Queer attachments : the cultural politics of shame / by Sally R. Munt.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Series Editors' Preface: After Shame -- Foreword / Donald L. Nathanson -- The Cultural Politics of Shame: An Introduction -- Ch. 1. Queer Irish Sodomites: The Shameful Histories of Edmund Burke, William Smith, Theodosius Reed, the Earl of Castlehaven and Diverse Servants - Among Others -- Ch. 2. Shove the Queer: Irish/American Shame in New York's Annual St Patrick's Day Parades -- Ch. 3. Expulsion: The Queer Turn of Shame -- Ch. 4. Queering the Pitch : Contagious Acts of Shame in Organisations -- Ch. 5. Shameless in Queer Street -- Ch. 6. A Queer Undertaking: Uncanny Attachments in the HBO Television Drama Series Six Feet Under -- Ch. 7. After the Fall: Queer Heterotopias in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy -- Ch. 8. A Queer Feeling When I Look at You: Tracey Emin's Aesthetics of the Self.

"In this lucid and passionately argued book, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces - from eighteenth-century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across cultures and historical periods, and that patterns of shame are disturbingly long-lived. But she also reveals shame as an affective emotion, engendering attachments between bodies and between subjects - queer attachments. Above all, she celebrates the extraordinary human ability to turn shame into joy: the party after the fall. Queer Attachments is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame."--BOOK JACKET.