“It left shame in me,lodged in my body”: Representations of shame,gender,and female bodies in selected contemporary South African short stories

Abstract

I offer a feminist literary analysis of gendered representations of shame in selected contemporary South African short stories. The analysis reveals how the dynamics of shaming operate by drawing on social constructions that continue to devalue and denigrate women’s bodies. The female characters’ narratives are littered with “I should haves” and other indications that shame fulfils a powerful disciplinary function that causes women to modify their behaviour and sanction their feelings in a futile quest to avoid shame. I demonstrate that this is a futile endeavour because female characters are bombarded with messages of shame from so many different avenues that it becomes impossible for any of them to emerge unscathed. The shame that they cannot escape resides in their bodies and the article seeks to listen to the corporeal articulations of shame in an attempt to acknowledge a potent, yet often silenced, aspect of women’s daily lived realities.

Over the past few decades, shame has received increasing critical attention, specifically in terms of its powerful disciplinary potential and the “identity work” that it performs (Irvine, 2009: 74). Mary Ann Huckabay (1996: 145) insists that gender is intricately intertwined with shame as she explains that it is “primarily through the experience of shame and the process of shaming that societies construct and control the distribution of differentiated values, roles, affective domains, and points of view to men and to women”. She summarizes her argument by identifying shame as “the primary instrument of gender socialization” (Huckabay, 1996: 145). A number of theorists have teased out the complex ways in which shame resides in bodies. Elspeth Probyn (2000: 14), for instance, describes “shame as very bodily affect” which “is located in, and in relation to the body” (2000: 23) while Elina Reenkola (2005: 101) notes that “[s]hame touches the entire self and is manifested as bodily reactions”. Iris Fodor (1996: 229) suggests “that women live in a field of shame and thus construct their own reality and build their sense of self from ongoing messages and experience that devalue femaleness”. Women’s gendered experiences of their bodies play a crucial role in their daily engagements with manifestations of shame on different levels. Of living as women in a patriarchal society, Wendy Chapkis (1986: 5) contends that “[w]e are like foreigners attempting to assimilate into a hostile culture, our bodies continually threatening to betray our difference”. This article considers how South African women authors represent female characters’ corporeal experiences of shame in two contemporary short story collections, namely Looking for Trouble (2012) by Colleen Higgs and Ride the Tortoise (2013) by Liesl Jobson. By means of a feminist literary analysis, my reading of the selected texts will demonstrate Huckabay’s (1996: 146) contention that “the phenomena and dynamics of gender and shame exist at the boundary between the environment and the self system: they are simultaneously highly charged sociopolitical phenomena and deeply personal and private ground for the experience of self”. The classic feminist insistence that “the personal is political” finds clear expression in these short story writers’ explorations of women’s shame in a variety of South African contexts. This article will follow an interdisciplinary approach and, by drawing on different strands of gender research, it will shed light on the layered shaming to which female characters are subjected in these texts and it will reveal the extent to which such shame becomes lodged in the bodies of women.

According to Sinéad McDermott (2011: 144), “the recent turn to the emotions in the humanities has brought shame out of hiding and made it subject to critical reassessment”. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have turned to the phenomenon of shame to shed new light on their divergent objects of inquiry. In early modern studies, Ewan Fernie’s (2002: 1) Shame in Shakespeare explores both the positive and the negative dimensions of shame and he describes it as “one of the most interestingly ambiguous [of our human emotions] for although it can inhibit, constrain and even destroy a person, it can also cause them to reform and begin a new life”. The potential for radical shame to act as a transformative catalyst has also featured strongly in queer studies with important texts such as Elspeth Probyn’s (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame and Sally Munt’s (2008) Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. The imbrications of race, shame and trauma have enriched studies of racial identities. In her analyses of Toni Morrison’s novels, J. Brooks Bouson (2009: 18) considers how she “uses fiction to aestheticize — and thus to gain narrative mastery over and artistically repair — the racial shame and trauma she describes”. In the South African context, Zoe Wicomb (1998) uses shame as an analytical tool to explore the construction of coloured identity. In The Female Face of Shame, Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran (2013: 10) highlight the work of the many feminist theorists who have demonstrated “the ways in which female embodiment heightens women’s ambivalent and often shame-saturated relationships to their physicality”.

