Queer Attachments

by Sally R. Munt

Why is shame so central to our identity and to our culture? What is its role in stigmatizing subcultures such as the Irish, the queer or the underclass? Can shame be understood as a productive force? In this lucid and passionately argued book, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces - from eighteenth-century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across cultures and historical periods, and that patterns of shame are disturbingly long-lived. But she also reveals shame as an affective emotion, engendering attachments between bodies and between subjects - queer attachments. Above all, she celebrates the extraordinary human ability to turn shame into joy: the party after the fall. Queer Attachments is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Queer

268 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2007

About the author

Sally Rowena Munt, DPhil. is Professor and Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies. She has published widely on cultures of otherness and social justice, and is the author of Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Ashgate 2007).

Reviews

[Boka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps it was because I expected something different from the book than it turned out to offer. What I was missing most was a clear thread running through the book and connecting the different chapters, which discuss very different cultural artifacts, to the core theme of shame. Many of the chapters might be interesting to different readers for different reasons, but the discussion of shame and its connections to power felt underdeveloped in the end.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here

[Mentai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich reading of shame that doesn't elide the political. And each chapter is on something wildly different. Enjoyed far better than Probyn's work on shame. The chapter on Tracy Emin is useful.