Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century

Description

A radical reframing of shame as a vital impetus of queer feminist activism Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was used to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But certain forms of shame were also embraced by 19th-century activists in an attempt to reverse entrenched power dynamics. Bogdan Popa brings together Rancière’s techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists denaturalised conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the 20th century. Foreword......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 13 List of Illustrations......Page 15 Part I: Shame and Queer Political Theory......Page 16 The Argument......Page 18 What is Shame?......Page 23 What is Queer Genealogy?......Page 25 Queer Practices......Page 29 Political Theory and The Police......Page 32 Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists?......Page 37 The Structure of the Book......Page 40 Chapter 2 How to do Queer Genealogy with J. S. Mill......Page 56 How to “Part Company with the World”......Page 59 Mill in Drag, Shame and Silence......Page 68 “Barbarians” and “Lunatics”: Harsh Language and Mill’s Rhetoric......Page 78 Conclusion......Page 85 Part II: Counter-Figures......Page 94 Chapter 3 Disturbing Silence: Mill and the Radicals at the Monthly Repository......Page 96 Unitarian Radicals and Performativity......Page 99 Beyond Liberal Shame......Page 105 Mill’s Disturbing Silence and the Fox Affair......Page 112 Conclusion......Page 121 Chapter 4 Performative Slurs: Political Rhetoric in Feminist Activism......Page 130 The Contagious Diseases Acts and Josephine Butler’s Rhetoric of Humiliation......Page 134 Mill’s Testimony against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Policing of Feminist Activism......Page 147 Conclusion......Page 161 Chapter 5 Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free Love......Page 166 Woodhull’s Shaming and Sexual Transgressions......Page 169 Shame as Dispossession......Page 177 The Police and How to Close the Lines of Escape......Page 187 Conclusion......Page 192 Part III: Queering Shame......Page 196 Chapter 6 Does Queer Political Theory Have a Future?......Page 198 References and Further Reading......Page 209 Index......Page 220