Asia Sakchatchawan (The Queen’s College): 'Wrong Face Theory of Shame'
Abstract: In virtue of being a negative self-conscious emotion, shame has as its intentional object oneself as negatively evaluated in some way through another’s perception (whether in real time, anticipated, or imagined). This chapter challenges Lucy O’Brien’s (2020) Social Diminution Theory of Shame (SDT) that characterises shame as a consciousness of one’s diminished social magnitude and instead advances the Wrong Face Theory of Shame (WFT) that characterises shame as the failure in self-presentation. To make her point, O’Brien points to Rembrandt’s painting Susanna and the Elders, which depicts the moment of overwhelming shame in which the bathing Susanna realises that she is being spied on by village elders. According to SDT, though Susanna does not straightforwardly judge herself as ‘bad’, she nevertheless feels ashamed in virtue of being exposed to the elders in such a way because she experiences her social price as being diminished qua a sexual object in their eyes. Though it offers a persuasive explanation for Susanna’s case, I argue that SDT faces the challenge in explaining how the same evaluative gaze can occasion either shame or pride in different contexts - call this the ‘challenge from feeling sexy’. SDT’s one-dimensional metric of social value fails to account for why being seen as sexually attractive can be shame-inducing in one setting yet pride-inducing in another. To avoid the challenge from feeling sexy, I propose the Wrong Face Theory of Shame (WFT) that draws on dramaturgical concepts of ‘faces’ and ‘face-work’. According to WFT, shame arises from consciousness of myself as occupying a ‘wrong face’, i.e. when my external face (how others perceive me) conflicts with my internal face (how I wish or intend to be perceived in specific contexts).
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