ABSTRACT
I would like to begin this chapter with a brief fictive scenario that appears in preeminent queer theorist and cultural critic Eve Sedgwick’s influential book on affect, Touching Feeling:
Lecturing on shame, I used to ask listeners to join in a thought experiment, visualizing an unwashed, half-insane man who would wander into the lecture hall mumbling loudly, his speech increasingly accusatory and disjointed, and publicly urinate in the front of the room, then wander out again. I pictured the excruciation of everyone else in the room: each looking down, wishing to be anywhere else yet conscious of the inexorable fate of being exactly there, inside the individual skin of which each was burningly aware; at the same time, though, unable to stanch the hemorrhage of painful identification with the misbehaving man. That’s the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.
