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All About My Mother's Shame

At one level, this paper recounts a joyful day that gives way to the quiet hostility of family relations. In turn this prompts an act of reclamation that gives voice to two men whose stories would otherwise have been lost in familial shame. In trying to understand what we experience as shame, this paper explores the concept by drawing on Lynne Huffer’s exploration of Foucault’s use of the phrase “the hypocrisy of our societies with its halting logics” as places contemporary forms of shame as correlative with Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of the sovereign moral subject. This leads to Rogers to reflect on the social power of “insult” (as originally developed by Didier Eribon) through which shame itself becomes the stigmatized subject. Written in the style of a boy’s own story using the convention of the (auto-) biographical, there is a curious but welcome leap from academic distance and analytic sobriety to some disturbingly strong emotions on the part of Rogers, sliced through with his partner William’s disbelief and, as in the title of the piece, (his) mother’s shame. As one of the first works addressing gay marriage from a philosophic/cultural theory approach, Rogers presents a significant contribution to feminist and queer studies, giving a strong set of analytic and emotional tools to begin to address the persistent problem of familial homophobia.