Shame on who? : experiential and theoretical accounts of the constitution of women's shame within abusive intimate relationships : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University
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Date
2009
Open Access Location
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Massey University
Abstract
This feminist project explores the experiential accounts of twenty-five women who have
lived through abuse within their intimate relationships. Their stories, gathered through a
series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews intended to elicit accounts of resilience
were saturated with emotion-talk, especially shame-talk. To address questions of the
relationship between these accounts and theoretical accounts of abuse, and shame the
women’s texts were engaged in an analytic dialogue with feminist knowledges of abuse
against women, Erving Goffman’s sociological understandings of shame, stigma and
mortification of the self, Thomas Scheff’s sociological theory of shame and social bonds,
and feminist poststructuralist understandings around the constitution of human
subjectivity. These conversations enabled development of a conceptual representation of
the special and highly specific form of social bonding experienced by victims of abuse
within intimate relationships. This bonding begins with processes of mortification of the
self, the gradual erosion of a sense of self through the systematic imposition of various
shaming and shameful actions. These processes take place within a specific social context
created through the constitutive power of dominant discourses of gender, heterosexual
coupledom, matrimony and motherhood which work to shape the lives of individual
women. Because of the specific ways in which these discourses currently operate within
Aotearoa New Zealand they result in the constitution of a narrow range of tightly
prescribed subject positions available to victims of intimate partner abuse. This analysis
leads to an argument that women’s inability to ‘do’ motherhood or intimate partnership in
line with dominant discourses of mothering and relationships (because these simply
cannot be achieved within an abusive context), opens them to the debilitating effects of
shame. Shame, both actual and threatened, promotes silence, isolation and dangerous
private spaces as women seek to protect themselves from its painful experience. I argue
that it is therefore crucial to promote the availability of discursive positioning for women
living through abuse which offers non-shaming and realistic choices.
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Keywords
Abused women, Intimate partner abuse, Shame, Stigma