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Femininity, Shame, and Redemption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Bonnie Mann
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Abstract

At a time when some modicum of formal gender equality has been won in many late‐capitalist societies of the West, what explains the persistence of practices that extract labor and value from women and girls while granting a “surplus” of value to men and boys? Gendered shame is a central mechanism of the apparatus that secures the continued subordination of women across a number of class and race contexts in the mediatized, late‐capitalist West. Focusing on the story of Amanda Todd, two forms of shame are distinguished. “Ubiquitous shame” is that shame that accrues to feminine existence as such, and is structured in relation to a futural temporality of redemption. “Unbounded shame” is a brute form of value‐extraction that has found its ecological niche in social media—and destroys all futural aspirations.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Gender and the Politics of Shame , Summer 2018 , pp. 402 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

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