American Shame

Description

On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America's discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors.

Introduction: American Shame and the Boundaries of Belonging / Myra Mendible
Part 1: Scarlet Letters: Gender, Race, and Stigma
1. Shame Before the Law: Affects of Abortion Regulation / Karen Weingarten
2. Sex, Shame, and the Single Life: Bond and the "Black Shirley Temple" / Daniel McNeil
3. Neoliberal Crimmigration: The "Common Sense" Shaming of the Undocumented / Leah Perry
4. The Look of Sovereignty: Style, Shame, and Politics in the Young Lords / Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Part 2: Disciplining the Body Politic: Domestic and Foreign Policy
5. Suicide as an Invocation of Shame in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist / Renee Lee Gardner
6. Fat, Shame, and the Disciplining Practices of Health Expertise / Meghan Griffin
7. Citizenship at Odds: Disability, Liberalism and the Shame of Interdependence / Noel Glover
Part 3: Bodies on Display: Performing Shame in Visual Arts
8. Shame and Shitting: Postfeminist Episodes in Contemporary Hollywood Films / Madeline Walker
9. Distancing Maneuvers: Collective Shame in Iraq War Films / Mike Rancourt
10. Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill, Shame, and the Rise of the "Slasher" Trope in Halloween / Anthony Carlton Cooke
11. Shaming and Reclaiming Women's Sexuality through Cinematic Depictions of Masturbation / Megan Tagle Adams
12. Dieting for the Sake of Art: Eleanor Antin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Ringgold / Emily Newman
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Abortion
• Shame
• United States
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019868
• Langue: English

