Investigating Shame in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

Shame is one of the feelings most commonly associated with sexual assault—whether it is shame felt by those who know the survivor or the shame the survivor often feels. The #MeToo movement allowed many survivors to confront this shame and recount their experiences on social media. In the same vein, the 2017 List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA) set out to expose incidents of sexual assault within Indian academia. When the list came out, however, some discussions focused less on survivors’ experiences of shame and more on the potential shaming of the accused, leading to descriptions of the list as a “campaign to name and shame.” In this context, the word shame itself was associated with the perpetrator. This article looks at what associations of shame with sexual assault might mean in the era of social media movements and what it might mean for the word shame to be associated with perpetrators, critically or even defensively.