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

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

This article takes The Shamer Chronicles, the teenage fantasy series by the Danish author Lene Kaaberbol, as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical thought experiment. It shows how Kaaberbol'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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEuropean Journal of Women's Studies
Volume25
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)102-115
Number of pages14
ISSN1350-5068
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2018

    Research areas

  • Affect, fantasy literature, feminism, feminist killjoys, paranoid reading, shame

ID: 201459842