Shame As A Structure of Feeling: Raped and Prostituted Women In J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless

Abstract

If colonialism and apartheid shaped masculinities of past, transition to democracy in South Africa in 1990s has had effect of unsettling and unseating entrenched masculinities: masculinities which were, in main, patriarchal, authoritarian and steeped in violence.- Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, Masculinities in QuestionWhile seemingly fertile ground for negotiation of gendered, racial, and sexual politics of post-apartheid South Africa, raped and prostituted female body in South African fiction demands de-metaphorization. In her essay, Rainbow Womb, Meg Samuelson contends that the metaphorical use of women's bodies eclipse [s] and distort[s] social and political realities they inhabit (88). Samuelson's point elucidates problematic rendering of female form by South African writers as penetrable and violatable, and yet as a self-contained, abstracted symbol of national fantasy. Reduced either to abjected materialism or abstracted symbolism, women's bodies appear to function as un-integrated, de-contextualised, and convenient dumping ground for masculine anxieties and desires.Rather than reinforce notion that female form is a carrier and container of meaning, it is essential to acknowledge mode of affect - that is, - that motivates acts of violence against women in first place. Sexually independent and newly-empowered women in workplace, for instance, effectively threaten patriarchal power, resulting in feelings of on part of men followed by an attempt to recover dominance through sexual violence as well as through displacement of upon women in form of public stigmatization. An approach to raped and prostituted women, then, ought not to privilege female body as preferred site of negotiating colonial trauma, tensions of post-apartheid democratization, or destabilising of Zulu masculinities, but should examine affect of as embattled ground of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems. In J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, a system of anxious masculine desire is mobilized through feelings of disgrace - a of that carries with it notions of private (inward) shaming and public stigmatization. Similarly, in Futhi Ntshingila's Shameless, rhetoric of shame is directed toward prostituted, female body. Intriguingly, though, is not represented statically, but is enacted in both novels through its concomitant a\>owal and dism'owal. In Disgrace, Lucy Lurie (a lesbian) is gang-raped and impregnated by three violent black men and yet refuses to publically acknowledge trauma of this act - just as her father, David Lurie, publically denies effect and affect of Iiis sexual assault on one of Iiis students, Melanie Isaacs. In Shameless, protagonist Thandiwe renounces stigmatization of prostitution, arguing that to be a female labourer in any sector of society is simply to be another kind of whore (59). The disavowal of on part of female protagonists in these fictions serves to negate a reading of female body as passive receptacle of masculine fear and fantasy, and points instead to political and social pressures that are its cause. To be sure, along complicated nexus of shame, who is ashamed and who is shaming another is never an entirely divisible line.Tracing workings of as a structure of feeling underscores complexity of its distribution and circulation in both private and public spheres. For as Raymond Williams writes in Marxism and Literature, structures of are products of interrelating subjects, creating a set of specific internal relations at once interlocking and in tension (132). Williams' formulation of interlocking and dividing elements of relational subjects is remarkably compatible with an examination of operations of shame, since is at once inward (opposed to, or turned away from community) and vicarious (shared by members of community). …