The quotation in the title of this article is taken from Higgs’s short story “Looking for Trouble” in her collection of the same name. All the stories in the collection are set in Yeoville, which was a very trendy and cosmopolitan suburb of Johannesburg during the late eighties and early nineties. At this time, the resistance to apartheid and the move towards South Africa’s democratic transition was at its peak and the socio-political context was thus one of rapid change and a great deal of uncertainty. Higgs is both an author and the owner of Modjaji Books, which publishes work by women writers. In an interview with Moira Richards (2008: 81), Higgs explains her publication choices as follows: “I want to be a conduit for telling stories, opening up areas that are silent”. The intersections between identity, shame and silence make this a particularly important venture, especially in terms of providing a space where muted aspects of women’s experiences can be articulated. Frank Davidoff (2002: 623) confirms the harmful dynamics and silencing potential of shame when he notes that “shame is so devastating because it goes right to the core of a person’s identity, making them feel exposed, inferior, degraded; it leads to avoidance, to silence”. According to J. Brooks Bouson (2000: 20), “the literary container provides a potentially safe space from which to explore reconstructed stories of shame-laden traumas”. Katharina Metz (2009: 168) explores the ways in which fictional imaginaries express characters’ feelings of shame and how these articulations shape the interactions between readers and texts in different literary forms. Specifically, she distinguishes between literary representations of shame in novels and short stories and she suggests that novels “tend to accustom the reader to the shame disposition of their narrative characters”. She goes on to explain that the

sustainable narrative potential of longer fiction can eventually support a reader shame reaction almost independent from the actual shame disposition of the reader, whereas shame reactions to shorter fiction rely much more on common sense and instantaneously recognisable shame scenes. (Metz, 2009: 168)

Short stories thus tend to offer representations of very clear and explicit shame scenarios that elicit direct and immediate reactions from readers.

Jenna, the narrator in “Looking for Trouble”, explains that her shame is directly linked to an abusive relationship she had with a man named Patrick. The story opens with the narrator’s admission that “when Patrick hit [her] that time, in [her] face” she “wasn’t surprised” (Higgs, 2012: 22). ¹ She explains that they had been “seeing each other for about a year, in an on-off fashion” and within the first paragraph she reveals the distinctly gendered tendency for women to blame themselves for male violence: “Afterwards I kept thinking I should have known, I should have been able to prevent it from happening”. In their tellingly titled article “Battered Women’s Entrapment in Shame: A Phenomenological Study”, Eli Buchbinder and Zvi Eisikovits (2003: 356) identify shame “as a major factor in maintaining the secret of abuse”. The narrator’s repeated use of the phrase “I should have” reveals her internalization of self-blame which will manifest itself in the shame that is “lodged in [her] body” by the end of the short story.

According to Deborah Mahlstedt and Linda Keeny (1993: 329), “women in battering relationships experience three forms of self-blame: for causing the violence; for not being able to modify the violence; and for tolerating the violence”. Patrick’s character is quite explicit in blaming women in general and the narrator in particular for instances of violence in their relationship. The narrator recalls that Patrick “slapped” (30) her during sex and he explained this as follows: “Women like it if you’re gentle, then later you can be a bit rough” (30). The narrator also keeps wondering whether she was “asking for it” and she “couldn’t understand why [she] had kept going back for more when he didn’t treat [her] right”. Feminist research on gender violence suggests some possible answers to the narrator’s questions. Charlotte Bunch and Roxanne Carrillo (1992: 18), for instance, postulate that “women are socialized to associate their self-worth with the satisfaction of the needs and desires of others and are thus encouraged to blame themselves as inadequate or bad if men beat them”. A further important point emerges from Buchbinder and Eisikovits’s (2003: 356) research when they find that a gender violence “victim’s sense of shame is enhanced by a sense of inadequacy aroused on the realization that abuse symbolizes the victim’s public failure in achieving intimate, romantic, and familial ideals and dreams”. Cathrine Norberg (2012: 161) similarly points to research suggesting that “a woman’s feeling of shame because of her failure to maintain inter-personal relationships, for instance, may be seen as a reflection of societal pressures placed on women to conform to certain standards of femininity”. The ideal of maintaining a successful romantic relationship is represented as one that features strongly in the narrator’s consciousness. She recounts how she felt just a “few days before the incident” (31) during which Patrick hit her “[n]ot once, but three times, in the face” (27). Her recollections are as follows: “He bought me a beer and fish and chips, and was pleased to see me. I felt so happy that afternoon, as though I had a real relationship and as though it might all work out after all” (31). At this stage of their relationship, she had already been feeling “a growing unease [which] built up inside [her]” (26) but she chooses to mute the “danger signals” and “signs” (28) in order to cling to the illusory façade of a “real relationship”. Buchbinder and Eisikovits (2003: 356) note that women in abusive relationships often keep silent in order to avoid the shame of failing to maintain a relationship, yet “these efforts to fight against shame increase their vulnerability to further abuse”. The narrator’s desperate hope that this relationship “might work out after all” does expose her to escalated violence in an attack where she “heard bone and cartilage connecting” and that left her “slumped to the floor, blood spewing everywhere” (27). Cunningham et al. (2002: 334) explain that shame “results from a person experiencing failure in relation to personal or other people’s standards, feeling responsible for that failure, and believing that the failure reflects an inadequate self”.

