This introductory chapter clarifies the goals and the method of the book. My first claim here is that a genealogical approach pushes political theory away from traditional liberal models about politics. In doing genealogy, I put Jacques Rancière's work in conversation with queer theory and challenge a liberal feminist conception of shame, which understands shame as being primarily negative and dangerous for politics. In turn, I conceptualize shame as a political act which interrupts a given hierarchy of power and social roles. As such, shame articulates a wrong, disrupts an uninterrogated allegiance to a hierarchical identity, and creates the scene of a disagreement. My second claim is that I shift a conventional perception about political agency by rethinking the origins of Anglo-American feminism. Rather than highlighting the nineteenth-century contributions to a liberal conception of agency, I illuminate three counter-figures, disturbing silences, performative slurs, and non-conventional relationships, that challenge a contemporary brand of activism. I categorize these figures as nineteenth century queer practices and explain why shame functions as a political interruption of the liberal order.

The Argument

This is a work of political theory that aims to rethink the relationship between shame and politics. I draw from Jacques Rancière's philosophy of politics, queer feminist theory, Michel Foucault's practices of freedom, as well as from the actions of nineteenth-century theorists such as John Stuart Mill, to imagine interventions that have the potential to open up situations that are currently considered blocked and unchangeable. The goal of this book is to imagine a new kind of queer political theory and, in doing so, to change the conventional perspective on shame as a negative and bad emotion for political action. Shame, I argue, has a disturbing capacity to introduce an order of equality as an antidote to the police. To modify a widespread perception about shame, I challenge various feminist and queer theories that police this affect, by which I mean that they contain and restrict shame's capacity for political action.