Womersley, Gail

2011-11-25, Womersley, Gail, Maw, Anastasia, Swartz, Sally

Despite the psychically toxic nature of shame, it has historically been under-researched and under-theorized. However, a recent burgeoning of literature has brought an increasing awareness of shame as a pathogenic force. An investigation of this noxious affect is especially pertinent in the context of feminist qualitative research. The authors consider the significant effect of shame on a specific dialogue that unfolded with a female survivor of rape in Cape Town. The analysis tracks the ubiquitous manifestations of shame between researcher and researched and reveals how shame was unavoidably generated, exacerbated, and maintained within the intersubjective field. What is highlighted is a need to reflexively locate the emotion within the racialized, gendered, and institutionalized relationships. Such a consideration would arguably provide invaluable insights for psychological research and practice as it pays critical attention to positionality, reflexivity, and the power relationships inherent in the production of knowledge.

2008, Maw, Anastasia, Womersley, Gail, O'Sullivan, Michelle

2011-5-13, Womersley, Gail, Maw, Anastasia, Swartz, Sally

Shame is pervasive, and contagious. Shame is ashamed of itself. Shame activates shame. The mystifying dualism of shame is that it is at once an isolating, intimately intra-psychic phenomenon seeking concealment, yet remains deeply embedded in a visual and public interpersonal space where the self is violently and unexpectedly exposed to the critical gaze of the Other. The source of shame can therefore never be completely in the self or in the Other, but is a rupture of what Kaufman (1989, p. 22) calls the “interpersonal bridge” binding the two. The pervasive and potentially paralysing nature of shame and its particular relevance to a South African research context became no more apparent to me than in the course of interviews that I, as a researcher (white , middle-class) have had with rape survivors (coloured, working-class). This research had as its original aim to delineate the network of discourses in which the rape of women is embedded. However, I have come to understand that our co-constructed shame which permeated the research significantly affected my emotional and intellectual investments, and contoured my interpretations of the narrative which unfolded between myself and the research participants. Such recognition of this noxious affect is especially pertinent in the South African context, marked by a myriad of class, gender and race differentials between researcher and researched. Here, skewed power dynamics continue to mark intellectual relations between researcher and researched (Bennett, 2000) and “deeply entrenched and racialised divisions between communities continue to shape the negotiation of power” (Swartz, 2007, p. 177). Within this context (significantly determined by class formations developed through the formal structures of colonialism and apartheid) shame is inherently linked to the politics of knowledge production and the limitations of our own positionings within such unequal power structures. I attempt not only to understand the role of shame in the research relationship which unfolded, but to consider the way in which it was intrinsically linked to the representations of our multiple and constantly shifting identities within this space, as overtly marked by the “intersectionality” of class, race and gender (Burman, 2006).

2009-1-1, Womersley, Gail, Maw, Anastasia

The psychological impact of rape is most commonly described by drawing on a medical/ psychiatric framework, which feminists have argued fails to factor in the broader contexts of patriarchy and female oppression. Internationally, and in South Africa, feminist researchers have called for more research on rape trauma which seeks to understand the impact of rape in light of the marginalised and oppressive contexts within which particular groups of women live. In response to this need, this article presents a feminist discourse analysis of conversations with nine women living in a low-income area of Cape Town interviewed within 72 hours of being raped. The analysis revealed that the women's narratives of rape were informed by patriarchal discourses which operated to reinforce gendered relations of power. The discourses discussed in the paper are identified as discourses of damage, ostracism, resistance and survival, confessional discourses and discourses of masculinity and femininity. A multitude of cultural scripts informed the discourses drawn upon by the participants, highlighting the heterogeneous, fluid and dynamic nature of the participants' subjectivities and indicating that their relation to such discourses are far from being fixed, stable and unambiguous. Furthermore, the dominant discourses highlighted in the findings are understood to play a binding role in maintaining social structures of power.