Marilyn Mason (1992: 175) reminds us that “shame is systemic” and she calls for more attention to be paid to “the overpowering and typically overlooked cultural context of shame”. The context within which Higgs’s narrator must negotiate her sense of shame is unequivocally patriarchal and we should focus on gendered socialization, which Mason (1992: 175) describes as “the ever-present shaper and perpetuator of women’s shame”. The narrator learns that hers is not the only battered female body in which shame has taken up residency. After the attack, her observations reveal how pervasive both gender violence and shame are: “I start to see other women with bruises. It was not something I had noticed before. Women of all shapes and sizes and races have bruises on their faces. I recognise their awkwardness and shame” (31). By rhyming “races” and “faces”, the sentence acquires a sing along effect that reminds one of a nursery rhyme. The author achieves quite a jarring effect by imparting this stark information about gender violence in a language that is associated with childhood and innocence. Feminist researchers “have highlighted not only the invisible and often insidious workings of male power and control within public and private spaces but also the endemic and routine nature of violence” (Thapar-Björkert and Morgan, 2010: 36). It appears that violence against women has become such a normalized aspect of life that the narrator only notices the bruises on other women after she is attacked herself. Of her reaction when she notices these bruises on others, she goes on to note: “Once or twice I have wanted to say something, but what? I see you?” (31). It seems, however, that she is at a loss and remains unable to find the words to address fellow survivors of gender violence. Speaking about such violence and telling survivors that they are indeed seen by others constitute important weapons in the arsenal against the gendered disciplinary power of shame. Janice Irvine (2009: 77) suggests that “shame’s invisibility enhances its regulatory power” and, as a result, “making shame visible might erode its power”. Speaking about shame could potentially play a crucial role in relieving the isolation that is typically experienced by women in abusive relationships. After the attack that the narrator describes as “the final showdown” (27), the narrator reflects on the feelings that prevented her from reaching out to her close friend, Tina, for help: “I couldn’t face phoning Tina. I was afraid she would blame me because I’d hung in with Patrick, even though they’d both told me he was no good” (28). Since she had already internalized the shame and self-blame, the narrator anticipates blame from others. In addition to the narrator’s self-blame and primary shame, the short story also reveals the power of secondary shame, which is “shame about shame” (Broucek, 1991: 14). Broucek explains that “[p]eople tend to hide their shame from others and from themselves because they are ashamed of their vulnerability to the shame affect” (1991: 14). The damaging, self-reinforcing power of secondary shame is clear. Brooks Bouson (2009: 4) notes that “being ashamed about shame” can trap one “in an endless, and paralyzing, spiral of feeling”.

All the narrator’s reflections point to her inclination to hide the abuse. She recollects how, as a child, she would get bruises from playing and how “[y]ou could show bruises off to friends, get a cuddle from your mother, it was evidence that you had been hurt, and that you had survived the hurt” (31). By the time she is an adult, however, she had been bombarded by so many messages of gendered socialization that bruises become evidence of something very different. These are not bruises to be shared with others. Rather, they become shrouded in “awkwardness and shame” (31). The narrator notes: “I never got a bruise from a person, until I was an adult woman. It was not a bruise I was proud of” (31). Norberg (2012: 162) cites research confirming “that a woman’s shame is typically presented as sexually coded and produces responses like silence and a sense of physical shrinking”. One of the most authoritative researchers on shame, Silvan Tomkins (1995: 172), also finds that shame “must itself be hidden as an ugly scar is hidden, lest it offends the one who looks”.

