American Shame

Stigma and the Body Politic

Myra Mendible

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253019868
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America's discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. "An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich." —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality

PART 1

Scarlet Letters: Gender, Race, and Stigma

ONE

Shame before the Law: Affects of Abortion Regulation

Karen Weingarten

Self-possession [did not] liberate the former slave from his or her bonds but rather sought to replace the whip with the guilty contract and the collar with the guilty conscience.

—Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America¹

With each passing year, anti-abortion activists have managed to institute new laws further restricting women’s access to abortion. In March 2013, North Dakota’s governor signed the most far-reaching anti-abortion law yet. He decreed that once a fetal heartbeat is detectable then an abortion is no longer legal. Considering that in most cases a fetal heartbeat can be heard in the sixth week of pregnancy, which is often only a week or two after women discover their pregnancies, the law effectively bans abortion. Arkansas has similarly passed a law that prohibits abortion after the twelfth week of pregnancy, or when a fetal heartbeat can be detected via an abdominal ultrasound. Although these laws will most likely be declared unconstitutional in federal court, they represent anti-abortion activists’ attempt to overturn Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court case that ruled that states could not curtail abortion rights if they placed an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions, and Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that prohibited states from outlawing abortion before twenty-four weeks of pregnancy. In the meantime, these laws, while continuing to limit women’s access to abortion through the legal effects they institute, also work through the shaming rhetoric they produce in order to justify their measures. Not only do these laws claim to save “unborn children,” they are also defended as protecting women from themselves. In other words, anti-abortion lobbyists and legislators argue that if women only understood that they were taking a human life, they would be repelled by their decision to abort. This position patronizes women but also shames them by suggesting that a “real” woman would never be able to abort once she visibly or audibly witnessed the life inside her.²

Although abortion has been legal in the United States since 1973, it is still steeped in shame, in ways that affect how it is both regulated and limited. Almost all relevant Supreme Court cases since Roe v. Wade have made it more difficult for women to obtain abortions. Laws requiring parental notification, waiting periods of twenty-four to seventy-two hours, mandatory counseling, or viewing the fetal ultrasound all work to shame women who choose to have an abortion. Furthermore, although many feminists and women’s organizations hold Roe v. Wade to be sacrosanct, worrying over its potential loss with the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Roberts and the replacement of the pro-abortion Sandra Day O’Connor with Samuel Alito, they elide the problem with the underlying arguments of the case, which actually allow for the limiting of reproductive rights, particularly through their foundations in American legal discourse on the right to privacy. This essay examines how the affect of shame in current abortion discourse places the burden of choice on the individual woman while still making her accountable to societal expectations. The privacy foundation of this pivotal Supreme Court case actually limits women’s access to abortion and other reproductive rights by creating the perfect conditions for shaming, an individualizing and alienating affect.³ In the latter half of this essay, I expand this argument to look at how shame also regulates bodies as populations, and I show how shame is ultimately not only an affect of individualism but also a regulative measure of life en masse, particularly as it works to harden racial classifications. Shame, I suggest, is a perfected technology of control because it invisibly captures the individual in a larger system of disciplinary and regulatory measures.

In the years following World War II, access to abortion was dramatically curtailed for most women across the United States. Although abortion had been illegal in the majority of states since the 1880s, prior to the 1950s government officials rarely prosecuted abortion providers unless death occurred.⁴ However, as the post-war cultural climate shifted, it became more difficult to obtain abortions because of witch hunts that targeted women abortion providers in particular. Many women seeking abortions had to leave the country, if money was available, or risk aborting pregnancies through their own means or in unsanitary conditions. A woman’s only legal option was to testify before a board of doctors that her physical and/or mental health would be severely impaired if she carried the fetus to term. Many women refused to go through this process, finding it shameful to discuss their reproductive health and personal lives in front of strangers, who were almost always male. Instead, they opted for procedures that risked their lives or their ability to reproduce again.

