Embodied Shame

Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women's Writings

Author: J. Brooks Bouson
ISBN: 9781438427287

How does physical, emotional, and sexual abuse shape women’s perceptions of their bodies and identities? How are women’s psyches affected by the sexual, racial, and cultural denigration that occurs when women’s bodies are represented as defective, spoiled, damaged, or dirtied? Embodied Shame skillfully explores these questions in the context of recent writings by North American women, contributing to work in shame theory and to feminist analyses of the intersections of theories of the body, affect, emotions, narrative, and trauma. By examining popular contemporary fictional and nonfictional texts, including Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, J. Brooks Bouson illuminates how deeply entrenched bodily shame continues to operate in contemporary culture, even as we celebrate the supposed freeing of the female body

Publisher: SUNY Press
Publish Date: 2010-07-02

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Feminist, Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Social Science / Women's Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Psychology/Emotional Health)