Subjectivity DOI 10.1057/s41286-016-0014-6 ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Toward a queer psychology of affect: restarting from shameful places Wen Liu1
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2017
Abstract The affective turn that has emerged in academia problematizes the previous dichotomous conceptualization of essentialism and social constructionism. It also points toward a new direction for the study of human—and beyond human— experience. Situating this paradigm shift within broader social scientific inquiry, this paper engages with psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s and queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s theories of affect. In doing so, it employs shame as a critical concept for queer psychology that is distinct from the sexual minority framework dominating North American LGBTQ psychology. The author proposes moving toward a concept of shame that identifies it as a curious engagement beyond disciplinary boundaries and movement that circulates through different sexualized and racialized bodies. In moving toward this concept and away from one of shame as a problem and an undesirable object to be rid of, we can work toward a queer psychology of affect that breaks open the binarism of pride and shame. Keywords Affect theory Shame Queer theory LGBTQ psychology Critical psychology Homonormativity
& Wen Liu
[email protected] 1
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA
W. Liu
Affect1 has become a renewed interest in the field of psychology through engagement with various traditions of critical theory such as psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and feminist and queer studies (Blackman et al. 2008). In particular, theorists are interested in its provocative links to concepts of the body and subjectivity beyond the established borders of humanities and social sciences. Critical psychology and queer theory have recently become vibrant scholarly fields that take an affective approach both to theorizing queer becoming beyond the reproduction of normative desires and to troubling the dualism of assimilation and abjection (e.g., Blackman 2011; Halperin and Traub 2009; Hegarty 2011; Sedgwick 2003). To highlight this productive bond between the two fields and re-engage with queer subjectivity against the reductionism of queer desire, in this paper I turn to Silvan Tomkins’s theory of affect (1962, 1963) and its revitalization by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Sedgwick 2003; Sedgwick and Frank 1995). Through affect theory, I explore the possibilities for an alternative formation of queer subjectivity by focusing on the relationship between shame and queerness. In this affective turn, the concept of subjectivity that was traditionally caught between the dichotomies of structural determinism and discursive construction is undone and replaced by a renewed focus on bodies (Blackman et al. 2008). The traditional cognitivist framework of psychology conceptualizes the body and the subject as integral, fixed entities that passively wait to receive sensory responses (e.g., James 1890; Lange 1922). Conversely, the recent critical engagement rethinks bodies as entangled processes that have the capacity ‘‘to affect and be affected’’ (Blackman and Venn 2010, p. 9). This approach rejects both the essentialist characterization of emotion as innate, or motivated solely by the evolutionary needs of the individual, and the social constructionist analysis of emotion as mere representation of feelings located in social structures, imposed on the subject (e.g., Hochschild 1983; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Affect, instead, can be better understood as the movement of intensive energies that travel across the boundaries of bodies, creating and undoing subjectivity through the dynamic relations of transmission, repetition, and incitation (Blackman et al. 2008; Massumi 2015). This affective turn thus resists the division between the individual and the social, as well as the dichotomized theorization between biological essentialism and social constructionism, because affect is not an object that moves between subjects. It is, rather, the flow, or repeating patterns of energy, that circulates across the body and mind, the individual and social, and the private and public, in which bodies and subjects are constituted and reconstituted (Blackman and Venn 2010; Clough and Halley 2007; Henriques 2010). 1
The terms ‘‘affect’’ and ‘‘emotion’’ are often used interchangeably across perspectives and disciplines. In this paper, I invoke Greco and Stenner’s (2013) general argument that ‘‘emotion’’ refers to a more conscious level of cognitive and behavioral response or social category attached to specific meanings in the cognitive and social constructionist perspectives, whereas ‘‘affect’’ refers to the poststructuralist transition to a more unconscious analysis of processes and embodiment in the ‘‘affective turn’’ in a general sense. At the same time, Greco and Stenner propose that developing firm definitional boundaries between emotion and affect may be counterproductive as one would be associated with the traditional and the other with the sophisticated. Therefore, I employ the two terms only to differentiate intellectual perspectives instead of assigning categorical definitions.
Restarting from shameful places…
The turn to affect is not only theoretical but also deeply political (Ahmed 2015; Clough and Willse 2011; Massumi 2015; Protevi 2009). Critical scholars from feminist studies and critical psychology have pointed out the violent split of rationality from gendered and sexualized bodies that constructs them as emotionally excessive subjects (e.g., Blackman and Walkerdine 2001; Butler 1997; Young 1990). Politics is filled with affects, from the obvious example of emotionally charged protests in the streets to the seemingly public consensus on the particular affects attached to certain subjects—gays with disgust, terrorists with fear, and undocumented immigrants with hatred. In Sara Ahmed’s (2015) terms, these cultural figures become the objects upon which affects densely accumulate and ‘stick,’ producing social values attached to their particular signs and bodies. These nonnormative bodies are often treated as the Other and externalized as pathologically different in order to guard the fantasy of the ‘‘unified, original civilized human subject’’ central to the foundation of psychological knowledge production (Blackman and Walkerdine 2001, p. 153). The fear of AIDS in the peak of its global crisis in the 1980s, for instance, singled out the homosexual subject to be loaded with images of perversity and illness while leaving the broader context of poor health care and homophobic ignorance unchallenged (Blackman and Walkerdine 2001). The turn to affect with and through critical psychology draws attention to the loaded sociopolitical conditions in which the subject is constituted and from which it emerges. It also accentuates the problems of how power is felt through the boundaries of the body beyond the limits of rational, economistic, or legalistic arguments regarding social transformation. Instead of dissecting the internal psychic structure of the subject, affect turns the attention to the conceptualization of bodies as processes that shape and are shaped by their context. Further, it presses the question of ‘what sticks,’ not only to political subjects but also to the structures they become invested in through collective movements (Ahmed 2015; Blackman et al. 2008). It is indeed a critical time to reconsider the concept of queer subjectivity through an affective approach, as queerness has coalesced with the neoliberal technologies of individualization and normalization. This historical shift of queer subjectivity from pathology to assimilation, termed ‘‘homonormativity’’ by Lisa Duggan (2002), is connected to the broader context of white supremacy, urban gentrification, imperialist warfare, and neoliberal policy reforms, particularly in North America and Western Europe (e.g., Brown 2012; Ferguson and Hong 2012; Hanhardt 2013; Puar 2007). The liberationist and queer politics in LGBTQ psychology has been partially recruited by a new essentializing research paradigm of gay identity formation that depicts the acceptance of one’s gay or lesbian identity as the dominant goal of healthy psychological development (e.g., Cass 1979; Troiden 1988). This shift has occurred despite the effort of psychologists and psychiatrists who actively bridged their research agendas with the gay liberation movements in the 1970s to depathologize homosexuality and create intellectual spaces for the development of diverse LGBTQ subjectivities (e.g., Minton 1997; Kitzinger 1987), most notably through the research of Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker. This scientific project of gay affirmative psychology, which emerged primarily in the US, has received several internal critiques from LGBTQ psychologists. Drawing from
W. Liu
