Shame as a Performative Narrative Affect in Automedial Art by Female British Authors with ‘Disabilities’ and ‘Mental Distress’
Final Report Abstract
The project investigated shame as an ambiguous intertextual narrative affect that unfolds its effects in contemporary (1981-2023) verbal, graphic, audio-visual and social media forms of autobiographical writing and storytelling as well as between texts, epitexts, practices of writing, drawing, performing, and processes of reception. The project explored works by female-identified, often debut British and Indian authors from heterogeneous backgrounds, with different sexual orientations and disabilities, chronic illnesses and forms of mental distress. The narrative aesthetics of shame and shaming adopted by these writers is apparent in their choice of the shame-related (or purportedly ‘shameless’) genre of female autobiographical writing and life storying, their explicit, ubiquitous citation and re-signification of stigmatizing, disablist and sexist speech acts, objectifying practices and medicalizing diagnoses as well as their use of feminist techniques of ‘oversharing’ stigmatized, tabooed topics and experiences (medical diagnoses, graphic details about sick / impaired bodies, distress, suicidality, being bullied or psychologized). My analysis shows that the mostly retrospectively narrated, formally hybrid, partly co-created, autotheoretical, autoethnographic, strongly relational, often multiregistered, interdiscursive, multi-voiced and fragmentary or open-ended practices of writing and oral storytelling deploy shame and shaming as complex narrative strategies of affective conversion. They work through shame as a narrative technique, not by avoiding or transcending narrators’ experiences of shame, as critics had suggested. As narrative and aesthetic strategies, shame and humiliation generate contingent amalgamations of affective, emotional and reflective responses (distress, grief, anger, disgust, self-hatred, interest, surprize, love, pleasure, hope, acceptance, solidarity, pride, resistance against shame, shameinducing norms and sensationalist audience expectations, practices of ‘shaming back’) that pervade narrative incidents, ‘pathos scenes’, narrative events and plot trajectories. At their most effective, the affective conversions provoked by shame critically explore and deconstruct (readers’ and audiences’ complicity with) ableist and sexist norms, essentialist concepts of disability and capitalist notions of productivity. They generate alternative forms of knowledge and multiple concepts of reality as well as conceptualize disability, interdependency, non-normativity, illness and mental difference as universal, non-essentialist experiences. At their most problematic, affective conversions provoked by shame (often unwittingly) affirm medicalizing labels and reproduce ableist, mentalist and gendered shame-inducing norms and make audiences complicit with the attention economy of shame as a sensationalist, individualizing spectacle.
Publications
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Disability-Aktivismus und Social Media. Technikzukünfte, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft / Futures of Technology, Science and Society, 143-165. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Röder, Katrin
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Materiality, Affectivity and the Female Disabled Body in Contemporary Automedial Art. Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading, 215-230. Routledge.
Röder, Katrin