In Mike Leigh’s 2004 film Vera Drake, Vera, a happily married mother of two and a housekeeper for wealthy women, secretly performs illegal abortions, or what she calls “helping young girls out.”⁵ The film, set in England in the 1950s, chronicles several abortion scenes between Vera and these girls, and though we see the girls as scared, lonely, or disdainful, none of them express shame for their choice to transgress the law. In a secondary narrative of the film, Susan, the daughter of one of Vera’s wealthy employers, after being raped by a prospective husband, seeks a legal abortion through the help of a therapist who charges more than £100 and permits the procedure after hearing Susan’s story. Susan, however, is barely able to articulate what happened to her and what she desires. She answers questions through half-finished sentences and pained expressions. She obtains her abortion under sanitary conditions and the auspices of a caring staff of nurses, but she is the only character who has an abortion during the film who is so shamed by her experience that she can barely speak. She is shamed by having to tell her story once to a family friend who she seems to believe will connect her to an abortionist, then again to a gynecologist, and then once again to a therapist. She is asked intimate questions about her sex life, her love life, and her family life in a cold and clinical way. And yet she answers, even though the experience shames her, because it is the only way she can have the legal abortion that will save her life.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in a July 2004 column in The New York Times entitled “Owning Up to Abortion,” challenges the shame Americans associate with abortions,⁶ pointing out that a Viacom-run channel refused to run an episode of a teen soap opera because a character had an abortion, and the popular HBO series Six Feet Under, usually known for its honest depiction of sexual issues, aired a show about abortion that shamed the character choosing to have one. However, the media is not solely to blame, according to Ehrenreich. She cites a website, “A Heartbreaking Choice,” which provides emotional support to women who have aborted fetuses with potential birth defects, that quotes a woman complaining that she had to sit next to “all these girls that did not want their babies.” Ehrenreich critiques women who claim their abortions were “necessary” because through these claims women attempt to position themselves on a higher moral plane, suggesting that their abortions were not really by choice and thus relegating only so-called ordinary abortions to the realm of the shameful. Ehrenreich warns that this position silences over a million American women a year who choose to have an abortion for a variety of personal reasons and not because of the fetus’s potential birth defects; she therefore concludes that this silencing may one day cause all women to lose their right to a legal and safe abortion:

Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this “bad faith,” meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.⁷

Similarly, and perhaps more surprisingly, in the field of English/American literary criticism, there are few articles and books that discuss abortion post–Roe vs. Wade without the shadow of shame. Some critics looking at the trope of abortion relegate it to the confines of symbolism and metaphor, arguing that abortion represents loss or lack, or they justify their investigations through language that equivocates between recognizing the necessity of legal abortion and asserting the implicit shame of choosing to abort. For example, in one of two book-length studies of abortion narratives in American literature, Judith Wilt prefaces her work by explaining, “As a feminist and a Catholic, I believe a woman’s freedom to abort a fetus is a monstrous, a tyrannous, but a necessary freedom in a fallen world.”⁸ The rest of her study examines the ways in which abortion works as a trope for the resistance of male control. Wilt’s argument is infused with precisely the kind of shame that Ehrenreich critiques. Even as Wilt clearly states her position as a pro-choice feminist, she frames her discussion in terms that might make many women faced with the decision to abort cringe. Wilt seems unable to view abortion outside of Catholicism and its categorization of abortion as “monstrous” and “tyrannous.” She chooses what Ehrenreich calls the “fetal position” and what Sartre calls “bad faith” because, even as she proclaims the necessity of a pro-choice position, which she sees as liberatory, she ascribes to that position the very affect that makes it impossible for women to act without feeling shame.

Although I sympathize with Ehrenreich’s stance, I don’t think that simply acknowledging that we have exercised our freedom to abort will guarantee that freedom. Ehrenreich falls into the trap she warns against if she assumes that speaking out, demanding access to abortion under any circumstances, and admitting to having had an abortion is enough to combat the shame associated with it. Instead, as the epigraph to this essay hints, the shame inherent in contemporary American abortion discourse is rooted in the liberal law that claims to protect our right to abortion—rooted in what Saidiya Hartman describes as the “liberal notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation.”⁹ Hartman’s example of slavery may seem to have little relevance to the more contemporary conflict surrounding abortion, but using it as an analogy, I hope to reveal how emancipatory laws may actually create new ways to oppress and repress the newly emancipated subject. To elaborate, Hartman’s work explores how the laws that emancipated slaves after the American Civil War worked to keep former slaves and other African Americans in subservient positions. She examines how emancipated African Americans were made to internalize their subordinated class position through legal discourse that granted their freedom but demanded their second-class status. She turns from looking at how the whip and the collar enslaved Blacks to how the ruling White class maintained that enslavement through psychological and disciplinary means.

Similarly, the turn I make looks past the laws that protect our freedom of choice to how shame ensures that women feel alienated and alone if abortion is what they choose. And, as Hartman suggests, this individualized discipline leads to the regulation of entire populations that must be contained and managed to ensure the maintenance of the status quo.

The 2007 film Juno models how the disciplining force of shame curtails access to abortion.¹⁰ Juno is a sixteen-year-old White girl from a middle-class family, and she seems to have a bright future ahead of her. She’s intelligent, funny, and creative, but she still gets pregnant the first time she has sex with her equally charming boyfriend. Juno considers an abortion, and she even visits an abortion clinic. But once there she encounters her anti-abortion schoolmate chanting outside the door, “All babies want to get borned [sic],” and she tells Juno, “Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails!” Juno walks away from her looking dejected, but she is moved...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: American Shame and the Boundaries of Belonging
• Part 1 Scarlet Letters: Gender, Race, and Stigma
• Part 2 Disciplining the Body Politic: Domestic and Foreign Policy
• Part 3 Bodies on Display: Performing Shame in Visual Arts
• Contributors
• Index