queer theory, they have actively critiqued gay affirmative psychology for not only depoliticizing queer concerns (Blackman 2011; Kitzinger 1987) but also confining the possibilities of an anti-identitarian vision of queer desire (e.g., Diamond 2008; Hegarty and Massey 2006). The dominant minoritarian framework of gay affirmation psychology operated through the homonormative regime, which intended to dissociate the queer subject from sexual shame by objectifying and reprivatizing shame. This paradigm shift has nonetheless produced a queer paradox, especially in social and behavioral sciences (Blackman 2011), that continues to bleed through our social reality and queer scholarship. In it, the image of the happy and healthy queer is idealized in the context of widespread queer vulnerability to poor mental health and suicidal ideation. To counter the problem of the rapid normalization and depoliticization of queer subjectivity, queer studies and queer activism have also initiated a re-engagement with shame as a critique of the assimilationist discourse of gay pride (Halperin and Traub 2009; Sycamore 2004; Weiss 2008). Nonetheless, critics have pointed out that gay shame has become a subject adopted primarily by white gay men, which prioritizes their experiences of gendered humiliation and projects the public gaze onto the bodies of queer people of color, who are always already seen as ‘‘shameful’’ (Halberstam 2005; Perez 2005). Whereas mainstream LGBTQ psychology attempts to assimilate the queer subject by reducing shame, the queer approach of gay shame aims to repoliticize the queer subject by embracing shame and the position of antinormativity. However, both of these approaches reproduce the issue of localizing shame as an object attached to a single subject, whether it be the white gay male body or the unhealthy queer, instead of conceptualizing shame as a process of circulation and movement between bodies. These two poles of queer subjectivity continue to reinforce each other, as antiassimilationist queers project their shame onto the racialized Other and prideful queers juxtapose themselves against the danger of queer ills in order to exhibit their present normativity. In the meantime, the discourse of (white) queer vulnerability and the criminalized portrayals of racialized queer bodies are recruited by queer liberalism to propagate the violence of gentrification, policing, and militarism in the name of seeking protection from the state (Hanhardt 2013). The dichotomization of queer subjectivity between pride and risk, joy and melancholia, and happiness and unhappiness has resulted in the co-optation of queer shame for neoliberal interests. Instead of holding the tensions of the two possible becomings, neoliberalism produces these binary, fixed subject positions (Blackman 2011, p. 197). To restart the theorizing of queer subjectivity somewhere anew, I draw from Tomkins’s theory of affect, and in particular his concept of shame as a circulatory affect, to provide a queer strategy of and through psychology to undo these binarisms. Since its inception in the 1960s, Tomkins’s affective framework has sparked interdisciplinary interests in queerness and sexuality scholarship because of its resistance to the reductionism of the debates regarding essentialism and social constructionism as well as its thick phenomenological descriptions of interactive, affective experiences (Johnson 2012, 2015; Sedgwick 2003; Stenner 2004). For Tomkins, affect is a complex cybernetic network, which cannot be simplified as a biological drive confined by the motivation of a single object (e.g.,
Restarting from shameful places…
hunger or pain) but is heterogeneous in origin. Tomkins’s well-known definition of affect, ‘‘Any affect may have any ‘object’’’ (1962, p. 190), emphasizes that the meaning making of affect is not predetermined but serves as a potential that triggers and amplifies an assembly of memory, perception, and cognition during interaction. Affect not only captures the functional aspect of behavior—as in activation or prohibition—as is commonly understood in the behavioral paradigm, but adds texture and relational potentiality to social experiences. Tomkins’s theory of affect has produced multiple ways of re-engaging with shame in the fields of both queer studies and critical psychology. Despite the fact that Tomkins’s theory was not necessarily an antihomophobic project inspired by queer interests, the structure of affect with high degrees of flexibility and freedom of expression has allowed for a queer and critical psychological reconceptualization of shame. This reconceptualization extends beyond the individualist and therapeutic perspective that merely brings about internalized despair and destructiveness. Instead, it generates shared cultural knowledge of marginalization and survival (Love 2009; Moon 2009), antiassimilationist belonging (Halperin and Traub 2009), and reparative and restorative forms of sociality (Mun˜oz 1999; Munt 2008; Sedgwick 2003). Critical psychologists have also pointed out the problems of the behavioral health model, which often reduces shame to an individualized issue of poor self-concept or underdeveloped self-acceptance through the articulation of internalized homophobia (e.g., Meyer and Dean 1998) that can be prevented by simply shifting personal cognitive consciousness. Instead, many have emphasized the productive engagement of queer subjectivity with shame as evidence of an urgent need for social connection and cultural resources (Johnson 2012) as well as a performative form of intergenerational community bonding (Blackman 2011). Within LGBTQ psychology, the subject of queer youth suicide is saturated with discourses of risk and victimization. Critical psychologists have therefore also integrated the affective politics of shame and queer theory to stress that shame is not necessarily an act of humiliation or the effect of internalized stigmatization but the unresolved tensions between individual and collective identity, present and future self, and private and public surveillance of sexuality (Cover 2016; McDermott et al. 2008). A reparative analysis of queer vulnerability must not place ‘‘self-acceptance’’ as the solution to rehabilitating from shame but instead recognize how shame mobilizes certain ‘‘social knowledge’’ of and against homophobia to produce queer subjectivity and nonnormative ways of belonging (Cover 2016, p. 98). Shame can, indeed, be transformative in the context of relational reciprocity. Tomkins states that it is motivated by an ‘‘incomplete reduction of interest or joy’’ (1963, p. 354) that involves mutual gaze and interconnectedness. During a time in which the neoliberal regime produces hyperindividualized subjects in order to fracture collective agency and privatize cultural resources, this reciprocity bridges the double movements toward ‘‘painful individualization’’ and ‘‘uncontrollable relationality’’ (Sedgwick 2003, p. 37). After two decades of a gay pride movement that has not necessarily been successful in shaking off shame, as critical scholars we need to move inquiry beyond ‘‘how to come out of shame’’ toward an investigation of the following: What are the historical connections and empirical constructions that enable the stickiness between shame and queerness? What kinds of politics
W. Liu
have this affective attachment made possible? Tomkins’s approach to shame, which insists on the relationality of interest instead of rejection and the capacity to resocialize instead of internalize, indeed elevates a sense of curiosity for further theoretical investigation and political involvement. Curiosity, as central to Tomkins’s theory of shame, provides two levels of curious engagement: Firstly, at the level of the body, this approach offers an alternative reading of shameful encounters that may elicit more curious desire and interest, rather than repulsion or humiliation, disrupting the borders between normative and nonnormative bodies. Secondly, at the level of epistemology, as psychologists we should become curious about the potential for synthesis between sites of scholarship that are constructed as oppositional in the process of knowledge production. Whereas queer theory has become a project of othering psychology, Peter Hegarty reminds us that it indeed ‘‘[needs] psychology as a site of engagement to retain the criticality of queer theory’’ (2011, p. 1). In a sense, there has always been a curious intimacy between the two fields that requires more theoretical synthesis and interdisciplinary attentiveness. In this paper I offer a critical psychological analysis that emphasizes that the circulation of shame can provoke important insights into the sticky resistance to social transformation and justice. In the context of a homonormative regime, queer subjectivity has become increasingly disembodied and recruited by the ‘‘positivist sciences of happiness’’ (Blackman 2011, p. 192) to participate in the normative institutions of marriage, military, and reproduction. Within homonormative as well as ‘‘at risk’’ discourses—the latter of which is invested in psychopathology, privatization, and racialized policing—shame has the capacity to make interest in queer subjectivity urgent and alive (Probyn 2005, p. 105). In turn, this interest encourages theorists to ‘‘bear the shame’’ of pathologizing psychological science and restart somewhere anew (Johnson 2015).
