Cody
“And yet I can’t claim for the twinned ambitions behind this demonstration the supposedly clean distinctions between constative and performative, or between reference and embodiment. Few words, after all, could be more performative in the Austinian sense than ‘‘shame’’: ‘‘Shame on you,’’ ‘‘For shame,’’ or just ‘‘Shame!’’, the locutions that give sense to the word, do not describe or refer to shame but themselves confer it. At the same time, our ‘‘smuggling’’ activity of embodiment, however self-referential, could boast of no autonomy from the oblique circuits of representation. At least because a majority of our smuggling-intent bodies were not themselves black, many of us who had so much need to make a new space for black queer representation were haplessly embroiled in the processes of reference: reference to other bodies standing beside our own, to the words on our placards, to what we could only hope would be the sufficiently substantial sense—if, indeed, even we understood it rightly—of our own intent.” Strike-Out Poem of Eve Sedgwick [1]
“shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance. I mean the theatrical performance. Performance interlines shame as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though importantly it is those things. Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between intro version and extro version, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and— performativity.” Strike-Out Poem of Eve Sedgwick [4]
[1] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 32
[4] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 38
