QUEER ATTACHMENTS: The Cultural Politics of Shame

Does shame have a history? Sally R. Munt’s Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics

of Shame does for shame what Judith Butler did for gender in Gender Trouble; the

kind of historicising work Michel Foucault carried out in relation to sexuality. She

presents shame as a socially constructed and historically contingent entity, system

or psychic process that in turn constructs us as subjects. Shame is, for Munt, an

embodied emotion, one in which the body functions as an ‘archive of feelings’ in

the words of Ann Cvetkovich. For Munt as for Butler, we are not our shame but

rather are constituted as subjects by it in the acting out of its psychic processes.

If Melanie Klein’s work points to the ‘memories in feelings’, Queer Attachments

encourages readers to uncover the memories of feelings and the feelings in

memories. Munt calls on readers to explore the cultural vicissitudes of shame with

her by traversing temporal locations, geographical regions, disciplinary formations

and theoretical alignments in an effort to unpick shame’s latent intricacies.

Queer Attachments is a mature work, one that has been in gestation for many

years and shows evidence of Munt’s considerable knowledge of lesbian and gay

studies, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical theory,

class, space and textual analysis, all of which she brings to bear on this project.

Munt is an accomplished thinker, one who makes productive use of a range of,

what at first glance might appear to be, conflicting theories and approaches in

the service of her analysis. She draws on a wide variety of scholars, including

Raymond Williams, Charles Darwin, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Wendy

Brown, Judith Butler, Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, Benedict Anderson, William

Meissner, Adriana Caverero, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Jacques

Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz. From

historical speeches to film, academia to performance art, lesbian classics to

children’s literature, television to the Internet, normative politics to queer activism,

Munt employs ‘text’ in its widest sense as she deftly traces the twists and turns of

shame through time and space, presenting us with both its harmful effects and

transformative potential.