Shame as a Performative Narrative Affect in Automedial Art by Female British Authors with ‘Disabilities’ and ‘Mental Distress’

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katrin Röder, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447802653

This project investigates shame/humiliation as a performative narrative affect in contemporary (1981-2020, in the renewal proposal 1981-2022) automedial art (verbal and graphic autobiographies, personal YouTube video blogs referred to as ‘vlogs’, one videotaped performance and one weblog) by mostly British (and in the renewal proposal Indian Anglophone) female authors with physical, sensorial and developmental / cognitive ‘disabilities’ as well as ‘mental distress’. The selected authors have different social and ethnic backgrounds and different sexual orientations. My analysis explores shame/humiliation as a performative narrative affect by drawing on methods from disability, gender, affect, autobiography and media studies. It demonstrates that the cultural images of women with ‘disabilities’ and ‘mental distress’ created in automedial practices are not necessarily produced (as is often suggested) by narrative processes in which the shame related to medicalised forms of embodiment and the devaluating responses of social environments is overcome or erased. Instead, my selected automedial practices will be shown to be shaped, disseminated and received through the impact of shame as a performative narrative affect that can bring to light as well as challenge intersectional forms of stigmatizing interpellation connected with social and cultural constructions of ‘disability’, ‘mental distress’, ‘femininity’, ethnicity and sexual orientation. As a narrative strategy, shame has the potential to produce poietic, heteroglossic, interdiscursive, hybrid, citational and interactive artefacts / works of art. Furthermore, it generates precarious affective relationalities between cultural texts, media, readers and viewers that can constitute fluid affective communities and publics in the context of increasingly personalised forms of politics and citizenship. In order to investigate this relational affective impact of narrative scenes and events of intersectional forms of shame / shaming together with its potential for eliciting / imagining new forms of civic action, I will analyse viewers’ comments and online reviews about the digital, verbal and graphic automedial texts I selected in this project. The results of my study will be archived and shared on online research data management bases. I will present my results at a workshop hosted by me, during a research stay and my participation in an international conference. In addition, I will produce a monograph covering the results of my analyses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants