Overview

Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was used to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But certain forms of shame were also embraced by 19th-century activists in an attempt to reverse entrenched power dynamics. Bogdan Popa brings together Ranciere's techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists denaturalised conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the 20th century.

Full Product Details

Author:   Bogdan Popa (Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics, Oberlin College)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 23.40cm
ISBN:  

9781474419826

ISBN 10:   1474419828
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   09 May 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsForeword: ""But Officer..."" Part I: Shame and Queer Political Theory 1.Queer Practices, or How to Unmoor Feminism from Liberal Feminism The Argument What is Shame? Queer Genealogy Queer Practices and Liberal Feminism Political Theory and The Police Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists? The structure of the book 2. How to do Queer Genealogy with J.S. Mill How to ""Part company with the world"" Mill in drag, shame, and silence ""Barbarians"" and ""lunatics"": harsh language and Mill’s rhetoric Conclusion Part II: Counter-Figures 3. Disturbing Silence: Mill and the Radicals at The Monthly Repository Unitarian Radicals and performativity Beyond liberal shame Mill’s disturbing silence and the Fox Affair Conclusion 4. De-policing Humiliation: Political Rhetoric in Feminist Activism The CD Acts and Josephine Butler’s rhetoric of humiliation Mill’s Testimony against the CD Acts and the policing of feminist activism Conclusion 5. Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free Love Woodhull’s shaming and sexual transgressions Shame as dispossession The Police and how to close the lines of escape Conclusion Part III: Queering Shame 6. Does queer political theory have a future? ReferencesIndex

Reviews

Bogdan Popa's exquisite investigation gifts us with a newfound appreciation for the loving, quotidian, and sometimes snarky radicalism of our Victorian forebears. In our shame, shows Popa, we - theorists, feminists, and other weirdos committed to equality and social transformation - are in the queerest of company.--Joseph Fischel, Yale University

Bogdan Popa’s exquisite investigation gifts us with a newfound appreciation for the loving, quotidian, and sometimes snarky radicalism of our Victorian forebears. In our shame, shows Popa, we - theorists, feminists, and other weirdos committed to equality and social transformation - are in the queerest of company. -- Joseph Fischel, Yale University

Author Information

Bogdan Popa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. He has been published in the Annual Review of Critical Psychology and contributed chapters to books including Cosmopolitanism and the Legacies of Dissent (edited by Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2014). This is his first book.

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