I consider the trope of “bad feelings”, set out in this lecture series, to explore the dynamics of shame in contemporary American women’s fiction. Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1996) map the consequences of stereotypical constructions of gendered, raced and classed Others as failures in a shame-phobic society, where ‘those who are stigmatized as different or those who fail to meet social standards of success are made to feel inferior, deficient or both’. (J. Brooks Bouson 2001: 101) Here Sara Ahmed’s critical stance on ‘bad feelings’ can be productively applied to how shame and rage have contributed to rendering structural injustices visible, whereby [...] it is the very assumption that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed that allows historical forms of injustice to disappear. [...] If injustice does have unhappy effects then the story does not end there. (Ahmed, 2010: 50) Debilitating shame resulting from traumatic abuse exacerbates the ‘unhappy effects’ adhering to these young girls of ‘poor white trash’ and black urban ‘welfare’ poor backgrounds. The narratives stage shame and rage as ‘bad feelings’ as complex emotional constellations within families and cultural contexts necessary in revisiting the intersections of racial, gender and class injustices, envisioning fraught modes of citizenship and belonging.
Originally from Singapore, she holds a PhD from the University of York, England, and has taught in the Postcolonial and North American Studies departments at the universities of Münster, Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main. Vogt-William was Interim Professor for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the English and American Studies Department, Humboldt University, Berlin from 2014 to 2017, where she taught literary and cultural studies. She is currently working on her second book on cultural representations of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures at the University of Augsburg. Vogt-William is the Director of the Gender and Diversity Office with the Africa Multiple Cluster (funded by the German Research Council) at the University of Bayreuth.
