Encountering shame and sex: storied assemblages

Abstract

This inquiry came to life when I found myself embroiled in a fiery encounter with shame through writing into the aftermath of sexual assault. Sensing shame’s urgency, I embarked on an autoethnographic project yet found myself in an echo chamber. I became interested in speaking with others, hopeful that our joining together could carve out spaces for shame and sex stories. Right in the middle of a global pandemic with no public ‘private’ meeting spaces, a shame-sex assemblage emerged. Each encounter was full of co-constituent forces including myself and others, our environments, histories of sex and shame, discourses, parents, physical sensations, sounds and feelings, past lovers, one-night stands and abusers, and so on. In alignment with the Deleuzoguattarian logic of assemblage (1987), these multiplicities of human and nonhuman force work together in this thesis to produce unique tellings of shame and sex. While encountering ‘data,’ the stories from my history blur with and (re) inform others’ stories. Uncertain about personal exposure and vulnerability in a project that apparently centres others, I engage with Barad’s intra-action, particularly their notion of ‘spacetimematterings’ (2014), to better understand how stories of self and other are implicated in and woven through one another. Through the writing process, encounters come alive and ‘hotspots’ (MacLure, 2013) of shame’s affective intensity make themselves known. Puzzling over these peculiarities, I think with a cross-disciplinary literature to better understand how shame and other material-discursive forces plug into assemblages to produce possibilities for sexual subjectivities and bodies. Bringing this project to a tentative and somewhat artificial close, I discuss the ‘emergencies’ (Murray, 2020) of inquiring about shame and sex, the lessons gleaned from putting assemblage into practice, and where this work might take us.