Shamewreck: Essays: 21st Century Essays
Autor Peggy Shinneren Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 feb 2027
For readers of Eula Biss and Cathy Park Hong, essays that knit cultural criticism, social history, and personal experience to excavate the entanglements of shame, power, language, and identity.
In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. These essays grapple with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into the opposite, “abashed and ashamed”; how talkative women were thought to be sloppy women, like Eve (loose of mouth and morals ); how occupation once meant “heterosexual intercourse” and now means “military invasion.” Parsing the dark undercurrents of popular culture alongside her own experiences as a queer woman, Shinner exhorts us to abandon willful unseeing and consider the legacies of language. Take a look, she urges, you can buy a new car in twenty-first-century America and for your money get two masters and a slave key. Shamewreck complicates our notions of shame and shamelessness and rescues them from the refuse pile, reclaiming shame as a potent moral adjudicator.
In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. These essays grapple with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into the opposite, “abashed and ashamed”; how talkative women were thought to be sloppy women, like Eve (loose of mouth and morals ); how occupation once meant “heterosexual intercourse” and now means “military invasion.” Parsing the dark undercurrents of popular culture alongside her own experiences as a queer woman, Shinner exhorts us to abandon willful unseeing and consider the legacies of language. Take a look, she urges, you can buy a new car in twenty-first-century America and for your money get two masters and a slave key. Shamewreck complicates our notions of shame and shamelessness and rescues them from the refuse pile, reclaiming shame as a potent moral adjudicator.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814260043
ISBN-10: 0814260047
Pagini: 208
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria 21st Century Essays
ISBN-10: 0814260047
Pagini: 208
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria 21st Century Essays
Recenzii
“When Peggy Shinner asks, ‘Can we not have words?’ she has no intention of giving up on language. Bikini. Occupy. Lesbianism. Apology. Words and their archives are the girders of this collection—essays as gorgeous idiom excavations, language as keys to systems that forbid and sometimes liberate. Shinner’s stunning etymologies accrete into stories and analyses that revise the unseen and rebuild from the variants, in the process transforming the wreck of shame into a navigable morality that might just keep us afloat.” —Barrie Jean Borich, author of Apocalypse, Darling
“A literary acrobat, Peggy Shinner juggles memoir and social criticism, tossing seemingly unrelated ideas in the air like flaming torches. The thrill comes in watching them spin. Obsessed with hidden meanings of words, Shinner is also a keen observer of silences, especially her own unspoken apologies to a long-dead mother. At turns mournful, meditative, angry, and electrifying, Shamewreck is a wonder of a book.” —Miles Harvey, author of The Registry of Forgotten Objects
Notă biografică
Peggy Shinner is the author of You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body, which was longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A lifelong Chicagoan, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize. Her work has appeared in BOMB, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere.
Extras
When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associated with a beast held in possession, livestock, cattle; chattel, as slaves, came into use in the seventeenth century) and can be further divided into tangibles and intangibles. Tangible property can be felt or touched and intangible property is immaterial. Personal effects are tangibles; debt and goodwill, intangibles. (And then there was paraphernalia, a specifically female version of personal effects: these are called her paraphernalia . . . the apparel and ornaments of the wife, which also included tableware and sometimes her bed.) Real property, with its echoes of real estate, realty, royalty, realm, is immovable property, land and the structures on it. Durable goods, also known as hard goods, have a useful life of three or more years, and consumable goods, also known as soft goods, get used up or discarded; a further subset is known as perishables, goods prone to disintegration or decay. Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions. She didn’t leave a thing, save her body and that, of course, would be gone soon, too.
My grandmother was under my custodianship, a kind of power, although daily she was under the care of the nurses and aides at the Sherwin Manor Nursing Home. Mine was the name they had on file, the responsible party. She died with no clothes, shoes, sleepwear, undergarments, accessories, eyeglasses, jewelry, toiletries, trinkets, talismans, keys, loose change, photos, birthday cards, collectibles, household goods, furniture, financial assets, or real estate. She never owned a vehicle. She owned no artwork, although her husband, my grandfather, was an artist by trade, in the trades, a sign painter. (He scribbled dirty pictures on scraps of newspaper to amuse me while we did the crossword puzzle in The Chicago American.) There had been a wedding ring, removed before she went into the nursing home and then stored in a safe-deposit box; a heavy gold choker which sat on one’s neck like a snake, passed on to my mother, and then to me but never worn; a small ruby ring, possibly a child’s, which I lost in a motel room. She died without anything to her name, a phrase which arguably had its origins in the ability to sign one’s name to a binding document, a right that many women were long denied. Civiliter mortuus, civil death.
I first came across the term civil death in the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, articulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminists, who argued that the twin institutions of marriage and patriarchy had rendered women, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. To be civilly dead is to lose the rights of citizenship through imprisonment or banishment. To lose the right, among other rights, to property and wages. Civil death had its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where it was known as atimia (dishonor) and infamia (infamy), respectively. It was a form of collective forgetting that forced the infamous, the disregarded, to disappear from the polity. Had I, as her default caretaker, rendered my grandmother civilly dead?