Dawn Leeming and Mary Boyle (2004: 384) explain that “[e]xperiences of shame can be seen as episodes within culturally saturated dramas, albeit episodes that are sometimes experienced silently and privately”. This is a cultural drama that is fundamentally coded according to gender, and episodes of shame are no less structured along gendered lines. When a mutual friend of the narrator and Patrick “told all his friends” about the attack, the gendered experience of shame crystallizes very clearly. The narrator notes that Patrick “suffered a public humiliation because of what happened, because of what he did to me”. However, she states: “It was different for me” and she then continues to explain how the shame adhered in her body. In an article about gender and embodied emotion, Camille Nurka (2012: 321) makes the following argument that helps to explain why it was so different for the narrator: “given the historical connection between femininity and the body, [I suggest] that the female body is closer to the corporealising effects of shame than the male body, which is more prone to experiencing disgrace”. While the reader is not privy to Patrick’s reflections, the story ends with the narrator emphasizing the irreversible impact their interactions have had on her sense of self, and she does so by articulating the feeling that something tangible has changed in her body: “none of it has gone away. I still feel the hard pebble, somewhere deep inside” (32).

The intersections between shame, bodies and women’s physical vulnerability in the context of a society that is structured according to unequal gendered relations also emerge in the first short story in Liesl Jobson’s Ride the Tortoise. These stories are set in various locations in post-apartheid South Africa. In “The Edge of the Pot” (2013: 1–14), ² the narrator, Constable Jess Niemandt, and her police partner, Lebo, work in a station with Inspector Msomi. Within the first few paragraphs, the author suggests that women of various ages and social situations are exposed to multiple layers of gendered pressures, which range from dismissive naming strategies to the rape of girl children. Jess realizes that Inspector Msomi “is trying to provoke [her] by calling [her] ‘ntombi’” (1) but she refuses to react to his attempt to infantilize her by referring to her as a “girl”. As she is dealing with this more subtle example of gender harassment, she is busy working on a notice board that also contains “a grainy wanted poster of an escaped prisoner, a suspect for the rape and murder of a ten-year old girl” (1–2). The fundamentally gendered nature of violence in the society that is represented in this short story is foregrounded by Jess’s reflections about a woman with a baby that she notices in the station. She knows that there is a good possibility that “the woman is [t]here to report a baby rape” and she muses: “It might be a boy. Lucky baby. Male infants are just about never raped” (2). Jobson deftly signals to her readers the difficulty of reading more mundane examples of gender oppression as separate from the extreme manifestation of baby rape. Even as Jess muses that a child is lucky to be born male because of the much greater prevalence of the rape of girls, she notes that she will have to handle the inspection because the “only other female officer on duty went to buy Msomi’s cigarettes” (2). Without further commenting on this scenario, the reader is alerted to the fact that Jess is working in a male-dominated environment and that the only other woman is sent on errands, which is reminiscent of insisting that female colleagues make and serve tea in corporate settings. This is the gendered context from which Jess must negotiate both her attraction to her partner and her attempts to field the advances of her line manager. In the analysis that follows, I will demonstrate how a feminist reading of shame and its manifestation in her female body reveal just how complicated these negotiations become.

Jess reflects on her relationship with her partner and admits: “Sometimes my body betrays me when I’m with Lebo” (7). Although she does not act on the attraction, partly because he is married, her body does not allow her to suppress her feelings completely. After a day out on a case with Lebo, she observes: “When I undressed later, my panties were moist. I recalled the smell of him, and blushed at my need” (7). Here the author explicitly links female sexuality and shame. These are dynamics that have received a great deal of scholarly attention for, as Nurka (2012: 318) argues, “female desire is so laden with negativity and ambivalence that it feels the twist of shame to its core”. The shame that attaches to female sexual desire can be traced back to a long patriarchal and heteronormative history of constructing women’s sexualities “in a relation of passive dependence and secondariness to men’s” (Grosz, 1994: 202). Grosz goes on to explain that “the only socially recognized and validated representations of women’s sexuality are those which conform to and accord with the expectations and desires of a certain heterosexual structuring of male desire” (1994: 202). Jess’s shame can thus be read as a reaction to her deviance from the norm that posits women’s sexuality as secondary to male desire, gratification, and procreation. A further salient factor in reading Jess’s shame is the racial dynamics that emerge when a white woman is sexually attracted to a black man. In the story, Lebo is represented as a black man who is fluent in isiZulu (8), while Jess is a white woman whose surname suggests that she is of Afrikaner descent. Although South Africa has now celebrated two decades of democracy, apartheid era attitudes and legislation continue to haunt contemporary interpersonal interactions. Not least of these is the Immorality Act of 1927, which criminalized all sexual relations across racial categories. Ania Loomba (1998: 158) argues that the “spectre of miscegenation most graphically brings together anxieties about female sexuality and racial purity”. Interracial sexual relations posed a threat to apartheid’s racial hierarchy and women, who have traditionally been regarded as the custodians of sexual control and morality, thus bore the brunt of the responsibility for maintaining a group’s racial purity. By desiring Lebo, Jess thus finds herself in conflict with “South Africa’s history of taboo and prohibition of interracial liaisons” (Sherman and Steyn, 2009: 78).

