“The Shame of Being a Man”?: Masculinity and Shamefulness in Peter Ho Davies’s A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself (2021)

Ángela Rivera Izquierdo
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Abstract

Often drawing on a misogynistic psychoanalytical tradition that perpetuates gender stereotypes, guilt has generally been considered a “masculinised” affect, while shame has often been “feminised,” apparently causing men and women to write shame differently. Scholars have often concluded that while women tend to write themselves out of shame, men have frequently written shame in abstract philosophical terms, displaced it onto female bodies or tried to coin glory from it. These alleged differences between men’s and women’s writing in/about shame have been taken as an indicator that shame organises women’s personal sense of self but is never the baseline condition of being a man. However, this article proposes that Peter Ho Davies’s A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself (2021), a narrative about the aftermath of an abortion, can be read as an exploration of the shame of being a man in contemporary postfeminist society. The text investigates the legitimacy of the shame experienced by privileged subjects and demonstrates that the pro-feminist stance of its author/protagonist goes beyond mere imposture. In his exploration of male shamefulness, Davies’s writing aligns itself with the criticised female (or feminised) tradition of “oversharing” and vindicates the feminist adage that “the personal is political.”
"男人的耻辱" ?:彼得·何·戴维斯《别人告诉你的关于你自己的谎言》(2021)中的阳刚之气和无耻
通常利用厌恶女性的精神分析传统来延续性别刻板印象,内疚通常被认为是一种“男性化”的情感,而羞耻通常被认为是“女性化”的情感,显然导致男性和女性对羞耻的描述不同。学者们经常得出这样的结论:女性倾向于把自己写出来,而男性则经常用抽象的哲学术语来写羞耻,把它转移到女性身上,或者试图从中获得荣耀。这些所谓的男性和女性关于羞耻的写作差异被认为是一种指标,表明羞耻组织了女性的个人自我意识,但从来不是作为男人的基本条件。然而,这篇文章提出,彼得·何·戴维斯的《某人告诉你的关于你自己的谎言》(2021),一个关于堕胎后果的叙述,可以被解读为对当代后女权主义社会中作为一个男人的羞耻的探索。文章调查了特权主体所经历的羞耻的合法性,并表明作者/主人公的女权主义立场不仅仅是装模作样。在他对男性羞耻感的探索中,戴维斯的作品与被批评的“过度分享”的女性(或女性化)传统保持一致,并证明了女权主义者的格言“个人就是政治”。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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