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'Bogdan Popa's exquisite investigation gifts us with a newfound appreciation for the loving, quotidian, and sometimes snarky radicalism of our Victorian forebears. In our shame, shows Popa, we - theorists, feminists, and other weirdos committed to equality and social transformation - are in the queerest of company.' Joseph Fischel, Yale University A radical reframing of shame as a vital impetus of queer feminist activism Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was utilized to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by political activists? How has it been used to reverse entrenched power dynamics? This book brings together Rancière's techniques of disrupting inequality and a queer curiosity for the performativity of shame to illuminate how nineteenth-century activists denaturalized conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the twentieth century. Bogdan Popa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and Affiliate Faculty at the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Institute, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA Cover image: Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!, Thomas Nast, 1872. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1982-6
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword: "But Officer..."
Part I: Shame and Queer Political Theory1.Queer Practices, or How to Unmoor Feminism from Liberal Feminism
- The Argument
- What is Shame?
- Queer Genealogy
- Queer Practices and Liberal Feminism
- Political Theory and The Police
- Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists?
- The structure of the book
2. How to do Queer Genealogy with J.S. Mill
- How to "Part company with the world"
- Mill in drag, shame, and silence
- "Barbarians" and "lunatics": harsh language and Mill's rhetoric
- Conclusion
Part II: Counter-Figures3. Disturbing Silence: Mill and the Radicals at
The Monthly Repository
- Unitarian Radicals and performativity
- Beyond liberal shame
- Mill's disturbing silence and the Fox Affair
- Conclusion
4. De-policing Humiliation: Political Rhetoric in Feminist Activism
- The CD Acts and Josephine Butler's rhetoric of humiliation
- Mill's Testimony against the CD Acts and the policing of feminist activism
- Conclusion
5. Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free Love
- Woodhull's shaming and sexual transgressions
- Shame as dispossession
- The Police and how to close the lines of escape
- Conclusion
Part III: Queering Shame6. Does queer political theory have a future?
References
Index
About the author
Bogdan Popa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. He has been published in the
Annual Review of Critical Psychology and contributed chapters to books including
Cosmopolitanism and the Legacies of Dissent (edited by Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2014).
Summary
Bogdan Popa brings together Ranciere's techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists embraced certain forms of shame to denaturalise conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender..