In her research on blushing as a corporeal manifestation of shame, Francis Broucek (1991: 69) explains that

[b]ecause we tend to experience our self as most present in the face, shame having to do with a sense of personal unworthiness is apt to be quite visible in the face, not only in the form of a lowered head and averted gaze but in the form of a blush as well.

Irvine (2009: 70) similarly contends that shame is “mapped on the body in the blush”. Later in the short story, when Jess learns that Lebo is not only married, but also has a girlfriend, she finds: “I can’t stop my rising colour” (9). Forouz Jowkar (1986: 45) argues that shame functions as a “sanctioning mechanism”. Jess’s blushing serves as a reminder that her sexual desire, and its manifestations in her body, is somehow shameful and it appears that shame fulfils its function of disciplining her and curtailing her impulse to act on her sexual attraction to Lebo. When she wants him so much that “an intense heat started between [her] legs”, her “puritanical anxiety won”, and she “gave him a quick, chaste hug and got out of the van fast” (7). Debbie Fallon (2013: 321) confirms that shame is “one of the most insidious means by which women come to recognise, regulate and control themselves through their bodies”. Sandra Bartky (1990: 96) argues that shame is such a pervasive presence in women’s lives that it constitutes a “perpetual attunement”. This, Anne Drapkin Lyerly (2006: 103) explains, can be traced back to “women’s existence within a sexist society — a society that reinforces the shame of women’s embodiment, the contagion and polluted nature of her sexuality”. While the shame of sexual desire operates differently from the shame of being a victim of gender violence, these manifestations all exhibit the fundamental characteristics of shame and they all play out on the bodies of the female characters.

Once the shamefulness that resides in Jess’s very body has firmly been established in the text, an interaction with Msomi reveals the extent to which she has come to doubt her body when it attempts to alert her to danger. When the “inspector rests his hand on [her] thigh”, she feels how her “stomach lurches” (12). Like the narrator in “Looking for Trouble”, Jess mutes her body’s warning signals and doubts her own instincts. She reflects: “I tell myself I’m imagining his advances. He doesn’t like me; my scrawny body is not his type” (12). Despite all indications to the contrary, she keeps trying to convince herself as follows: “Maybe his hand on my leg is just friendliness … I want to dismiss my anxiety as paranoia” (12). Her earlier shame over her sexual desire for Lebo and her sense that her “body betrays” her (7), have severely compromised her ability to trust the messages that she is now receiving from her body. While she “want[s] to push his hand away”, she chooses to “move [her] legs together discreetly instead” (12).

In the short story “Snap” in the same collection, the anorexic narrator makes explicit links between her eating disorder, shame and her sexuality. She reflects on her therapy at Tara Hospital and she enumerates the diagnoses that she has been receiving during treatment that seems to have been going on for some time: “I go to therapy. I have shame issues, control issues, boundary issues and repressed sexuality issues. Could the list be more boring?” (118). She insists that these various “issues” are not applicable to her, but the reader gets a clear indication that her illness cannot be separated from a larger context that shapes women’s sense of self in a patriarchal society. She mentions the experience of Thuli who was a finalist in a prestigious modelling contest. The narrator observes that Thuli “claims it was dehydration that got her rushed to hospital and eliminated, but it wasn’t that. I know her secret” (114). The tendency for models to starve themselves is an open secret but it is one that is so saturated in shame that someone like Thuli would rather point to dehydration as the cause of her illness. Thuli ends up in the same therapy group as the narrator and, although the narrator denies that a “distorted body image” (118) is responsible for her anorexia, her protestations ring hollow. In her research on the power of media images, Judith Daniluk (1993: 53) found that her study participants were well aware that such images presented a distorted version of female appearance. Despite being conscious of this fact, women are not immune to their shaming impact. Daniluk (1993: 53) explains: “However objective they were able to be about the marginalization of most women’s reality within the media, the constant bombardment of unrealistic standards of beauty and behaviour left the women waging constant battles with feelings of inadequacy and shame”. Similar to the women in Daniluk’s study, the narrator in “Snap” may be able to articulate her awareness of the gendered pressures she faces, but this does not mean that she remains unaffected by them.

