‘The Dumb Cunt’s Tale’: Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction

Abstract

Chapter 3 develops arguments from earlier in Writing Shame around the inextricability of femininity and shame, the non-redemptive literary treatment of shame, the formal disruptions produced in the writing of shame, and the ways in which shame seeps into the contexts and processes of writing, reading and critical reception. It does this via readings of three contemporary, female-authored autofictions with a central focus on (female, heterosexual) desire and with a leaning towards literary experiment: Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) and Katherine Angel’s Unmastered (2012). All three texts are discussed as performing and reflecting on acts of self-exposure and states of vulnerability – while also, sometimes, turning that humiliation outwards. All three are read also as complicating the confessional mode via their generic mixing of fiction, memoir, essay and theory. More broadly, the chapter asks what the relationship might be between self-abasement and self-advertisement, and how these texts might work to reveal the structural – not merely personal – nature of shame, as far as women are concerned.