Shameful selves: Women's feelings of inadequacy and constructed façades

Abstract

This paper explores women's experiences of shame as a political, existential and psychological emotional state. In particular, it focuses on women's accounts of the specific shameful experiences containing the employment of a ‘façade’ to protect the ‘true’ self constructed as inadequate and shameful. The key argument in this paper is that women's shame should be understood as discursively, politically and psychodynamically over-determined. It therefore presents a reading of women's shame that brings together Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and positioning in discourse, with a psychodynamic theorization of shame as resulting from a constant negotiation between external forces and internal agencies. The paper also argues for the necessity of a multiplicity of readings to make adequate sense of such over-determination.

Keywords:

• Shame
• women's oppression
• feminist theorizing and research
• discourse analysis
• psychoanalysis
• façade
• self
• psychodynamics
• discursive psychology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the Writing Group – Rose Campdevila, Ros Gill, Lesley Hoggart, Ann Phoenix, Ros Johnson and Stephen Frosh for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

Notes

[1] Title borrowed from Wumser's (1981) work.

[2] B stands for Bruna, the author of this paper, who conducted the interviews.

[3] What has been left out here is a list of illnesses and social disabilities attributed to inadequacy