ABSTRACT
The point is that Tracey Emin has done more for public awareness of art, public and private shame as a force in its own right and as a necessary part of life, than any other living artist'. Emin has a cultish celebrity or notoriety, she is known for her strikingly creative reworking of shame, disgust, and sexuality, particularly of the female body. Shamed and humiliated by a group of local young men, Emin discovers their vicious hypocrisy as their cat-calls noisily annihilate her dreams of escape. Shame is a force that acts upon the self, constituting social subjects who are marked and shaped by its interpellating propensities of recognition, misrecognition and refusal of recognition. Shame has an opposite tendency toward effacement and disguise, mutating into other more visibly expressed emotions like disgust, envy, antagonism and contempt. Shame has a plasticity that lends itself toward creative and critical exploration.
