melissaeth.jpgPink is definitely the colour of the month. It’s everywhere. This past weekend included intense bursts of retail therapy, which meant countless encounters with a stunning array of pink products. Pink is contagious. Many good incisive things have been written about what’s wrong with pink marketing strategies, and that’s not what’s on my mind today.

shamelogosmall.jpgEvery time that I walk into the local Safeway, I find myself scanning the pedagogical texts that everywhere litter the walls, windows, and space beside the cash register. The Breast Cancer Awareness campaign posters tell you what you can do to avoid getting breast cancer. Eating 5-10 servings of fruit and vegetables a day is bolded, presumably because that’s something you can do right then and there at Safeway. Spend money, buy a cure, get cancer off your mind right here, right now.

Much to my surprise, in the face of all this pedagogically-motivated reading material, I experience shame. Why, shame? Is it because, in realizing that I am not the intended reader of this material, I feel like I have already failed the test? It’s too late, for me. Which of the ten items on the list did I forget to complete? The text does not address me. It looks right past me. I am outside of the text - marginalia. But all of those are just paranoid readings of the text. It’s actually worse, perhaps. I am the perambulating object lesson, the embodiment of warning - a prognostic signifier for what can go wrong.

Eve Segwick has written some very smart things about shame and breast cancer in A Dialogue on Love, and observes that shame is most intensely experienced at moments where relationality with another is interrupted by estrangement - where the other, or the self as other and non-recognizable, literally seems an unexpected stranger. Shame, she writes, in Touching Feeling, “floods into being as a moment, a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity-constituting identificatory communication. … In interrupting identification, shame too, makes identity.” (p. 37)

Shame, Sedgwick argues, is a peculiarly queer affective relation. And it is in relation to shame that Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative readings is especially helpful. Writing of reparative readings, she suggests that “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. (p. 151)

Today, shame is on my mind. It colours my world, and it suffuses my sense of who I am. Or more to the point, who am I? That I am not quite sure is the genesis of this sense of shame, and the understanding that there is much to be learned here, in this awkward place.