Queer theory and psychology: the productive bond over shame ‘‘Gay Shame: A Virus in the System.’’—GayShameSF.ORG Shame is inseparable from LGBTQ politics in the US. In psychology, the identity formation of the queer subject is historically situated in one’s struggle with sexual shame; ideally one comes out of shame through the development of one’s sexual identity (e.g., Herek et al. 2007). In this liberal humanist discourse, to be a welladjusted queer is to get rid of shame and assimilate to the normative sexual culture, as in the marriage equality movement from which LGBTQ people seek inclusion to the nation-state through performing appropriate and legitimate cultural values. To counter homonormative politics, shame has re-emerged as a politicized affect in queer movements in resistance to commercialized, assimilationist gay pride and gay identity. The Gay Shame collective started in 1998 in New York for marginalized queer and trans youth empowerment, initially in response to the ‘‘Quality of Life’’ campaign in New York City. This campaign was a government policy that instigates gentrification processes by enclosing public social space, cutting shelter services
Restarting from shameful places…
budgets, and increasing police forces to harass racialized queer bodies in the streets (Sycamore 2004). As the rhetoric of ‘‘pride’’ becomes rapidly privatized to favor conservative procorporate and promilitary demands, shame is strategically appropriated to be the evil twin sister that attempts to rescue the queer movement and look for alternatives to assimilationist politics. This queer engagement of shame is not only a political antithesis to pride but also a call to re-examine basic assumptions about sexual identity and sexuality. Halperin and Traub (2009) write in Gay Shame, ‘‘Gay pride has never been able to separate itself entirely from shame, or to transcend shame. Gay pride does not even make sense without some reference to the shame of being gay, and its very successes…testify to the intensity of its ongoing struggle with shame’’ (pp. 3–4). In other words, shame is central to the formation of gay identity and gay political subjectivity. To transcend the limited and conservative discourse of pride, we cannot avoid the question of shame. Gay shame challenges the whitewashed, normative portrayals of queer subjects in mainstream LGBTQ movements that seek to privatize sexuality in order to achieve rights. However, in an era of heightened homonormative visibility and white gay assimilation, Gay shame fails to develop into a transformative politics because the spectacle of nonnormativity it raises must be mediated by the unresolved sexual perversity imprinted on the bodies of queer people of color (Perez 2005). The problematic treatment of race in gay shame signifies how the politics of shame cannot be merely about representations, in which the queer subject performs shame when politically convenient. Rather, shame needs to be conceptualized as an affective capacity to circulate (non)normativity, trauma, and pleasure across bodies. This binarism between the gay shame spectacle and psychology’s homonormativity—expressed in the circuits of colorblindness, queer liberalism, and corporate consumerism of contemporary LGBTQ politics—requires a deeper reading of Tomkins’s structure of affect. Such a reading can facilitate movement beyond a onedimensional critique through shame and of shame, uncovering a productive bond between queer theory and psychology. A critical psychological standpoint of affect is necessary not only to excavate psychological assumptions of affect, identity, and sexuality, but also to make explicit that psychology has always been a site for the production of queer theory (Hegarty 2011). Why shame? Beyond its political timeliness and my queer curiosity to reexamine this construct, shame is central to identity development and the reflexivity of the self. Psychoanalyst Francis Broucek writes, ‘‘Shame is to self psychology what anxiety is to ego psychology—the keystone of affect’’ (1982, p. 369). Shame is the sense of disturbance and defeat activated and felt within the self. Tomkins (1963) states, If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated
W. Liu
one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (p. 351) The question of human suffering often points the problem outward to locate the objects of pain and distress, as if we feel distressed because the objects we encounter have an essential property of distress, and our body merely reacts to that. Here, Tomkins’s emphasis on the experience of shame offers a humanistic lens, which draws attention to the necessity of dignity in the capacity to experience suffering at all. Indeed, Tomkins’s affect theory makes a provocative argument that affect, rather than biological drive, is the ‘‘primary motivational system’’ (1962, p. 4). The predominant drive paradigm marks human beings’ affective or spiritual experiences as subordinate to the urgent state of hunger or thirst, meaning people are only free to pursue the higher values in life only when these basic, lower needs are met (see Maslow 1943). Tomkins does not reject the necessity of biological drives; however, his affect theory makes the affective struggle against these biological and environmental forces more primary and essential. The self in the affect system is a dynamic being with multiple goals, aims, and wants, and it has a high degree of freedom and an indeterminate path that is distinct from the drive system restricted by primitive biological logic. One may repeat a pleasurable act simply because it is pleasurable. It does not have to be reinforced by an external purpose—the positive affect of pleasure is both the aim and the drive to accomplish the act. In the case of shame, the affective self not only acts in response to external objects but also produces the internal gaze that makes one feel exposed by one’s own eyes. Therefore, in the midst of shame, ‘‘the phenomenological distinction between the subject and the object of shame is lost’’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, p. 136). The self feels shameful by its very own mechanism. This movement of looking inward heightens one’s self-consciousness. Shame thus activates a response to reduce interaction through dropping one’s head or looking away. Although the inhibitive function of shame temporarily impedes intimacy within the self and with others, Tomkins stresses that shame does lead to permanent renouncement of the object, as shame is the ‘‘incomplete reduction of interest or joy’’ (1963, p. 354). In the case of encounter with a stranger, I may feel ashamed and turn my eyes away. I may wish to keep looking at the stranger out of interest in being seen reciprocally, but do not continue the act because of feeling ashamed by my own interest in looking. The activation of shame thus does not contradict the interest or continued investment in its object, unlike contempt or disgust. Shame is thus, phenomenologically speaking, stretchy and sticky. It constitutes a persistent but ambivalent identification to the object that ties both the positive affect (i.e., love-identification) and the negative affect (i.e., shamehumiliation) to the self, who is unwilling to abandon either of them. Shame, in its essence, is the refusal to split and the desire for oneness. The flexibility of Tomkins’s affect theory points to an alternative framework that resists the dogmatic, ritual positivism of cause and effect. More importantly, it shifts the Freudian theory of drive and repression attached to the Oedipus complex away from predisposed object relations. Tomkins’s framework of the affective system
Restarting from shameful places…
