Shame Narratives Research Articles

Unravelling military aggression: Ontological insecurity, great power narcissism, and Japan’s international relations, 1868–1971

Abstract This article examines the extent to which or how self-identified great powers resort to military aggression following events that challenge their sense of greatness. It problematises the prevalent notion that great powers and events exist and have effects independently of the narratives that constitute them. The article does this by engaging with Ontological Security Studies, Great Power Narcissism, and the psychology of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, as well as by analysing Japanese identity narratives in two periods seemingly marked by equally challenging events – the Meiji era (1868–1912) and the post-war period (1950–71). It finds that Japan’s military aggression against China in 1894–5 was enabled by vulnerable narratives of shame and insult, while the decision to wage war with Russia a decade later was facilitated more by grandiose narratives. Despite Japan’s overwhelming defeat in the Second World War and the persistent desire among conservative elites for great power status and identity, however, overall post-war narratives did not feature similarly negative emotions and calls for revenge. Japanese great power aspirations were arguably curtailed in this period through intense narrative contestation, notably progressive counter-narratives featuring more self-reflective expressions of guilt and remorse, and even the self-reflexive desire for a non-great power identity.

Ecofeminism and menstruation: menstrual practices with reusable menstrual products among Israeli women

Menstruators perceive and experience their menstruation in diverse ways, influencing their choice of menstrual products and impacting both body literacy and the environment. This article investigates Israeli menstruators who use reusable menstrual products (RMPs), a practice viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, within the context of menstrual concealment culture and its role in perpetuating oppression. This article's objective is to reveal the extent of this ecofeminist practice and to understand the motivations and choices behind it as well as the meaning of menstruation for Israeli RMP users. An analysis of forty semi-structured interviews revealed that the participants exercise cognitive, emotional and sociocultural agency. Environmental and physical factors strongly motivated participants to use RMPs, producing predominantly positive experiences. The use of RMPs promotes novel perceptions and management strategies for menstruation, facilitating acceptance of menstrual blood and challenging prevalent narratives of shame and pollution. Finally, many participants expressed a desire to engage in legitimised conversations about menstruation and to resist the dominant discourse. This highlights the transformative potential of the ecofeminist practice of using RMPs, which can disrupt capitalist-consumer culture, challenge menstrual stigma and foster sustainable alternatives. The present study promotes knowledge and equality in education about menstrual management, concealment, products, stigma and environmental factors.

“In the Wardrobe of Her Royal Daintiness”: A Historical Analysis of Menstrual Product Advertisements From the 1920s to the 2020s

“In the Wardrobe of Her Royal Daintiness”: A Historical Analysis of Menstrual Product Advertisements From the 1920s to the 2020s

Dolly Parton’s Mythologised Persona, Collective Life Writing, and Building a Home for LGBTQ+ Listeners in Country Music

This article conceptualises persona and life writing as being collectively constituted to explore multiplicity in the way country artist Dolly Parton’s persona can be constructed by LGBTQ+ audiences. I use the idea of mythmaking, where myths are neither true nor false, to explore how Parton’s persona and life writing challenge dominant narratives and assumptions around LGBTQ+ belonging in country music, a genre that is increasingly being re-evaluated in terms of its LGBTQ+ representation and queer resonances. Parton’s persona is deeply invested in her constructed life story that represents a collective mythology around the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, Appalachia, and country music. This paper uses close readings of Parton’s songs ‘Coat of Many Colors’ and ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’ to explore how these texts enable LGBTQ+ listeners to anchor themselves within the life-writing practices of her country music and Appalachia. ‘Coat of Many Colors’ uses an episode from Parton’s life story to work through class and regional representations that also have the potential to resonate with LGBTQ+ experiences through the renegotiation of narratives of shame that become reworked into pride and acceptance. My reading of ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’ expands on this using the idea of home and the affective role this has within queer narratives to explore how Parton situates LGBTQ+ experiences within the genre of country music. The final part of this article considers the importance of anti-racism and intersectional critiques of overly romanticised narratives around Parton to ensure multiplicity when conceptualising the role of persona in Parton’s work.

Airing Egypt’s Dirty Laundry: BuSSy’s Storytelling as Feminist Social Change

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.

A Place to Finally Rest: Reading National Shame in Spanish Crisis Cinema

ABSTRACT This article argues that economic crisis and austerity ruptured how many young Spaniards understand their place in the world by disrupting their sense of what makes home home. It analyses two Spanish films in the emergent subgenre of crisis cinema, Techo y comida (2015) and Hermosa juventud (2014) and argues that crisis cinema not only viscerally depicts the Spanish economic crisis as a failure of late capitalism, but it also challenges us to think about what Spanish pop star Marta Sanchez called “a place to finally rest” may mean during times of economic crisis. The article argues that both films articulate narratives of shame that can be read on a national and individual level, suggesting that the emotional resonance of shame is a potent emotion that weakens the individual connection with the nation-state during times of economic crisis.

Shaming interrogatives: Admonishments, the social psychology of emotion, and discursive practices of behaviour modification in family mealtimes.

