Writing about Mill's The Subjection of Women, Martha Nussbaum expresses her disappointment that the book lacks a theoretical chapter exploring “new rules” for marriages, alternative life styles and “experiments in living” (2010: 143). Although Mill was queer because he condemned the tyranny of the social norms over eccentric individuals, Nussbaum believes he was not “queer enough” because he was silent about many experiments that were going on at the time. Like many feminists (Annas 1977; Okin 1979; Eisenstein 1981), Nussbaum claims that the argument of The Subjection of Women is not radical enough. Mill's reluctance to ask men to participate in child rearing and his failure to imagine women's work opportunities stemmed from his conservatism. Mill was silent on radical gender projects because he shared a deep attachment to “the orderly forms of Victorian life” (Nussbaum 2010: 142).

In this chapter, I propose to rethink Nussbaum's assumption about the inherent conservatism in the philosopher's silences. Nussbaum is not unique in thinking that silence, as opposed to speaking out, is a conservative gesture. Here I utilize the counter-figure of disturbing silence to contest the demand to always speak out about sexual injustices. This figure reconceptualizes shame as an interruption of norms instead of constituting a stand-in for an undemocratic disciplinary affect. Disturbing silence is the first trope that I deploy to change a contemporary view about shame as negative and restrictive. To further this genealogical project, I argue that disturbing silences open up a space to live a life that unsettles normalized sexuality.

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler claims that her work challenges a common assumption in liberal thought that one simply needs to oppose political power in order to become liberated. She analyzes the social and psychological formation of the subject and argues, in a Foucauldian vein, that power is not just “what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings we are” (1997a: 2). Differently put, for Butler we become political subjects as we become subjected and subordinated to social and political dominant power.

Her argument has strong implications for a theory of political agency. Rather than perceiving political action only as refusing conventional political norms, as in, for instance, Rosa Parks's refusal to sit in the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, we can understand Parks's actions as generated by a set of conditions that preceded her intervention. Parks's actions had an enduring impact because they came from a woman who was perceived as having integrity and honesty. Her image as a hardworking black person helped the cause of black civic activism. Had she been seen as lazy and dishonest, the impact of her gesture of civil disobedience would have been different. Rosa Parks's act of resistance was a performative intervention. It was enabled by conventional racial assumptions even as she contested such assumptions and disrupted the normative order of Southern racism. Parks did not oppose racial discrimination in a vacuum; ideological and racial conditions provided the circumstances for her to act as a decent black woman and to contest the racist definitions of blackness. Her disruptive intervention was made possible by norms that constituted her as a viable political subject.

Power, in Butler's understanding of the term, is constituted by a constitutive tension. Political agency—and the possibility of an emancipatory politics—is inherently marked by a double bind. On the one hand, we are formed by power because power offers the condition of the subject's possibility and articulates its formation. Without previous conventions about social and linguistic existence, the subject would not exist.

In a speech given on November 20, 1871, in what was “the fi rst free love lecture presented to Northeast audiences ranging from 2,500 to 4,000,” Victoria Woodhull embraced the label of “free lover” which had been conferred on her, so she could resignify its meaning in a positive light (Frisken 2004: 126). Woodhull was the most prominent advocate of free love in the United States during the nineteenth century. In her speech, she asserted that she had “an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom [she] may” and “to change that love every day if [she] please[d]” (Woodhull in Carpenter 2010: 52). Her defense of free love appealed to the right to privacy, which she borrowed from John Stuart Mill's famous defense of individual rights in On Liberty.

However, in addition to defending her position by drawing on her constitutional right to free speech, she then executed an unexpected move by reversing the accepted meaning of an injurious term—free lover—and transforming it into a term with positive connotations. Because the term free lover was used with the intention to harm, Woodhull's intention was to change a slur into a performative assertion of power. Although Woodhull pointed out that free lover operated as a shaming interpellation, she claimed that her enemies were unaware that the word was “handed over to us already coined” by associating the two most beautiful words “in the English language,” free and love (Woodhull in Carpenter 2010: 53).

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.

On May 9, 1870, Josephine Butler was preoccupied with the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts, which regulated prostitution in Victorian England. The CD Acts consisted of three laws passed by the British Parliament between 1864 and 1869, which affected the lives of many women and were opposed by many women's rights activists. Among feminists such as Florence Nightingale, James Stansfeld, James Stuart, Elisabeth Wolstenholme, and John Stuart Mill, Butler was the law's fiercest opponent. Because Butler argued that women needed to be protected from a piece of “vicious” and “evil” legislation, she became the most vocal defender of the prostitutes.

In a letter to the editor of The Shield, the magazine of the Anti- Contagious Diseases Acts Association, Butler made the case that the laws regulating prostitution had “demoralizing, brutalizing and oppressive” effects (Jordan and Sharp 2003b: 86). By channeling the voice of the prostitutes, she deployed shame rhetorically to show that upper class men were participating in the spread of prostitution. She strategically appealed to the threat of public humiliation. Butler used the confession of a woman to underscore the sexual involvement of an unnamed magistrate in prostitution. While Butler did not disclose the name of the magistrate, she gestured at the possibility that she might use such information to expose him as a hypocrite. Her implied threat was that all the magistrates in Kent might be in the same situation, and that they themselves could subsequently be exposed for their misdeeds, to the extent that they would have to endure public shame of their own.