Queer Gnosis

by Troy Williams

Kathryn Bond Stockton marks the queer-edge of our culture. As the director of the University of Utah’s Gender Studies Department, she is quite simply a genre unto herself.  Kathryn’s new book, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer explores the subterranean passages of Shame.  She deftly uncovers the way shame has shaped the identities of queer and black communities in literature and film. She elegantly undresses the artists who crawl, sweat and pull themselves through the dark underbelly of guilt and debasement. Her work is both invitation and seduction.  I sat down with Kathryn to talk dirty.

Troy Williams: After reading your book I’ve become convinced that we’ve given “shame” a bad name.

Kathryn Stockton: Hopefully so.  We don’t want to loose that part of shame.  Where would we be the shame that didn’t have a bad name attached?

TW: Exactly. How would you define shame?

KS: Well, being an English professor, I always run to the dictionary to make sure I’m not making things up.  The dictionary tells us that shame is a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment or unworthiness, and often shame comes from enforcement.  Which of course queer and black people know a good deal about.

TW: You’re book is counter-intuitive because you are embracing shame. That’s a different direction. Most of us want to run from shame and validate ourselves.

KS: Growing up as a queer person, I spent my life trying to flee shame along with everybody else.  I know a good deal about wanting to turn places of shame toward dignity and pride.  But I began to think there was something intellectually dishonest about that.  There is something about growing up with such an intense sense of shame that you learn to be an expert, and you learn to make things of shame.  Everybody does that.  Shame is a fundamental part of human life.  The wish to quickly be done with it doesn’t give the intellectual and emotional curiosity that it might deserve.

TW: Okay.  Well then, for people who belong to different minority communities, where can we begin to look for the value of shame?

KS: Think about the famous moments in the late1960’s: black pride — the notion that black is beautiful.  There is a lot to learn from that particular moment — of embracing the very thing that you are supposedly denigrated for, and see that there is actually beauty to be found there. Take a butch girl growing up who loves masculine clothes.   This is very much a story about shame.  One of the fundamental things from my childhood was the fright of being in female clothes and literally coming home from church and wanting to run as fast as possible from the car into the house so that my little boyfriends next door wouldn’t see me in paten-leather shoes.  It seems odd that something so trivial, so much on the surface could be such an intense marker of shame.  But I think that’s something that black folks know a lot about. Something as benign as skin color being the major marker of one’s shame, enforced obviously by other people around you.  For a butch girl growing up, this intense relationship to female clothes is a fascinating story of shame.  How odd, that a butch girl might feel unbelievably shamed in female clothes but be completely drawn to women in female clothes (a dynamic that obviously straight men know a lot about).  What’s that about?  How can I be attracted to the very thing that on me felt like an intense scene of shame? But put it just over there, on another girl, and I can sense it’s fantastic beauty.  So in a very strange way shame is part of this whole scene of desire.  And to take shame out of the equation is literally to misunderstand the states of our own attraction.

TW: Is there redemption in shame?

KS: Redemption is a funny term.  And this is what I think is critical about Pulp Fiction.  It reminds us of just how violent redemption can be.  Just think of Christ on the cross.  Redemption can’t undo anything.  It pays for it by adding another scene of violence.  When Butch saves Marsellus and is forgiven for his sins for stopping the rape, he’s forgiven, but nothing can stop the fact that Marsellus was raped.    You can’t turn the clock back on American Jim Crow history.  It’s there, it’s part of our history and it’s part of what sticks to the sign of “black” still.  Questions of slavery haunt the signifier of African Americans in a highly significant way.  So Tarantino is playing with the notion that redemption does not mean undoing or erasing, but actually feeling the force of wounds that cannot be undone.  It’s a quite orthodox definition of redemption.  I think this is true for gay people too.  If you grow up with certain aspects of shame attached to your identity, you are never going to loose them fully.  But you add other layers.  It becomes more textured. It’s the layering and the texturing that I am after in this book.  Shame is one of our most important layers.  It’s not going to go away. Indeed there is something toxic about straight masculinity, in the way it gets talked about in the public domain.   Nothing is more virginal than masculinity.  Nothing is more fragile or fearful.  Why does a man need to beat up another man wearing a dress?  Nobody is putting him in a dress.  That man in a dress does not touch him.  But somehow he feels like his sign is being messed with.

TW: The danger of contamination.

KS: Exactly.  What’s important about shame is that it’s a shield or a health-giving measure to help us live with impurity. Because nothing is more toxic than purity.

Qcast our complete hour-long interview here:
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame (52:55 min.)