proposes that ‘‘any affect may have any ‘object’’’ (1962, p. 190). This model establishes a profound critique of Freud’s theory of sexual drive, which operates based on the analogical switch of expression or repression. Sexuality, rather, is amplified by the multiple possibilities of the affective system and produces qualitatively different expressions. The sex drive mechanism no longer needs to be the result of splitting identification between the two parents but, rather, ‘‘involves the far more general wishes to be both parents and to possess both parents’’ (p. 61; emphasis in original). The freedom of the affect system, whether intentionally or not, disputes the heterosexual romance in the foundations of psychological development theories. Tomkins’s theory was developed in the cold war period of American psychology saturated by universalist, heterosexist assumptions of personhood and the self. Sedgwick and Frank note that the ‘‘sublimely resistant of Tomkins’s subject in the flexible and heterogeneous affective system may not necessarily be an explicitly antiheterosexist project in psychology, but the affect theory was an attempt at ‘‘finding a different place to begin’’ (1995, p. 7; emphasis in original).
Restart from ‘‘shameful’’ places: sexual stigma and internalized homophobia To start somewhere anew can be a crucial epistemological intervention in the current state of psychology and our accumulated knowledge on sexuality and identity. The removal of homosexuality as a pathological disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-4) in 1973, is a story of sexual progressiveness that psychologists now celebrate. Soon after the removal, the subfield of LGBTQ psychology began to gain legitimacy in its growing empirical knowledge on LGBTQ individuals as distinct sexual minorities. This knowledge was based on a liberal-humanist framework of sexuality (e.g., Meyer 1995), especially in the US context of increasingly powerful queer liberalism (Eng 2010). This scientific project of sexual minorities follows the framework of gay affirmative psychology that emerged in the 1970s, which aims to challenge the perspective of homosexuality as a pathology and ‘‘show that homosexuals are psychologically healthy, ‘normal’ individuals’’ (Clarke et al. 2010, p. 3). Whereas in the UK and Australia there has been an increasingly visible convergence of critical and qualitative approaches to LGBTQ psychology that take on antiminoritarian and antiessentializing queer perspectives (Clarke and Peel 2007, p. 5), in the US, LGBTQ psychology remains dominated by positivist and empiricist frameworks. Driven by the neoliberal agenda of producing individualized ‘‘evidence’’ of risks and privileges (Fine 2012), mainstream LGBTQ psychology has become an effort to normalize LGBTQ populations and secure white and cisgender concerns within the LGBTQ category of inquiry, further marginalizing the experiences of queer and transgender people of color (Riggs 2007). Although the dominant positivist framework in LGBTQ psychology idealizes the image of the healthy, socially adjusted queer subject, shame is often presented as a indisputable, negative part of the LGBTQ experience from the heteronormative
W. Liu
public gaze (e.g., Herek et al. 2007). Whereas shame is constructed as a redundancy or excess within the present disciplinary consensus of LGBTQ status as normal, the absence of shame seems to be a rhetorical move that drives the question away from the fundamental heterosexist assumptions of the discipline itself. Sexual shame is minoritized and assumed to be only a problem of sexual minorities instead of circulating through the formation of social identity. I thus attempt at ‘‘finding a different place to begin’’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, p. 7), especially from the shameful places—of sex, pathology, and despair. These negative affective objects have been particularly generative in queer theory but are reified in psychological science so that they can be measured and cured. Although shame is simultaneously unspoken and normalized, what is present in the social psychological literature of LGBTQ experiences is dominated by the application of Goffman’s (1963) theory of stigma. Stigma, as Goffman indicates, is derived from the linguistic meaning of bodily signs ‘‘cut or burnt into the body’’ that signify disgrace, immorality, or inferiority (p. 1). Stigma is attributed to individuals as their innate social identity during social interaction and often becomes an indication of individual character blemishes. Goffman asserts that, in various instances of stigmatization that include homosexuality, the individual ‘‘…possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals’’ (p. 5; emphasis in original). Drastically different from Tomkins’s theorizing of shame, in which the actor is an agent who is engaged, curious, and interdependent with the onlooker, in Goffman’s theory of stigma, the gaze comes from the top down—the ‘‘normals’’ determine the absolute difference of the stigmatized. The stigma is something that one possesses, and this fact is further solidified in the encounter. For Goffman, the stigmatized almost have no other choice but to internalize the stigma into shame: ‘‘Shame becomes a central possibility arising from the individual’s perception of one of his own attributes as being a defiling thing to possess, and one he can readily see himself as not possessing’’ (1963, p. 7). In Goffman’s view, people are split into the stigmatized and the normal in every social interaction. The stigmatized are further split into those who feel ashamed and those who can sometimes pass as ‘‘normal.’’ But both of these conditions are motivated by the internalization of shame. The intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics along the continuum of shame and interest in Tomkins’s theory of affect, here in the form of stigma, are broken into two distinct subjects: the indifferent or prejudicial actors and the stigmatized Others. This splitting is evident in Herek et al.’s theory of internalized homophobia: For heterosexuals, sexual stigma tends to be salient only when sexual orientation becomes personally relevant (e.g., when they knowingly encounter a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person). For sexual minority individuals, by contrast, stigma awareness is chronic. It results in felt stigma, which translates into ongoing appraisals of social situations for possible enactments of stigma (e.g., discrimination, mistreatment). As a result of these appraisals, the minority individual may employ proactive or reactive coping strategies, including various stigma management strategies. When gay, lesbian, and
Restarting from shameful places…
