The political use of the negative affects: shame

Abstract

This paper argues that the politics of shame plays an important role in contemporary feminist theory and explores the philosophical background arguments justifying the employment of the negative emotion of shame as a positive resource for political change. It situates the reversal of shame in the political and ethical discourses within the turn from post-modernism to the affect theory in the social sciences during the late 1990s. It highlights the theoretical developments within the feminist theory by pointing to how the thesis about the performativity of gender held by the queer theory undergoes a reinterpretation in terms of emotivity. With a focus on the broad interpretation of hate speech as including theoretical expressions about gender, the essay proceeds to show the grounds on which the emotivist account of gender allows itself to implement a politics of shame to suppress the voices of its contesters, namely the feminists who rethink the relevance of biology in their ontological account of gender and refuse to commit themselves to the view of gender as self-id. By taking a critical position against the absolutist, script-based accounts of intersectionality, the author defends the view that the feminist politics of shame as a form of coercion to support a metaphysical account of gender is not conducive to a rational and pluralistic search for truth and is, ultimately, a politics of violence. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.