Sublime Shame

The spate of recent books in GLBTIQ studies on the topic of shame makes it seem as if gay pride and its marches are definitely a phenomenon of the past, something almost to be embarrassed about, whether one was on display oneself or watched and cheered on the sidelines. The parade of dykes on bikes, scantily clad men, leather daddies, and ranks of women in lavender might even provoke scorn from a cool queer youth today, especially because everyone, despite all the garishness, was neatly classified into groups. Although “pride” might seem démodé today, an embarrassing product of an exuberant time, it was tacitly about embracing one’s shame or, expressed otherwise, flaunting one’s difference, though it is only in the last few years that shame itself has become the object of fascination for academics, very much in the wake of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s rediscovery of the work of Silvan Tomkins. “Pride,” by contrast, has hardly made inroads into current scholarly discourse. In fact, in her cover endorsement for Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, Valerie Traub praises Sally R. Munt for showing “what’s at stake in moving beyond gay pride.” Such is the long march to institutionalized queer academic publishing!

Tomkins is a crucial voice in this turnaround, and the studies by Elspeth Probyn and Munt are particularly indebted to him. There are at least two basic reasons for his influence. First, he writes of how shame has its genesis in the body. Its corporeal signs can be read in the blush, the downcast eyes, or the hunched shoulders. In their attention to the erotics of shame, queer readings have capitalized on Tomkins’s acknowledgment of shame’s bodily effects—Probyn even taking the “blush” as the title of her inquiry—and this element distinguishes their deployments of shame from other, more abstract, Deleuzean accounts of affect, such as those by Brian Massumi or Lawrence Grossberg.¹ Above all, it is the nuances of the facial expression that are read in shame. Tomkins strikingly writes: “The self lives in the face, and within the face the self burns brightest in the eyes. Shame turns the attention of self and others away from other objects to this most visible residence of self.”² Second—and despite this focus on one’s self-awareness in shame, the feeling of a wounded self-esteem or, in that rich metaphoric phrase, the loss of face (and here one can comprehend the fundamental role played by shame in the disorders of narcissism)—Tomkins also emphasizes that shame is a social phenomenon: it is the most interpersonal of the affects. It is this cultural, social dimension to shame that all these studies stress—and here they derive their other indebtedness to Tomkins. Although in shame one wants to sink into the ground and not be noticed, although shame is a feeling that tends to be internalized and protected from public scrutiny, the blush and averted eye actually betray one’s passion and vulnerability to others. Not only can shame thus conceal yet reveal taboo, queer desires, this defenselessness also elicits an ethical imperative to which many of the scholars on shame discussed here respond eloquently. Tomkins elucidates in particular what he calls “the vicarious experience of shame” (159). He explains: “The human being is capable through empathy and identification of living through others and therefore of being shamed by what happens to others. To the extent to which the individual invests his affect in other human beings, in institutions, and in the world around him, he is vulnerable to...