bisexual individuals internalize society’s negative ideology about sexual minorities, the result is internalized homophobia. When heterosexuals internalize it, the result is sexual prejudice. (2007, p. 172; emphasis in original) As shame is transformed into the social psychological construct of sexual stigma, heterosexual subjects are constructed as either lacking any interest in engaging the sexualized Others or engaging out of contempt or disgust. LGBTQ individuals, however, denounce their identification with the stigmatized sign because of its association to discrimination, or because they feel the stigma and then internalize others’ disinterested contempt. In this sense, heterosexuals and LGBTQ individuals are placed into a dichotomous relationship of stigmatizing agents and stigmatized Others. Shame becomes the affect of only the stigmatized embody, as the stigmatizing agents enact prejudice and contempt. Rather than a circulating affect that connects the lookers and those who are looked at, as in Tomkins’s work, this objectified shame further separates the lookers and the looked at. In Herek’s model, stigma is theorized as an object from which LGBTQ individuals want to escape. Herek et al. (2007) write, ‘‘Felt stigma involves stigmatized individuals’ desire to avoid enactments of stigma, which is the motivational basis for modifying their behavior’’ (p. 181). If they do not break away from it, it becomes internalized stigma, an external perception about the negative identification of the stigmatized group living in the psyche and the body of sexual minorities. On the same note, the minority stress framework indicates how internalized homophobia is a stressor originating from the heterosexist social structure, which becomes self-generating in the consciousness of sexual minorities even when they are not experiencing external discrimination (Frost and Meyer 2009; Meyer and Dean 1998). The minority stress theory, as Meyer states, is not a general psychological process that cuts across populations but ‘‘unique—that is, minority stress is additive to general stressors that are experienced by all people, and therefore, stigmatized people require an adaptation effort above that required of similar others who are not stigmatized’’ (2003, p. 676). In other words, minority stress isolates stigma-related stressors that distinguish the experiences of sexual minorities from their heterosexual counterparts. However, the theory thus far has failed to explain the psychological processes in which stigma-related stressors become the causes of group-specific psychopathology, that is, it has not been able to address how minority stress ‘‘get[s] under the skin’’ (see Hatzenbuehler 2009). Here, the minority stress model flips the etiology of queer pathology back to social structure, but stigma is conceptualized as a rather taken-for-granted object that is attached to the interior psyche of LGBTQ people. A substantial body of research has put forward alternative approaches to the minority stress theory in the field of stress studies, problematizing the overdetermined casual relationship between minority status and stress as well as troubling the definition of sexual minorities as a population. These approaches emphasize the general psychological processes sexual minorities and heterosexuals share (e.g., Diamond 2003; Hatzenbuehler 2009; Savin-Williams 2001); however, the assemblage of shame–stigma–risk remains inseparable and sticky, dominating the
W. Liu
theorizing of queer subjectivity in psychology. The reciprocal affective dynamics of shame that could be described as ‘‘I caught you looking at me strangely, and therefore I feel shame and so do you’’ shifts to the one-sided looking involved in stigma, that is, ‘‘You know and I know that you are a shameful object to look at.’’ The strangeness in Tomkins’s theory of affect motivated by interest is replaced by an absolute shameful difference in Goffman’s stigma and minority stress model in psychology. Shame is no longer an affect produced by the self in relation to the object of interest; instead, it becomes an external object that turns to regulate the self. It is literally molded into ‘‘bodily signs…cut or burnt into the body [advertising] that the bearer [is] a blemished person’’ (Goffman 1963, p. 1). It is now imprinted onto the individual’s body but outside of her control—an inescapable antagonistic relationship.
Circulation of shame in its objectified form This transformation from shame to stigma can be read through the trajectory of the Western invention of homosexuality and contemporary homonormative politics. Foucault (1978) argues that modern forms of power operate not simply through repression but in fact through producing distinct subjects to be disciplined and regulated by social and medical institutions. Homosexuals are created as distinct individuals apart from heterosexuals, and the initial perversion of sexual acts marks the sexual identity of homosexuals. The contemporary lesbian and gay rights movement operates based on the assumption that the collective LGBTQ forms a distinct minority group, and it is the stigma attached to the sexual identities that needs to be removed, instead of the sexual shame toward certain behaviors and desires. Michael Warner (2000) states, Sexual deviance once was more a matter of shame than of stigma. Sodomy was a sin like fornication, not the sign of an identity. Anyone could do it. In the modern world that shame has deepened into stigma…. The act of sodomy came to be only one sign of homosexual identity among many. It became possible to suffer stigma as a homosexual quite apart from any sexual acts. (p. 28) By foregrounding stigma and identity, homonormative politics can dissociate itself from sexual acts and suggest that LGBTQ people are decent human beings who deserve full rights regardless of their private sexual behaviors—and, further, that any judgment against the humanity of LGBTQ people is regressive prejudice. However, as sexual identity becomes detached from shame, the pride in overcoming stigma displaces the unresolved shame onto the deviant, sexualized Others whose behaviors and desires do not conform to the dominant norms. In other words, the politics of identity that merely targets stigma does not transform shame, but displaces it. As shame becomes objectified as stigma—when it transforms from a collectively experienced affect to a ‘‘bodily sign’’ (Goffman 1963, p. 1)—it also circulates between bodies and marks those bodies with different meanings. The shameful gaze
Restarting from shameful places…
is also turned from one to another. Tracing shame through the different editions of the DSM, the victory of the removal of homosexuality in 1973 was immediately followed by the inclusion of ‘‘Gender Identity Disorder’’ in the DSM-4 (which was renamed ‘‘Gender Dysphoria’’ in the recent revision of the DSM-5 in 2013). The stigma attached to the construct of sexual orientation is now transferred to gendernonconforming bodies. David Valentine (2007) identifies this shift in the professional and medical psychological communities to the mainstreaming of the lesbian and gay rights movement in the US, which attempts to normalize lesbian and gay individuals by further privatizing sex. Furthermore, Valentine argues that this transition from pathological desire to pathological body is a racialized process, in which gender-nonconforming people of color are further marginalized by the colorblind transgender discourses in the medical institutions and nonprofit industrial complex. The subjecthood of gender-nonconforming people of color is thus deemed to be more invisible, illegible, and criminalized under the idealized image of the white cisgender queer. The political rhetoric of queer sameness in relation to heterosexual counterparts utilized by this version of mainstream LGBTQ psychology in the US, in fact, excludes and stigmatizes the Others in marginalized sexual communities. The Supreme Court decision in June 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage may be a keystone of gay rights achievement, but it is ultimately about the further privatization of sexuality. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stated, on behalf of the majority decision in the Supreme Court, ‘‘No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family’’ (Liptak 2015). The shame of queer sex is again pushed away by the homonormative desire of sameness within marriage, as the ‘‘highest’’ form of social order, and moves toward the other visibly perverse bodies of transgender and gendernonconforming individuals, immigrants, and poor people of color, marking them as the shameful Others. In other words, the source of sexual shame has never been removed but only been pushed onto a different corporeal host.
