ABSTRACT
Feminist phenomenology has become an important theoretical frame for feminist scholarship on emotion. Feminist phenomenology is an approach that combines insights regarding embodied experience, through phenomenological investigation, with reflections about the discursive structures which frame that experience, through feminist theory. The strong relation and association, historically and culturally, between women’s bodies, women’s sexuality and shame, both personally and politically, is far from trivial. The attunement to body shame that women experience is so pervasive and indeterminate that it is often beyond the reach of reflective consciousness. Women may not even realize that they are experiencing shame, or the threat of shame, and that they are exerting inordinate efforts to avoid shameful exposure.
