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.
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 (Citation1981) 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