Homonormativity and the shameful other The particulars of the rapid transformation of LGBTQ politics since the 1990s can be understood via shame’s capacity to move through populations with various embodiments. As discussed above, my analytical lens is drawn from Tomkins’s theory, which focuses on the circulation and movement of shame not only between bodies interpersonally but across affiliated bodies that produce the social relations and legible categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Whereas social attitudes toward homosexuality have drastically changed and political reforms have improved the lives of certain groups of lesbian and gay people, many queer theorists point out the racialized consequences of such social and political shifts accompanied by the neoliberal politics of homonormativity (Brown 2012; Duggan 2002; Puar 2007; Richardson 2005). Homonormativity emerges as a form of neoliberal governmentality that domesticates sexual difference in exchange for the gay subject to be an equal consumer in corporate economies, realigned with national
W. Liu
interests. The ordinary, rather than transgressive, gay life is achieved by privatizing shame, and it generates a mainstreaming of interest in gay bodies. Evidence of this interest is found in the proliferation of white gay representations in popular media, corporate businesses tailoring to gay consumers, and gentrified neighborhoods in metropolises designed for middle-class gay residents. This ordinariness of gay life is only value-generative because of its capacity to continue circulating shame through various sexual subjects beneath its appearance of normativity. Queer perversity has not been erased from the public consciousness so much as been attached to the visibly sexualized bodies that are unfit for normative citizenship and that continue to be the primary interest of state surveillance (Ferguson and Hong 2012; Puar 2007). Tomkins’s shame–interest continuum allows for a new analysis of the productive power of shame in the neoliberal context, where the greater circulation of queerness and the increased representations of gay life do not remove shame, but only allow a minority of queer subjects with proper whiteness and consumption capacity to project shame onto the Other. To put it simply, the politics of homonormativity generates a re-experience of shame that is attached to a new assemblage of sexualized, racialized, and classed bodies. The circulation of shame in the context of the psychological production of knowledge, policy reforms, and public discourses in the US has allowed the white, cisgender gay, and lesbian subject to become an unmarked, normalized population while leaving the other marginalized sexual subjects in the public to be scrutinized via shame. The difficult question we should ask around sexual politics then, Michael Warner (2000) writes, is not ‘‘How do we get rid of sexual shame?’’ because that immediately points to the removal of sex. Rather, the question we should ask involves what we will do with shame, and it takes critical reflexivity but also the continuous struggle with shame to resist the common impulse to displace or project it onto others (p. 3). Halberstam (2005) argues that this defense mechanism of projecting shame is not only personal but political, because where shame is projected is ‘‘neither random nor unpredictable’’ (p. 224). In the context of the Gay Shame movement that juxtaposes itself against commercialized ‘gay pride,’ Halberstam makes a provocative argument that behind the radical rhetoric gay shame is infused with whiteness. More precisely, gay shame emerges as a response of white gay men being denied access to privilege, in which white gay men themselves do not have to be exposed by a shameful gaze, but in which they fantasize their own vulnerability through turning their gaze toward queer men of color who are always already exposed. In his further articulations of critique against white homonormativity in gay shame, Hiram Perez (2005) observes how brown queer bodies become the nostalgic object of projected white gay male shame—the primitive pre-Pride queer culture that is recuperated for the consumption of gay cosmopolitism. The brown body is the spectacle that homonormative culture appropriates to externalize its shame, while retaining its whiteness, class privileges, and urban mobility, simultaneously resistant to and in an exotic relationship with liberal humanism. In a manner similar to how the shame of homosexual desire is transformed into the shame of gender variance in psychiatric diagnoses, which demands wider and more fluid conceptualizations of sexuality and gender, Halberstam’s attention to gay
Restarting from shameful places…
shame calls for the resocialization of shame beyond the outcry over the loss of the privilege of white masculinity. Halberstam writes, ‘‘If queer studies is to survive gay shame, and it will, we all need to move far beyond the limited scope of white gay male concerns and interests’’ (2005, p. 231). In other words, shame can be a means to expose the subject of inquiry itself, making visible how certain interests become fixed and blocked by privilege and identity. How does shame stick to a particular identity that disallows the tracing of broader power relations? The critique of shame can potentially shift the theoretical attention in psychology away from the self and republicize the gaze. Similarly to Halberstam’s critique of the application of shame in psychology, the fixation on stigma in mainstream LGBTQ psychology does not deal with the source of shame but further privatizes it and treats it as a sexual minority problem. Although this attention on sexual minority problems is an important framework under the broader heteronormative structure, it consolidates and normalizes stigma on LGBTQ bodies, shutting down other kinds of inquires around agency and contradiction. It blocks the resocialization and the circulation of shame in public as a collectively experienced affect by people who may or may not be sexual minorities. In this sense, to survive shame is not simply to cope with it or to embrace it—as a healthy sexual minority. Rather, it is to trace how power allows its circulation between different bodies and how it sticks on a certain population, making them outcasts from what Goffman termed ‘‘normal.’’ This analysis calls for what Sedgwick (2003) names ‘‘close reading’’ or ‘‘thick description’’ (p. 21)—a particular delicacy of scale that tears through the social layers, making shame sticky to a type of body at a given historical time.
