I started this book with the observation that shame is a widespread feeling in our neoliberal academia. While this feeling often produces a deep sense of anxiety and inferiority, I sought in this book to sketch the possibility of a queer political theory that may constitute an alternative to (only) feeling powerless. Reimagining queer political theory can start from understanding and illuminating how many of us are already talking back to police officers. My effort in this study was to show that shame disturbs the soul, or the already known architecture of the prison. But talking back to the police occurs—and occurred historically—in modalities that are still unknown. These situations are made unknown by a deep investment in forgetting how shame and its capacity to provoke activism have a history. Currently, shame is constructed in a presentist mode—this is what shame is—because capitalism blocks any account of unstable histories that led to our conception of affects and sexuality. Yet queer genealogy refuses this idea of a “thick” present which seduces us into thinking that shame does not have a history. The idea that shame feels only in particular ways is a consequence of the neoliberal investment in the value of the present.

To contest a current view of shame, this book deployed three counter-figures to enact the disruptive potential of this affect. They emerged from feeling “irritably attached” while reading queer and feminist political theory (Davis 2009: 2). Because the terms of my experience are historical and collective, I became curious about the ways in which this affect had been policed and controlled. To engage in this investigation, I had to analyze the terms of what counted as shame in contemporary queer feminism.