| Title | : | Queer Attachments (Queer Interventions) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0754649237 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780754649236 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 268 |
| Publication | : | First published April 30, 2007 |
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.
Queer Attachments (Queer Interventions) Reviews
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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.
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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.