Shame as a form of psychological social advocacy In the contemporary LGBTQ movement and in its collaboration with the social sciences, American psychologists take particular pride in their efforts to advance marriage equality legislation across the US. With marriage equality now legalized nationwide in the US, whether LGBTQ people have the right to get married is a homophobic debate that should be left in history. What I am interested in here is the discourse of shame psychologists have deployed to argue for marriage equality. Kitzinger and Wilkinson (2004) wrote a provocative article that argued that psychologists often join social advocacy efforts via the narrow lens of mental health, which focuses on the damage or deficit of minority populations, instead of via universal principals of equality, justice, and rights. The American Psychological Association’s (Paige 2005) policy statement on gay and lesbian marriage is filled with this discourse of LGB minority stress being an epidemic caused by legal stigmatization. Shame becomes a powerful political rhetoric in the psychological pursuit of rights—that we need rights because we personally feel humiliated by institutional exclusion. However, Kitzinger and Wilkinson stress that this type of psychological harm argument is ‘‘neither sufficient nor necessary grounds for the extension of human rights,’’ (2004, p. 185; emphasis in original) because it avoids political and structural questions on injustice itself. In other words, whether queers
W. Liu
feel personally humiliated by exclusion or even want to get married themselves should have no bearing on their rights based on the fundamental principal of equality. This fixation on shame and stigma at the disciplinary level prevents psychologists from asking more nuanced questions about sexual communities and sexual lives as well as the limitations of marriage as an institution. After all, queers cannot help but internalize the stigma of their ‘inferiority,’ and what queers deserve is nothing better than what the ‘normals’ already have.
‘‘Becoming curious’’: tracing the circulation of shame Gay shame’s antiassimilationism and the psychological deficit discourse of the queer subject are two dominant enactments of shame in contemporary sexual politics in the US. Whereas the critique of the former for its self-interest may normalize the whiteness in the movement, the critique of the latter is that it avoids theorizing broader conceptions of justice and equality. In both of the enactments, shame is stuck onto LGBTQ identities, producing a defensive subjectivity (in gay shame) that wants to preserve shame and a damaged subjectivity (in mainstream LGBTQ psychology) that wants to get rid of shame. However, Tomkins’s work on affect provides the insight that shame is not something to avoid or escape from. Instead, in its movement and circulation is found the continual engagement between the looker and the looked at as well as that shame is in actuality an integral part of identity formation. In a special issue on queer theory and psychology in Psychology and Sexuality, Peter Hegarty (2011, p. 1) titled his introduction ‘‘Becoming Curious’’—curiosity, as central to Tomkins’s theory of shame, can be the intention we as psychologists embody in order to build synthesis between queer theory and psychology. Similar to the efforts of many critical psychologists who have contributed to broadening the limited psychological notions of sexual minority and identity, to be curious about the affective negativity of shame can serve many purposes: abolishing the fetishization of white, middle-class, and cisgender normativity as the standard of LGBTQ experiences (Clarke and Peel 2007, p. 15); excavating the stickiness of shame and risk discourses, particularly around racialized queer bodies (Riggs 2007); and getting past the ‘‘dueling dualisms’’ (Fausto-Sterling 2000) of the sexuality and gender divide by recognizing the circulative nature of pathology within psychological categories (Coyle and Kitzinger 2002). This synthesis of the anti-identitarian and antinormativity critique of queer theory may mean scholars not foreclosing our theoretical engagement to the limits of our own discipline, in order to accumulate evidence of dominant discourses. It may enable us to see the subject of research as always dialectical and in contradiction—that shame is not an immobilizing, overdeterministic object for the self as it is in the theory of stigma (‘‘I’m ashamed and thus inferior’’)—and lead to questioning and engagement. Shame, as a capacity for circulation and an intensification of affect that can accumulate on particular sticky social objects, may help psychology to develop new theories of identity that are not confined by the rational cognitivist subject or the interior psychoanalytical subject but occur instead at the level of populations.
Restarting from shameful places…
Tracing how shame is internalized by some and externalized by others illuminates which populations are included as moral citizens and which populations are exposed to public scrutiny and excludable from state protection. Attention on both the flexibility of shame that moves across and the thickness of shame that clusters on different populations can highlight whose shame becomes valuable or profitable over whose bodies. It can also demonstrate which processes of knowledge production are accumulated by the evidence of risk and pathologies and thus ‘‘stuck’’ with stigma. Drawing from Tomkins, I argue that the approach to shame may elicit a sense of curiosity at the levels of the body and epistemology—the empathetic and desiring capacity of shameful bodily encounters and the intimate relationality between the two seemingly antagonistic sites of scholarly production. To start somewhere anew from the risk-oriented mental health discourses and the rapid normalization of queer desire, I propose that the queer strategy in psychology is precisely to undo the binarisms between shame and pride, health and pathology, and assimilation and dissidence. Undoing binarism involves becoming curious about the fabricated oppositional sites of beginning and end, seeing the circulation of affect between subjects and objects, and finding movement in how populations are displaced and replaced. Curiosity elicits a strong desire to learn and engage with unusual objects of the bounded scientific discipline. In the case of psychology, it has the potential to bring shame back to the public as a politically charged and productive affect for queer theorizing.
References Ahmed, S. 2015. The cultural politics of emotion, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Blackman, L. 2011. Affect, performance and queer subjectivities. Cultural Studies 25(2): 183–199. Blackman, L., J. Cromby, D. Hook, D. Papadopoulos, and V. Walkerdine. 2008. Creating subjectivities. Subjectivity 22(1): 1. Blackman, L., and C. Venn. 2010. Affect. Body & Society 16(1): 7–28. Blackman, L., and V. Walkerdine. 2001. Mass hysteria: Critical psychology and media studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Broucek, F.J. 1982. Shame and its relationship to early narcissistic developments. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 63(3): 369–378. Brown, G. 2012. Homonormativity: A metropolitan concept that denigrates ‘‘ordinary’’ gay lives. Journal of Homosexuality 59(7): 1065–1072. Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cass, V. 1979. Homosexual identity formation: A theoretical model. Journal of Homosexuality 4(3): 219–235. Clarke, V., S.J. Ellis, E. Peel, and D.W. Riggs. 2010. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer psychology: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, V., and E. Peel (eds.). 2007. Out in psychology: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer perspectives. West Sussex: Wiley. Clough, P.T., and J. Halley (eds.). 2007. The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham: Duke University Press. Clough, P.T., and C. Willse. 2011. Beyond biopolitics: Essays on the governance of life and death. Durham: Duke University Press. Cover, R. 2016. Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: Unliveable lives? New York: Routledge. Coyle, A.E., and C.E. Kitzinger. 2002. Lesbian and gay psychology: New perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.
