Conclusion: The Shame is (Not) Over

The Conclusion of Writing Shame reflects back on the key discussions of the book: the origins and manifestations of a contemporary ‘shame culture’; the persistence of shame and the challenges that it poses for writers; the formal and generic disruptions involved in the writing of shame; the uses and limitations of shared feelings of shame as a basis for political action or solidarity; the uses of shame as a tool of analysis, within and beyond queer theory and feminism; the fraught relationship between shame, pleasure and spectacle; and above all, the particular imbrication of shame and femininity, of shame and women’s supposed sexual impropriety – the central argument here, that shame’s role in femininity is constitutive, not merely regulatory. In addition, the Conclusion touches briefly on several recent novels and collections of short stories by women authors, revealing therein a continuing preoccupation with questions of desire, sexuality, sexual violence and embodiment, and suggesting that, while shame may not be the central strand, it remains on the edges of all of these considerations of femininity, female desire and women’s bodies within patriarchal cultures.