Shame
A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century
Published on 28. April 2017
233 pages
978-1-4744-1984-0 (ISBN)
Description
A radical reframing of shame as a vital impetus of queer feminist activism
Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was used to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But certain forms of shame were also embraced by 19th-century activists in an attempt to reverse entrenched power dynamics.
Bogdan Popa brings together Rancière's techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists denaturalised conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the 20th century.
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Content
- Intro
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- Part I: Shame and Queer Political Theory
- Chapter 1 Queer Practices, or How to Unmoor Feminism from Liberal Feminism
- The Argument
- What is Shame?
- What is Queer Genealogy?
- Queer Practices
- Political Theory and The Police
- Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists?
- The Structure of the Book
- Chapter 2 How to do Queer Genealogy with J. S. Mill
- How to "Part Company with the World"
- Mill in Drag, Shame and Silence
- "Barbarians" and "Lunatics": Harsh Language and Mill's Rhetoric
- Conclusion
- Part II: Counter-Figures
- Chapter 3 Disturbing Silence: Mill and the Radicals at the Monthly Repository
- Unitarian Radicals and Performativity
- Beyond Liberal Shame
- Mill's Disturbing Silence and the Fox Affair
- Conclusion
- Chapter 4 Performative Slurs: Political Rhetoric in Feminist Activism
- The Contagious Diseases Acts and Josephine Butler's Rhetoric of Humiliation
- Mill's Testimony against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Policing of Feminist Activism
- Conclusion
- Chapter 5 Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free Love
- Woodhull's Shaming and Sexual Transgressions
- Shame as Dispossession
- The Police and How to Close the Lines of Escape
- Conclusion
- Part III: Queering Shame
- Chapter 6 Does Queer Political Theory Have a Future?
- References and Further Reading
- Index