“Snap” also hints at the complex intersections of racialized identities with gender and shame, albeit subtly. Although race is seldom explicitly mentioned in the short story, the characters’ names serve as racial markers that will be instantaneously recognizable to South African readers. While Thuli’s name connotes her black racial identity, readers would assume that two other characters, the twins Safiya and Sherezade, are Muslim women who would be classified as so-called coloureds. As a group that is considered neither wholly black nor white, “coloured” identity has always occupied a liminal space in the highly overdetermined South African racial taxonomy. According to Pumla Dineo Gqola (2010: 25), “shame is inextricably tied to articulations of coloured identities”. She goes on to explain that, “[i]n a society where the visibility of Otherness serves to confirm the marginality of Black bodies, one of the consequences is an internalisation of this valuation process: shame” (Gqola, 2010: 25–6). In “Snap”, Safiya and Sherezade’s anorexia is linked to dynamics of shaming and to the expectations that attach to their racialized and gendered bodies. The narrator describes a visit by the twins’ mother who “frets because they are bringing shame on the family” as the “prospective in-laws want to know that there will be a string of little brown babies” (119). Desiree Lewis (2011: 205) contends that “[s]ystems of power rooted in race and gender have systematically tried to rationalise the regulation and exploitation of socially subordinate human bodies”. As part of the process, “myths about sexuality have been linked to definitions of the African female body in terms of domestic work, physical labour, sex work and all activity denying the mind and prescribing service” (Lewis, 2011: 205). Safiya and Sherezade were already “betrothed to suitable boys on their tenth birthday” and their bodies are clearly expected to fulfil the service of reproduction. Their failure to adhere to these expectations is the source of their mother’s shame. However, rather than producing the expected “string of little brown babies”, the twins “want to go to university to study microbiology” (119). The narrator suggests that the twins are “on a hunger strike to claim their intellectual, social and sexual freedom” (119). It seems as if the only way in which the twins are able to resist the construction of “Black women as excessively corporeal” (Gqola, 2010: 67) and destined to reproductive service, is to turn on their own bodies and to starve themselves to such an extent that they “haven’t had their periods on over a year” (119).

Women’s constant monitoring of their bodies and their internalized sense of shame also emerge in the short story that lends the collection its title. In “Ride the Tortoise” the narrator is on a road trip with her husband, their young daughter and a newborn baby. The story begins with a description of the narrator’s breasts: the one “cool and pale” and the other “shiny and red” (92). She is breastfeeding her baby and the milk ducts in one of her breasts are blocked. She repeatedly refers to the breast that produces milk as “the good breast” (94; 98) while the “hard breast will not ooze a single milky tear” (96). Although the term “shame” is never explicitly mentioned in this short story, a close reading reveals that the narrator’s experiences are fundamentally shaped by the dynamics of shame and that gendered social constructions of the female body are the source of this shame. In their research on “reproductive shame”, Johnston-Robledo et al. (2007: 33) find that “[w]omen’s attitudes reflect the shame, secrecy, and taboos commonly associated with breastfeeding” and they note that these attitudes can partly be traced back to the fact that breastfeeding is a reproductive function which “complicate[s] or interfere[s] with the social construction of women’s bodies as objects of desire”. The narrator experiences layers of shaming and her husband is represented as playing a significant role in this process. She seems to feel like a failure for struggling with the breastfeeding while also being exposed to her husband’s demands for her to play the “good wife”, which includes being his lover. She notes “[e]ight months after my baby’s arrival, my husband wants the bedroom back to normal” (95). When he decrees that, after the trip, “the baby can go on the bottle”, the narrator reflects: “I will offer my breast to my husband instead” (95). All of these competing pressures leave the narrator quite alienated from her body.

