces a distinction between social and moral shame arguing that, while the former can lead to a passive submission to injustice, the latter usually works as a motivating force to resist it. He subsequently discusses three cases of injustice, in which the subject is respectively the victim, the actor, and the witness. The main thesis of the paper is that in all (...) three cases the subject may feel moral shame for tolerating injustice and therefore be motivated to resist it. The conditions under which moral shame arises are discussed, while the absence of moral shame is attributed, through reference to clinical studies, to psychic defence mechanisms, such as negation and rationalisation, which allow the subject to tolerate injustice when it would be too costly to fight it. Throughout the paper, the author engages in a discussion of Honneth’s theory of social struggles, reassessing the role of recognition within the moral grammar of social struggles while attributing the due importance to the desire to live up to one’s self-ideal. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine alternative feminist activism and social movements in Egypt by analyzing BuSSy. BuSSy is a performance art group that hosts storytelling workshops and monologues of taboo and “shameful” personal stories that challenge societal and state-sanctioned normative discourses on femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood. Drawing on transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory and using collective memory as a lens, I argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry, queering normative discourses to enable feminist counter-memorializing. Based (...) on content analysis of secondary data including BuSSy’s published interviews, YouTube videos, website and Facebook images, and testimonies from 2006 to 2020, my analysis reveals BuSSy as curating an “archive of feelings” centralizing gendered narratives of shame. I examine how BuSSy’s affectively contagious storytelling leads to feminist social change by empowering storytellers and listeners. BuSSy’s works create cathartic experiences to shed stigma and shame. Finally, I reconceptualize feminist activism and collective memories outside of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and contribute to the literature on shame by analyzing how BuSSy identifies and counters shame’s silencing power. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that shaming interventions and messages during Covid-19 have drawn the relationship between public health and shame into a heightened state of contention, offering us a valuable opportunity to reconsider shame as a desired outcome of public health work, and to push back against the logics of individual responsibility and blame for illness and disease on which it sits. We begin by defining shame and demonstrating how it is conceptually and practically distinct from stigma. We then (...) set out evidence on the consequences of shame for social and relational health outcomes and assess the past and present dimensions of shame in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, primarily through a corpus of international news stories on the shaming of people perceived to have transgressed public health directions or advice. Following a brief note on shame (and policymaking) in a cultural context, we turn to the concept and practice of ‘shame-sensitivity’ in order to theorise a set of practical and adaptable principles that could be used to assist policymakers in short- and medium-term decision-making on urgent, tenacious, and emerging issues within public health. Finally, we consider the longer consequences of pandemic shame, making a wider case for the acknowledgement of the emotion as a key determinant of health. (shrink)