W. Liu Diamond, L.M. 2003. New paradigms for research on heterosexual and sexual minority development. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 32: 490–498. Diamond, L.M. 2008. Female bisexuality from adolescence to adulthood: Results from a 10-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology 44(1): 5. Duggan, L. 2002. The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neoliberalism. In Materialising democracy: Towards a revitalized cultural politics, ed. R. Castronovo, and D.D. Nelson, 175–194. Durham: Duke University Press. Eng, D.L. 2010. The feeling of kinship: Queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. Durham: Duke University Press. Fausto-Sterling, A. 2000. Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Ferguson, R.A., and G.K. Hong. 2012. The sexual and racial contradictions of neoliberalism. Journal of Homosexuality 59(7): 1057–1064. Fine, M. 2012. Troubling calls for evidence: A critical race, class and gender analysis of whose evidence counts. Feminism & Psychology 22(1): 3–19. Foucault, M. 1978. The history of sexuality, vol. 1, An introduction. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Frost, D.M., and I.H. Meyer. 2009. Internalized homophobia and relationship quality among lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Journal of Counseling Psychology 56(1): 97. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Greco, M., and P. Stenner (eds.). 2013. Emotions and social theory: A social science reader. London: Routledge. Halberstam, J. 2005. Shame and white gay masculinity. Social Text 84–85(3–4): 219–233. Halperin, D.M., and V. Traub (eds.). 2009. Gay shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hanhardt, C.B. 2013. Safe space: Gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence. Durham: Duke University Press. Hatzenbuehler, M.L. 2009. How does sexual minority stigma ‘‘get under the skin’’? A psychological mediation framework. Psychological bulletin 135(5): 707–730. Hegarty, P. 2011. Becoming curious: An invitation to the special issue on queer theory and psychology. Psychology & Sexuality 2(1): 1–3. Hegarty, P., and S. Massey. 2006. Anti-homosexual prejudice… as opposed to what? Queer theory and the social psychology of anti-homosexual attitudes. Journal of Homosexuality 52(1–2): 47–71. Henriques, J. 2010. The vibrations of affect and their propagation on a night out on Kingston’s dancehall scene. Body & Society 16(1): 57–89. Herek, G.M., R. Chopp, and D. Strohl. 2007. Sexual stigma: Putting sexual minority health issues in context. In The health of sexual minorities, 171–208. New York: Springer. Hochschild, A.R. 1983. The managed heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. James, W. 1890. The principles of psychology. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Johnson, K. 2012. ‘How very dare you!’ Shame, insult and contemporary representations of queer subjectivities. Subjectivity 5(4): 416–437. Johnson, K. 2015. Sexuality: A psychosocial manifesto. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kitzinger, C. 1987. The social construction of lesbianism. London: Sage. Kitzinger, C., and S. Wilkinson. 2004. Social advocacy for equal marriage: The politics of ‘‘rights’’ and the psychology of ‘‘mental health’’. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 4(1): 173–194. Lange, C. 1985/1922. The emotions. Trans. I.A. Haupt. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. Liptak, A. 2015. Supreme court ruling makes same-sex marriage a right nationwide. The New York Times, June 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html. Love, H. 2009. Feeling backward. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lutz, C.A., and L.E. Abu-Lughod. 1990. Language and the politics of emotion: Studies in emotion and social interaction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Maslow, A.H. 1943. A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review 50(4): 370–396. Massumi, B. 2015. Politics of affect. Oxford: Wiley. McDermott, E., K. Roen, and J. Scourfield. 2008. Avoiding shame: Young LGBT people, homophobia and self-destructive behaviours. Culture, Health & Sexuality 10(8): 815–829. Meyer, I.H. 1995. Minority stress and mental health in gay men. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 36(1): 38–56.
Restarting from shameful places… Meyer, I.H., and L. Dean. 1998. Internalized homophobia, intimacy, and sexual behavior among gay and bisexual men. In Stigma and sexual orientation: Understanding prejudice against lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Psychological perspectives on lesbian and gay issues, vol. 4, ed. G.M. Herek, 160–186. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication. Meyer, I.H. 2003. Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin 129: 674–697. Minton, H.L. 1997. Queer theory historical roots and implications for psychology. Theory & Psychology 7(3): 337–353. Moon, J. 2009. Gay shame and the politics of identity. In Gay shame, eds. D.M. Halperin and V. Traub, 357–368. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mun˜oz, J.E. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Munt, S. 2008. Queer attachments: The cultural politics of shame. Hampshire: Ashgate. Paige, R.U. 2005. In Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, Incorporated, for the legislative year 2004. Minutes of the meeting of the Council of Representatives July 28 & 30, 2004, Honolulu, HI. http://www.apa.org/about/policy (retrieved November 18, 2004). Perez, H. 2005. You can have my brown body and eat it, too! Social Text 23(3–4 84–85): 171–191. Probyn, E. 2005. Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, J. 2009. Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Puar, J. 2007. Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham: Duke University Press. Richardson, D. 2005. Desiring sameness? The rise of a neoliberal politics of normalization. Antipode 37: 515–535. Riggs, D. 2007. Queer theory and its future in psychology: Exploring issues of race privilege. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1(1): 39–52. Savin-Williams, R.C. 2001. A critique of research on sexual-minority youths. Journal of Adolescence 24: 5–13. Sedgwick, E.K. 2003. Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E.K., and A. Frank (eds.). 1995. Shame and its sisters: A Silvan Tomkins’ reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Stenner, P. 2004. Is autopoietic systems theory alexithymic? Luhmann and the socio-psychology of emotions. Soziale Systeme 10(1): 159–185. Sycamore, M.B. 2004. Gay shame: from queer autonomous space to direct action extravaganza. In That’s revolting!: Queer strategies for resisting assimilation, 237–262). New York: Soft Skull Press. Tomkins, S.S. 1962. Affect, imagery, consciousness: Vol. I: The positive affect. New York: Springer. Tomkins, S.S. 1963. Affect, imagery, consciousness: Vol. II: The negative affect. New York: Springer. Troiden, R.R. 1988. Gay and lesbian identity: A sociological analysis. Dix Hills: General Hall. Valentine, D. 2007. Imagining transgender: An ethnography of a category. Durham: Duke University Press. Warner, M. 2000. The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weiss, M.D. 2008. Gay shame and BDSM pride: Neoliberalism, privacy, and sexual politics. Radical History Review 100(Winter): 10–37. Young, I.M. 1990. Justice and politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wen Liu is a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As a multidisciplinary scholar, she draws on queer theory, affect theory, diasporic studies, and critical psychology in her research. She is a scholar–activist in LGBTQ and critical race studies and currently teaching at Sarah Lawrence College.