In contemporary society, “breastfeeding is promoted, romanticized and idealized” (Williamson et al., 2012: 444) and regarded as something that should come naturally to women. The narrator’s “unyielding flesh” (92) and “recalcitrant breast” (93), however, result in “unsatisfactory feeding” (92) of her baby. Her struggles with breastfeeding all seem like an irritation for her husband, who simply “adjusts the volume on the car stereo to drown out the hungry screams” (92). In addition to this insensitivity, he actively contributes to shaming his wife by reinforcing cultural constructions of the leaking female body as something disgusting that should be contained. During the road trip, the following exchange occurs between the couple:

The baby wakes a little later and his crying starts my milk again. I lift my shirt and a small spray escapes onto the dashboard. I cover the flow quickly, but it drips on the seat. My husband swerves to a stop, dabbing the dashboard with a handkerchief. “Get out”, he says, “I don’t want a sticky mess.” (93)

Johnston-Robledo et al. (2007: 27) confirm that breastfeeding is “associated with shame and embarrassment” and that “[c]ultural norms that dictate how [it] should be concealed, sanitized, and actively managed abound”. The narrator’s husband certainly regards this as something that should be sanitized so as to avoid the “mess” emanating from her female body dirtying their car. In her influential text, Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 203) hypothesizes that “women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage” and that “the female body has been constructed […] as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid”. Grosz (1994: 194) explains that body fluids “attest to a certain irreducible ‘dirt’ or disgust, a horror of the unknown or the unspecifiable that permeates, lurks, lingers, and at times leaks out of the body”, they are “undignified, nonpoetic, daily attributes of existence”, and when they leak from the body, they are regarded as “embarrassing”. Body fluids “flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed”. The narrator seems well versed in this constant vigilance as she is “quick” to cover the flow of her breast milk, but she fails to control the seepage completely, and her husband reacts with disgust that he makes no attempt to hide. Later in the short story we learn that the narrator isolates herself in the shower as she tries to dislodge the blockage in her breasts and we see how desperate she is to hide these processes from her husband. The frustration and pain cause her to “bang [her] head on the outermost wall, next to the window, on the other side of the bungalow from where [her] husband minds the babies” and, lest this precaution is not enough to hide her struggle with her breast milk from her husband, she “flush[es] the toilet to mask the sound” (96). Eventually her husband tells her to hurry since they are scheduled to go on a sightseeing tour and the narrator reflects that her “throbbing breast must wait until after the tour”. Grosz (1994: 192) argues that dirt, which is strongly associated with women’s bodily fluids, “is that which is not in its proper place, that which upsets or befuddles order”. The narrator’s husband seems determined that his wife’s bodily fluids must not upset his ordered existence, either by making a “mess” in the car or by causing them to be late for a tour.

The impulse to shrink and hide the self that is associated with shame appears to characterize the narrator’s reproductive experiences at a number of different stages. In an article entitled “Shame, Gender, Birth”, Drapkin Lyerly (2006: 111) argues that childbirth is a “particularly critical locus” for understanding the pervasive sense of shame that shapes women’s experiences in patriarchal societies. She explains her reasoning as follows:

It [childbirth] is a locus to which women bring a lifetime of experiences relating to the shame of female embodiment: of demeaning treatment and subordination, of traditions that relate female sexuality to pollution and contagion, and of expectations about what a good woman and mother should be capable of doing. (Drapkin Lyerly, 2006: 111)

The narrator’s recollections of going into labour demonstrate how her experiences are fundamentally informed by the gendered implications of being a woman who tries to take up as little space as possible and who tries to minimize any disruptions of the patriarchal status quo. She is a contrabassoonist in an orchestra and, during a performance, the “low vibrations of the instrument shook right through [her] belly to loosen the lining of [her] womb”. Looking back, she “didn’t know [she] was in premature labour. [She] hadn’t wanted to interrupt the maestro unnecessarily in the middle of the symphony concert” (93; emphasis added). When she gets home, she tries to convince herself that “[e]verything was fine” because she “hadn’t wanted to disturb the doctor in the middle of the night with [her] aching back” (93; emphasis added). Johnston-Robledo et al. (2007: 36) suggest that the multiple levels of shaming that shape women’s reproductive experiences “may render healthy female embodiment elusive”. This certainly seems to be the case with the narrator. Her body is sending her corporeal warnings as loud as a womb lining tearing and a back aching, yet she seems unable to decipher these alarm bells as she “thought [she] was imagining things when the weak contractions began twelve weeks early”. Much as Jess tries to ignore her lurching stomach and tries to convince herself that she is imagining things when Msomi touches her, the narrator in this story would rather dismiss her bodily knowledge than cause any discomfort to the maestro or the doctor.

