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  • The Low-End Theory
  • Tavia Nyong'o, assistant professor of performance studies
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" Kathryn Bond Stockton Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xi + 271 pp.

Accounts of shame tend to fall in one of two camps, therapeutic and transfigurative. The first stresses shame's crippling effects on the subject, resonating with ego psychology and self-help culture. In this camp we might class Patrick Moore's Beyond Shame or, more interestingly, James Gilligan's Preventing Violence, which speaks of "epidemics of shame" among poor and racialized men and advocates a public health approach to male violent crime.1 Where Moore proposes an identitarian reclaiming by gay men of their stigmatized sexual history, Gilligan confronts the social unevenness of shame, considering its outbreak in violent crime not as the workings of a pathological personality but as the consequences of a society structured in dominance within which the injuries of shame unevenly fall.

Gilligan's epidemiology of shame remains therapeutic, much like early homophile groups seeking to shift conceptions of homosexuality from crime to disease. But in grasping the social construction of shame, Gilligan moves a great deal further than Moore toward the transfigurative approach developed in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Reid-Pharr, and now Kathryn Stockton.2 Transfigurative approaches suspend assumptions of shame's crippling effects and consider uses of shame that might be queer and even beautiful.

By rights this book should be reviewing me, so forcefully did its theoretical arrivals strike me as I read it. Its discourse seems to anticipate and enable my own presence as its reader, short-circuiting the evaluative mode privileged in many intellectual contexts. Such a disclaimer of critical distance is itself an academic form of debasement. It brings with it the alternative of a critical proximity, a willingness [End Page 403] to rub up against the grain of Stockton's argument. Like the best queer theory, Beautiful Bottom calls for new modes of reading that break down the distinctions of subject and object animating many identity projects. In order to reach bottom, we must descend from metaphors of vision into less dualistic metaphors of touch.

Stockton's daring placement of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin alongside Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Pulp Fiction is no pastiche. Her method allows cultural texts to steep until certain figures emerge, figures that then provide the rhetoric for her criticism. This method yields startling results in a field where the "application" of theory has become routine. Instead of applying deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or even queer theory, Stockton permits her texts to apply themselves to her, to "tuck" and "prick" her (91, 126). Wound and thorn; edge and hollow. It is characteristic of the power of Beautiful Bottom that it should employ such paradoxical yet convincing figures for relationality.

Stockton tracks "switchpoints" (32–33) between black and queer debasements, beginning with the switchpoint between clothes and skin in chapter 1, between anality and poverty in chapter 2, between cinema and anal rape in chapter 3, between corpses and hipsters in chapter 4, and between ghosts and viruses in the final chapter. Of her transfiguring of shame, Stockton writes:

I want to ask of my texts what they imagine debasement produces, at certain moments, for those people who actually undergo it, who, in a manner of speaking, practice it. How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? These kinds of questions raise the issue of value. . . . I plan to show how queer theory and black studies are together far from over their academic moments. Perhaps, especially conceived as joint ventures, they can be invigorated and redirected—if we theorize from deep within their fictions.

(24–25)

Some might read into such language mere aestheticism. I would not, insofar as I hear in her attention to production, practice, and value a materialism from which would-be political critics might learn. And Stockton's defense of a future for academic thought, black and queer, is a timely alternative to antirelational queer theory. Where some theorists' attraction to debasement leads to asociality, Stockton seeks...

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