How to bring your daughter up to be a feminist killjoy: Shame, accountability and the necessity of paranoid reading in Lene Kaaberbøl’s The Shamer Chronicles

TY - JOUR

T1 - How to bring your daughter up to be a feminist killjoy

T2 - Shame, accountability and the necessity of paranoid reading in Lene Kaaberbøl’s The Shamer Chronicles

AU - Bissenbakker, Mons

PY - 2018/2/1

Y1 - 2018/2/1

N2 - This article takes The Shamer Chronicles, the teenage fantasy series by the Danish author Lene Kaaberbøl, as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical thought experiment. It shows how Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy allows us to link shame and paranoid/reparative reading with the figure of the feminist killjoy. The Chronicles can be read as a meditation on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic figure who insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination. The article elaborates postcolonial criticisms of shame theories, showing how racialisation makes a difference in which forms of shame are marked as (un)acceptable. Rather than dismiss shame theories altogether, the article explores how such criticisms can be integrated into, and thus further qualify, a critical shame reading of The Chronicles.

AB - This article takes The Shamer Chronicles, the teenage fantasy series by the Danish author Lene Kaaberbøl, as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical thought experiment. It shows how Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy allows us to link shame and paranoid/reparative reading with the figure of the feminist killjoy. The Chronicles can be read as a meditation on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic figure who insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination. The article elaborates postcolonial criticisms of shame theories, showing how racialisation makes a difference in which forms of shame are marked as (un)acceptable. Rather than dismiss shame theories altogether, the article explores how such criticisms can be integrated into, and thus further qualify, a critical shame reading of The Chronicles.

KW - Affect

KW - fantasy literature

KW - feminism

KW - feminist killjoys

KW - paranoid reading

KW - shame

U2 - 10.1177/1350506813519983

DO - 10.1177/1350506813519983

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1350-5068

VL - 25

SP - 102

EP - 115

JO - European Journal of Women's Studies

JF - European Journal of Women's Studies

IS - 1

ER -