The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women’s identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women’s shame.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Bodies of Shame
1. The Other Woman: Xenophobia and Shame / Jocelyn Eighan
2. Rape, Trauma, and Shame in Samira Bellil’s Dans l’enfer des tournantes / Nicole Fayard
3. A Bloody Shame: Angela Carter’s Shameless Postmodern Fairy Tales / Suzette A. Henke
4. ‘Ecrire pour ne plus avoir honte’: Christine Angot’s and Annie Ernaux’s Shameless Bodies / Natalie Edwards
5. Interactions of Disability Pride and Shame / Eliza Chandler
Part 2. Families of Shame
6. Colonial Shame in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng / Erica L. Johnson
7. Ancestors and Aliens: Queer Transformations and Affective Estrangement in Octavia Butler’s Fiction / Frann Michel
8. Daughters of the House of Shame / Sinead Mc Dermott
9. ‘Bound and Gagged with Thread’: Shame, Female Development, and the Künstlerroman Tradition in Cora Sandel’s The Alberta Trilogy / Patricia Moran
10. Girl World and Bullying: Intersubjective Shame in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye / Laura Martocci
11. Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil / Tamar Heller
Part 3. Nations of Shame
12. Coping with National Shames through Chinese Women’s Bodies: Glorified or Mortified? / Peiling Zhao
13. Shamed Bodies: Partition Violence and Women / Namrata Mitra
14. Interrogating the Place of Lajja (Shame) in Contemporary Mauritius / Karen Lindo
15. Shame and Belonging in Postcolonial Algeria / Anna Rocca
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Erica L. Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Wagner College in New York. She is author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro.Patricia Moran is author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and editor (with Tamar Heller) of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing.
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