Departing shame: Feinberg and queer/transgender counter-cultural remembering

Abstract

This article seeks to engage Rosi Braidotti's work on memory and Elspeth Probyn's on shame to analyse the novel Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. Probyn asserts that shame is a site of desire for connection and not solely humiliation. That queer and transgender expressions have been shamed then plays a role in how such communities are established. Braidotti analyses constructions of ‘history’ that privilege dominant subject positions (e.g. white, normatively gendered men). As a result mainstream history, or ‘memory’, is denied to those outside such privilege. Feinberg's novel serves as an alternate history for those with shamed genders/sexualities.