In the context of the "affective turn" in literary studies, shame has received significant critical attention as both a thematic and an emotive response that is intentionally evoked by texts. Shame mediates between the personal and the social, naming an embodied emotional response to the self-perception of doing or being wrong, divergent, or non-normative. Normative discourses that ground the concept of "identity" work through a networked intersection of social values or norms related to such identity categories as race, gender, class, sexuality, age, dis/ability, and somatic dimensions or body size. Somatically divergent bodies are pathologized in medical discourses -- too tall (are giants), too short (are dwarves), too thin (are anorectic), too fat (are obese) – and demonized via the casual use of demeaning language. The impact of these linguistic aggressions is to provoke the painful feeling of shame: self-loathing caused by the awareness of self-betrayal or the failure to meet the norms of society. Of particular concern to literary and cultural critics is the mechanism(s) by which shame is communicated not only as a thematic but as an effect triggered in the reader or viewer. In this presentation, I focus on three rhetorical strategies by means of which bodies are shamed: animalization, abjection, and the uncanny (unheimlich). In all three cases, the body is subject to radical estrangement as the boundary between the human/inhuman, visible/invisible, and familiar/strange is transgressed and shame works to monitor and maintain the discursive boundaries that construct "the human." These boundaries define the binaries (male/female, reason/emotion, civilization/nature, public/private, powerful/powerless, mind/body, etc.) that enable white patriarchal capitalist culture, where rights inhere only in "human" bodies and the less-than-human are rendered shamefully unworthy of the possession of rights. At the same time, the evocation of shame as a readerly response contributes powerfully to the textual critique of the network of intersecting discriminations that produce both the human-as-norm and the shamefully less-than-human.