Extrait

AMERICAN
SHAME
AMERICAN
SHAME
STIGMA AND THE BODY POLITIC
EDITED BY
MYRA MENDIBLE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01979-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01982-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01986-8 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To Ernesto, for always believing in me .
And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: American Shame and the Boundaries of Belonging Myra Mendible
PART 1 Scarlet Letters: Gender, Race, and Stigma
1. Shame before the Law: Affects of Abortion Regulation Karen Weingarten
2. Sex, Shame, and the Single Life: Bond and the Black Shirley Temple Daniel McNeil
3. Neoliberal Crimmigration: The Commonsense Shaming of the Undocumented Leah Perry
4. The Look of Sovereignty: Style and Politics in the Young Lords Frances Negr n-Muntaner
PART 2 Disciplining the Body Politic: Domestic and Foreign Policy
5. Suicide as an Invocation of Shame in Mohsin Hamid s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Renee Lee Gardner
6. Fat, Shame, and the Disciplining Practices of Health Expertise Meghan Griffin
7. Citizenship at Odds: Disability, Liberalism, and the Shame of Interdependence Noel Glover
PART 3 Bodies on Display: Performing Shame in Visual Arts
8. Shame and Shitting: Postfeminist Episodes in Contemporary Hollywood Films Madeline Walker
9. Distancing Maneuvers: Collective Shame in Iraq War Films Michael Rancourt
10. Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill, Shame, and the Rise of the Slasher Trope in Halloween Anthony Carlton Cooke
11. Shaming and Reclaiming Women s Sexuality through Cinematic Depictions of Masturbation Megan Tagle Adams
12. Dieting for the Sake of Art: Eleanor Antin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Ringgold Emily L. Newman
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a debt of gratitude to Evelin Gerda Lindner for her tireless efforts on behalf of human dignity. A public intellectual, global citizen, and genuinely kind human being, Lindner s fieldwork and writing have produced remarkable insights, given rise to related efforts among a community of activists and scholars around the world, and inspired a journey that led to this book. I also wish to acknowledge my friend and colleague, Delphine Gras, for her encouragement, feedback, and generosity of spirit. Thank you.
AMERICAN
SHAME
INTRODUCTION
American Shame and the Boundaries of Belonging
Myra Mendible
Shame as Spectacle: Bodies That Matter
The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.
-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle 1
On any given day in America s twenty-four-hour news cycle, shame is a hot commodity. Stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Nothing fosters the illusion of solidarity like shared condemnation: joining the chorus of outrage that follows the exposure of the rich and famous, we play out a fantasy of community that otherwise eludes us. Here is the stuff of cultural belonging today-a bonding ritual that fills in for the spectacles that once were town square stocks and pillories. Righteous rants about the latest breach in conduct circulate via chat rooms, blogs, and social media; civic interactivity plays out in tweets, hashtags, and posts. Duly disciplined, the exposed offender, egotist, or fool bolsters our faith in the notion that, in America, personal responsibility accounts for failures and everyone-even the rich and famous-get what they deserve.
But of course this is a comforting fiction. We watch as the disgraced politician goes on to profit from memoirs and reality show appearances; the chastened celebrity is rehabilitated and rebranded. Whereas the experience of shame prompts a desire to hide and conceal, shame spectacles generate publicity, increasing marketability and trending stats. They garner photo-ops, TV appearances, feature stories, press releases, and-most enthralling-staged mea culpas. As spectators, we play our part in these charades, expressing our outrage in shrill tirades, all Sturm und Drang and grand gestures. Commodified and converted into spectacle, shame is more entertaining than disciplinary, more akin to a system of sociality than morality. It produces tabloid fodder for mass consumption-a carnival of moral outrage that channels a people s discontent but ultimately deflects attention from the embodied conditions where shame does its work. Instead, we are induced to speak of shame as an absence, to behold it in its undoing. Performing a trifling dance in public, shame becomes form emptied of content, a kind of holographic image projected on bodies that matter enough to be singled out for media attention.
We are so acculturated to shame as spectacle that its power is often overshadowed by its trivialization. In the logic of abstract exchange that dominates market cultures, spectacle reflects the commodity s complete colonization of social life. 2 Commodification transfers the intersubjective nature of the shame dynamic into the realm of pseudo-events in which social relations are enacted via images rather than persons. After all, most of us have no actual relationship with the celebrities and power brokers whom we excoriate with glee; we relate to them as we do to familiar product brands-to their function as mediating frames rather than individuals. 3 They are known to us not for what they are but for what they have (money, power, fame). In a society of spectacle, an event or person becomes meaningful only when it appears as image. Guy Debord theorizes spectacle as a tool of pacification that distracts and stupefies social subjects, but new technologies such as online chat rooms, call-in radio, and social media add a more interactive dimension. Although this facilitates an active role for the subject, it also signals the subject s eclipse and the growing power of the object. 4 Relevant here is how these interactions deflect attention from the self and toward its objects: shame in this context has nothing to do with our own behaviors or flaws. It remains safely detached-a story we tell about them .
As I write this, the internet is alight with another celebrity shame spectacle-the so-called slut shaming prompted by Miley Cyrus s lewd onstage twerking at the MTV 2013 Music Video Awards. Moral indignation at Miley s behavior is the flavor of the month: Shame on you, Miley videos have popped up on YouTube, the online magazine Celebuzz has declared it the twerk heard round the world, and there have been numerous complaints to the FCC (which does not have the authority to sanction cable networks). Twitter has announced that Miley s performance set a record on the social networking site, garnering 306,100 tweets per minute. 5 The online tirades have spilled into newspaper editorials and television news shows. On MSNBC s Morning Joe , Mika Brzezinski expressed indignation at Miley s really, really disturbing performance, which she called disgusting and embarrassing. She suggested that Miley s behavior shows that the twenty-year-old diva is obviously deeply troubled, deeply disturbed and probably has an eating disorder. Moral outrage then turned to concern: She is a mess. Someone needs to take care of her, Brzezinski opined. The furor has gone on to produce more spectacular pseudo-events for our consumption, as other celebrities and even politicians have weighed in on the Miley affair. An infusion of race and politics has intensified the fury, with several commentators outraged by the image of the White former Disney star twerking with an all-Black cast of dancers. The popular blog Defend the Modern World posted a commentary on June 21, 2013, decrying Miley s behavior as a badge of shame for American Caucasians and a victory for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians who were presumably delighted, triumphant even at the decline of White society. Politico s Keith Koffler opined that Miley s performance heralded our culture s destruction, an imminent collapse he attributes to President Obama for abetting our moral disintegration. 6
Shame as commodity spectacle is most productive (and profitable) when projected on media-worthy objects, on bodies that matter enough to merit attention. In an American society where the success ethic predominates, achievement measures our intrinsic worth. 7 Being famous or powerful imbues certain bodies with intrinsic worth that makes them worthy of recognition, rehabilitation, or concern. Their shame matters. Marveling at the viral nature of moral indignat