Browsing by Subject "Racial Shame"

This research is a queer phenomenological reading of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). My key argument is that the novel is a story of racial shame, and my analysis traces its manifestations. I use queer phenomenology as my theoretical background because this analysis is located within the study of emotion. In addition, queer phenomenology is a tool that is used to question normativity and analyze bodies that deviate from it. The Bluest Eye is a story about bodies that deviate because of their race. This causes their experience of shame. I also argue that racial shame in the novel is closely tied to the history of colonialism, and it results from one’s vulnerability and misidentification (Näre and Ronkainen, 2008) that colonial rule has caused. In addition, I argue that the continuation of racial shame in the novel can be explained with Ahmed’s (2014) concepts of stickiness and the circulation of emotion. Moreover, Ahmed’s (2006) concept of orientation demonstrates the pervasiveness of social norms and is representative of the fixity of racial shame.