Documentary’s ethics of fremdschämen: neurodiversity, vicarious embarrassment and a subject’s right to agency

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses the German idiom fremdschämen to discuss some of the ethical dilemmas posed by the representation of sexuality and mental disability in documentary. Fremdschämen roughly translates as vicarious embarrassment. It suggests that one can feel embarrassed on behalf of somebody else who seems oblivious to the cause of embarrassment. Does the representation of sexual desire in neurologically diverse people evoke such feelings? And if so, can fremdschämen reveal our own complicity with normative assumptions about neurologically diverse subjects? The article uses Sickles and Santini’s 2017 documentary Dina as a case study to examine these questions. Dina’s protagonist is a neurologically diverse woman who speaks openly about her sexuality and her desires, thus evoking and at the same time challenging normative cultural expectations. The article turns to the film to discuss the relationship between these expectations and the ethics of representing subjects like Dina. It revisits commonly held beliefs about responsibility in documentary filmmaking and reveals a potential conflict between protecting vulnerable subjects and acknowledging and respecting their agency. By introducing the concept of fremdschämen to the discussion of documentary ethics, it asks us to consider not the documentary subject’s ability to conform but our difficulty in accepting non-conformity.