The Cultural Politics of Emotion

To introduce her discussion of shame, Ahmed returns to the text of Bringing Them Home and its comments regarding the national shame Australians should feel regarding the historical injustice of the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. Through collective recognition of their pain, this kind of shame solidifies collective identity and offers a proposed route toward reconciliation with those who have suffered at the nation’s hand. Ahmed is particularly interested in the way this text divorces group shame from individual guilt, how shame is used to direct attention to some aspects of a wrong while disguising others, and how shame is related to other emotions.

Shame is similar to pain in that it involves a turning away from the other, but it differs in that the attribution of the feeling is self-directed: Instead of blaming the “badness” of the other for causing pain, one directs the responsibility for shame inward and attributes the “badness” to the self. Shame is similar to disgust because both involve the perception of being filled with something bad—but disgust expels this badness, sticking it to the other instead of the self. Shame differs from guilt in that, while both recognize wrongdoing, only shame fills the self and “becomes what the self is about” (Location 2422 of 6419).