This paper contributes to the study of admonishments, the operation of shaming in family interaction, and more broadly presses the virtue of a discursive psychological reconsideration of the social psychology of emotion. It examines the methodological basis of contemporary research on shame in experimental and qualitative social psychology, illustrated through the Test of Self‐Conscious Affect (TOSCA) and qualitative work using shame narratives. Doubts are raised about how these methods can throw light on shaming practices in natural situations. The study uses a collection of video recordings of family mealtimes, focusing on admonishment sequences in which parents address the interrogatives ‘what are you doing’ or ‘what did I say’ to a ‘misbehaving’ child. Despite the interrogative syntax, rather than soliciting information we show that these interrogative forms pursue behaviour change by publicly highlighting both the problem behaviour and the child’s active and intentional production of that behaviour. This is the sense in which the practice can be understood as shaming. Although this practice prosecutes shaming, ways in which the children can ignore, push back, or rework parents’ actions are highlighted. This study contributes to a broader consideration of how enduring behavioural change can be approached as a parents’ project.

“Shame at being human” as a transformative political concept and praxis: Pedagogical possibilities

Feminist theorizations have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that shame operates not only as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion but also as a primary affect of intersubjective life. This paper argues that this theorization can be enriched by putting into conversation Agamben’s and Deleuze’s interactions with Primo Levi on shame as an ambivalent affect. What is shameful, for both Deleuze and Agamben, is not simply the sense of being judged by others as unworthy, unwanted, or wrong, but rather the awareness of one’s complicity in Others’ suffering. This essay explores the pedagogical openings of shame as the inability of the self to respond to Others’ suffering. The paper concludes by suggesting that certain experiences of shame can be transformative in that they create pedagogical possibilities that could subvert negative referents of shame. What the author terms critical pedagogies of shame pay explicit attention to the affective complexities of the narratives of oppression and suffering that enter the classroom and interrogate in particular the trappings of normative narratives of shame.

Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education

ABSTRACTWithin the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.

From Shame to Shaming: towards an Analysis of Shame Narratives

Abstract This paper examines shame in three narratives involving the social self and the evaluative perception of that self. The semiotic square is used for analysing some of the conceptualizations of shame and highlighting the structural relations of the shame phenomenon in narrative. The stance of this paper is that shame is a moral emotion which results from two main evaluative perceptions, involving moral sentiment and social reputation. In support of this claim, different aspects of shame are analysed in three types of narratives from different socio-cultural contexts.

Experiencing Shame

Shame is a painful self-conscious emotion that is closely associated with psychological distress. This article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the spontaneous shame narratives of 40 young adults (mean age = 25.2). The main themes that were identified in the participants’ shame narratives are explored and described, and the authors also explore the connection between feeling shame and having a traumatic experience.

Fat in Contemporary Autobiographical Writing and Publishing

Fat in Contemporary Autobiographical Writing and Publishing

‘They’re Gonna Think it Now’: Narratives of Shame in the Sexual Health Experiences of Young People

This article explores how shame operated for a group of young females who accessed emergency contraception (EC) following either contraceptive failure or unprotected sex. Accessing EC invoked anticipated judgements and feelings of shame that made them feel out of place – even in youth friendly environments, and this compelled many of them to avoid seeking much needed support. The article explores this issue, highlighting how the complex relationships that young people have with adults around them is often overlooked, and particularly the idea that they may be ‘shamers’ who unwitting evoke feelings of shame, troubling the notion that it is poor relationships that drive young people to avoid communicating with parents about sexual health matters. This has implications for healthcare practice, not least because current approaches suggest that the involvement of parents and the development of a better rapport with service providers may be the key to reducing teenage pregnancy rates.

Too Ashamed to Report: Deconstructing the Shame of Sexual Victimization

This article deconstructs the shame of sexual victimization by highlighting shame as a culturally mediated response triggered by threats to victims’ gendered selves. An exploration of victims’ narratives from the National Crime Victimization Survey reveals that 13% of respondents who experience rape or sexual assault express shame (i.e., self-blame, humiliation, or fear of public scrutiny) in their narratives. Looking separately at women’s and men’s shame narratives, the study delineates the cultural ideologies regarding gender and sexuality that contribute to victims’ definitions of their situations as shameful, and ultimately, to their reluctance to report incidents to the police.

Literacy, speech and shame: the cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil

This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24‐month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the article asks: What is accomplished through the micropolitics of shaming? What can it teach us about theories of literacy, language and power more broadly? The article shows how speech shaming in Brazil contributed to the cultural production of inequality by individualizing, psychologizing and embodying responsibility or blame for illiteracy. It argues that sociocultural theories of literacy, language and power need to account for the influence of emotions in communicative interactions.

Shakespeare's Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture

Introduction - This island is mine successors to his name - Shakespearean family romances wise children and foolish fathers - carnival in the family rewriting the narratives of shame - women's transformations in The Tempest Strange worship - Oscar Wilde and the key to Shekespearean sonnets The past is our mirror - Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jarman.