Shame

Bogdan Popa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. He has been published in the Annual Review of Critical Psychology and contributed chapters to books including Cosmopolitanism and the Legacies of Dissent (edited by Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2014). This is his first book.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsForeword: "But Officer..."Part I: Shame and Queer Political Theory1.Queer Practices, or How to Unmoor Feminism from Liberal FeminismThe ArgumentWhat is Shame?Queer GenealogyQueer Practices and Liberal FeminismPolitical Theory and The PoliceWhy Nineteenth-Century Feminists?The structure of the book2. How to do Queer Genealogy with J.S. MillHow to "Part company with the world"Mill in drag, shame, and silence"Barbarians" and "lunatics": harsh language and Mill’s rhetoricConclusionPart II: Counter-Figures3. Disturbing Silence: Mill and the Radicals at The Monthly RepositoryUnitarian Radicals and performativityBeyond liberal shameMill’s disturbing silence and the Fox AffairConclusion4. De-policing Humiliation: Political Rhetoric in Feminist ActivismThe CD Acts and Josephine Butler’s rhetoric of humiliationMill’s Testimony against the CD Acts and the policing of feminist activismConclusion5. Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free LoveWoodhull’s shaming and sexual transgressionsShame as dispossessionThe Police and how to close the lines of escapeConclusionPart III: Queering Shame6. Does queer political theory have a future?ReferencesIndex

Bogdan Popa’s exquisite investigation gifts us with a newfound appreciation for the loving, quotidian, and sometimes snarky radicalism of our Victorian forebears. In our shame, shows Popa, we - theorists, feminists, and other weirdos committed to equality and social transformation - are in the queerest of company.