Gary Yontef (1996: 362) explains how someone who experiences shame prefers “fading into the woodwork” rather than drawing any attention to herself:

The experience of shame is always accompanied by a desire to hide […]. When one feels shameful, inadequate, and unworthy, one generally does not want to be seen. Does not want one’s shame exposed to the world. The need to hide is natural.

The reluctance to draw any attention to her pregnant body in the presence of the conductor and the doctor extends to her experiences of her nursing body in the context of the intimate relationship with her husband. While they are driving, she would like to keep the baby on her lap so that he can feed when he gets hungry, but she knows her “husband will insist” (92) and the finality of this insistence is reflected in the short, emphatic sentence which suggests the unequal balance of power in their relationship: “He’s the driver”. Like the narrator in “Looking for Trouble”, the narrator in this story reacts to her discomfort by reflecting how she should alter her behaviour to conform to the stereotypical ideal of the “good wife”: “I should try to reason with him. I should say, Yes, dear” (93). When he stops the car after some of her breast milk escapes onto his dashboard, we see just how reluctant she is to leave any trace of her corporeality on his car, even as her body demands attention with great urgency. “I steady myself on the wing mirror, holding only the frame so as not to leave fingerprints on the glass” (94; emphasis added). She feels the need to avoid leaving her fingerprints even as she “twists[s] [her] nipple hoping to roll the blockage out, wanting to scream at the pain” (95). Her husband does not attempt to hide his dismissive attitude and simply “turns the music up a little more. He does that when he’s irritated” (94). The subtle denigration of women’s care work and domestic labour that is reflected in this quotation is signalled in a very similar way in a poem by Antjie Krog. In “how and with what?”, the speaker describes her daily routine as she cares for her children and notes “my man closes the door against us all / and turns up the Mozart piano concerto / and I go crazy” (Krog, 2000: 36). In “Ride the Tortoise”, we learn that the narrator’s husband turns up a Mahler compact disc while the narrator reflects that when some of her breast milk dries, “it will linger, tacky on [her] skin” (94). The men turn to so-called high art, as signalled by Mozart and Mahler, while the women remain preoccupied with the insistent demands of their bodies and those of their children. The message that these corporeal functions are somehow distasteful and should be muted by Mozart or Mahler is unmistakable in both the short story and the poem. Even in their most intimate relationships with their partners, these women are thus exposed to shaming.

In her research on the “continuing imbrication of femininity and shame”, Kaye Mitchell (2012: 1) calls on scholars to focus their critical gaze on how shame’s “displacement onto female bodies” ensures that this is an emotion that remains fundamentally gendered. She also recommends greater “attention to power, to the social, to those suprapersonal structures that serve to decree what counts as shameful” (Mitchell, 2012: 17; emphasis in original). By means of a close reading of contemporary South African short stories, this article has demonstrated how female characters negotiate their experiences of shame within a patriarchal society that decrees femininity and women’s bodies to be shameful. The article also reveals the complex ways in which shame is inscribed on bodies that are both gendered and racialized. The fraught history of race relations in South Africa demands that scholars in this context pay particularly close attention to race as well as gender when we consider how larger social and institutional structures determine what is regarded as shameful. Brooks Bouson (2009: 2) notes that, “[c]onceived of as defective or deficient from male norms and as potentially diseased, women have long been embodiments of shame in our culture, and, indeed, the female socialization process can be viewed as a prolonged immersion in shame”. The characters that were analysed in this article have been shaped by sustained shaming and they field these social messages from various directions, including from colleagues, lovers, and friends. As Irvine (2009: 71) argues, “shame inhibits”, and the characters in the selected stories engage in various forms of self-blame and self-regulation in order to manage their identities in contexts where they are bombarded with strategies of shaming. The gendered dynamics of shame are nothing if not insidious and Brooks Bouson (2009: ix) explains that, “[b]ecause there is shame about shame and because we tend to look away from the other’s shame, telling the story of the female body-in-shame can be a difficult, and even risky, business”. The turning away and the attempts to hide shame, emerge as factors that exacerbate the vulnerability of the characters in the selected stories. Yet, despite their best efforts to hide it, their female bodies speak the shame and this article seeks to listen to those voices in order to shed light on a disciplinary practice that continues to shape the life experiences of women.