Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics

Through cutting-edge accounts and interdisciplinary critiques of shame, this collection responds to the epidemic of gendered violence that the world witnesses daily. Contributors expose and challenge how oppression and violence connect to regimes of injustice that have dominated modern times.

Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice draws from contemporary, concrete atrocities against women and marginalized communities to re-conceptualize moral shame and to set moral shame apart from dimensions of subordination, humiliation, and disgrace. The interdisciplinary collection starts with a contribution from a Yazidi-survivor of genocidal and sexual violence, whose case brings together core themes: gender, ethnic and religious identity, and violence and shame. Further accounts of shame and gendered violence in this collection take the reader to other and equally disturbing accounts of lesser-known atrocities from around the world. Although shame is sometimes posited as an inevitable companion to human life, editors Lenart Škof and Shé M. Hawke situate the discussion in the theoretical landscape of shame, and the contributors challenge this concept through fields as diverse as law, journalism, activism, philosophy, theology, ecofeminism, and gender and cultural studies. Their discussion of gendered shame makes room for it to be both a negative and a redemptive concept. Combining junior and senior scholarship, this collection examines power relations in the cycle of shame and violence.

To Believe in the Words of Justice from Farida Khalaf (Farida Global Organization)

INTRODUCTION

Shé M. Hawke and Lenart Škof

PART 1: RESPONSES TO GENDER VIOLENCE

1. “Speaking About her just Might Heal”: Witnessing to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Jane Barter

2. Femicide: Another Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Danny Marrero

3. Positions of Power: Patriarchal Considerations in Criminal Law

Melissa McKay

PART 2: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON SHAME

4. Reframing Anthropological Shame as Exposure

Aaron Looney

5. Towards a Feminist Ethics of Shame

Sashinungla

6. Epistemic Injustice, Shame, Humility, and Sharing the Epistemic Space with Others: An Investigation of Epistemic Justice as a Virtue

Vojko Strahovnik

PART 3: GENDER VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA

7. Obligations to Expose and the Responsibility to Protect: Journalistic Ethics for Reporting on Wartime Sexual Violence

Janet H. Anderson and Benjamin Duerr

8. A Voice of Our Own: Retelling the Stories of Gender-Based Violence in the Lebanese Media.

Rouba El Helou-Sensenig

PART 4: CULTURES AND CONTEXTS OF SHAME

9. Shame, and Social Scripts

Vita Emery

10. An Ecological Feminist Perspective on Violence

Cecilia Herles

11. Embodying Freedom and Truth within the Compass Rose: Spiritual Leadership within the Revolution of Love

Eleanor Sanderson