ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one case, turning its attention to the way shame inflects ethnicity and class and produces specific kinds of narratives. It examines Irish-Americanism in order to unpack links between different kinds of prejudice, class hatred and homophobia, explaining how the roots of such are embedded in forms of shame. The chapter deals with establishing the claim that the concept or figure of a nation demands social homogeneity and blocks ambiguity. Many histories intersect at the horizon of the bad encounter of American queer and Irish parade-making, involving complex metropolitan politics of ethnicity, and the anti-racist and anti-homophobic histories of taking to the street to perform as yet unachieved rights, or to memorialise rights recently hard-won, but vulnerable. Queer Nation inverted the liberal division of society into public/private space to which lesbians in particular had been confined. Pride parades are annual arenas of queer public culture, where embodied notions of subjectivity are sold, enacted, transgressed and debated.
