Embodied Shame

How does physical, emotional, and sexual abuse shape women's perceptions of their bodies and identities? How are women's psyches affected by the sexual, racial, and cultural denigration that occurs when women's bodies are represented as defective, spoiled, damaged, or dirtied? Embodied Shame skillfully explores these questions in the context of recent writings by North American women, contributing to work in shame theory and to feminist analyses of the intersections of theories of the body, affect, emotions, narrative, and trauma. By examining popular contemporary fictional and nonfictional texts, including Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, J. Brooks Bouson illuminates how deeply entrenched bodily shame continues to operate in contemporary culture, even as we celebrate the supposed freeing of the female body from the social and cultural constraints that have long bound it.

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

Part I: Coming of Age, Coming to Shame: The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame

2. The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’sLives of Girls and Women

3. Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’sBastard Out of Carolina

4. Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’sThe Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’sDon’t Play in the Sun

5. Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

6. Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’sPromiscuities

Part II: Speaking a Kind of Body Language: Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances

7. Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’sLife-Size and Judith Moore’sFat Girl: A True Story

8. The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’sLook at Me, Doris Lessing’sThe Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’sThe Life and Loves of a She-Devil

9. Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’sAs We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’sThe Stone Angel

10. Writing the Disfi gured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’sAutobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’sPlaintext, Carnal Acts, andWaist-High in the World

11. In Conclusion

Notes
Works Cited
Index