She had never been rich. She had always been envious. Of the moneyed, of her younger sister. Her younger sister, who wore a tiara at her wedding and married a merchant. My grandmother was contemptuous of her sign-painter husband, whom she may have loved but often derided. He made enough money to put food on the table but not enough for her to flaunt. He spoke with a foreign accent; he was Russian-born. Her sister’s husband spoke with an accent too, but his was of the west, of Montana, and so it mattered less that he was crude. His crudeness was home-grown. My grandmother was long-suffering, and we knew about it. My mother called her Sarah Bernhardt. She fell to the floor when the call came about my grandfather’s death. She was putting on an act, my mother implied. A show. But can it be both, can one put on an act and be shocked to the floor in grief? She went down gently, so as not to hurt herself. Perhaps my mother felt that these antics allowed no room for her own pain, which was quieter but no less piercing.
She never owned a home, unlike her rich sister, who owned two homes, one a waterfront property in Miami with mango trees and a private dock, where my grandparents were regularly invited to spend the winter. It was a largesse my grandmother expected and resented, and one she feared would be withdrawn. She lived on Surf Street, in the Surf Hotel, a cramped apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, and then she lived with us, and then, widowed, she lived with another widow, an arrangement based on saving money, and eliciting mutual dislike, and then, after the widow sold her house, she lived in a nursing home, on Medicaid. When she lived with us, we shared a bedroom. She complained of the cold. Her bed was against the wall by the window; every night she asked me to move it. She was afraid of drafts. She wrapped herself up in cardigan sweaters and wore hose rolled at the knees. Often she held herself. Her breasts were massive, a geologic formation. Years later she had to have one of them removed. Once there was a Peeping Tom in the window, his face a dark outline against the glass. I was equal parts frightened and flattered. Be careful, she used to say, about almost everything.
Her father, a peddler, Russian-born as well, had sold sundries off a cart. He’d stocked other people’s shelves with goods, iron goods according to one census report and junk according to another, until he fell off his cart and died.
My grandmother was under my custodianship, a kind of power, although daily she was under the care of the nurses and aides at the Sherwin Manor Nursing Home. Mine was the name they had on file, the responsible party. She died with no clothes, shoes, sleepwear, undergarments, accessories, eyeglasses, jewelry, toiletries, trinkets, talismans, keys, loose change, photos, birthday cards, collectibles, household goods, furniture, financial assets, or real estate. She never owned a vehicle. She owned no artwork, although her husband, my grandfather, was an artist by trade, in the trades, a sign painter. (He scribbled dirty pictures on scraps of newspaper to amuse me while we did the crossword puzzle in The Chicago American.) There had been a wedding ring, removed before she went into the nursing home and then stored in a safe-deposit box; a heavy gold choker which sat on one’s neck like a snake, passed on to my mother, and then to me but never worn; a small ruby ring, possibly a child’s, which I lost in a motel room. She died without anything to her name, a phrase which arguably had its origins in the ability to sign one’s name to a binding document, a right that many women were long denied. Civiliter mortuus, civil death.
I first came across the term civil death in the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, articulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminists, who argued that the twin institutions of marriage and patriarchy had rendered women, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. To be civilly dead is to lose the rights of citizenship through imprisonment or banishment. To lose the right, among other rights, to property and wages. Civil death had its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where it was known as atimia (dishonor) and infamia (infamy), respectively. It was a form of collective forgetting that forced the infamous, the disregarded, to disappear from the polity. Had I, as her default caretaker, rendered my grandmother civilly dead?
She had never been rich. She had always been envious. Of the moneyed, of her younger sister. Her younger sister, who wore a tiara at her wedding and married a merchant. My grandmother was contemptuous of her sign-painter husband, whom she may have loved but often derided. He made enough money to put food on the table but not enough for her to flaunt. He spoke with a foreign accent; he was Russian-born. Her sister’s husband spoke with an accent too, but his was of the west, of Montana, and so it mattered less that he was crude. His crudeness was home-grown. My grandmother was long-suffering, and we knew about it. My mother called her Sarah Bernhardt. She fell to the floor when the call came about my grandfather’s death. She was putting on an act, my mother implied. A show. But can it be both, can one put on an act and be shocked to the floor in grief? She went down gently, so as not to hurt herself. Perhaps my mother felt that these antics allowed no room for her own pain, which was quieter but no less piercing.
She never owned a home, unlike her rich sister, who owned two homes, one a waterfront property in Miami with mango trees and a private dock, where my grandparents were regularly invited to spend the winter. It was a largesse my grandmother expected and resented, and one she feared would be withdrawn. She lived on Surf Street, in the Surf Hotel, a cramped apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, and then she lived with us, and then, widowed, she lived with another widow, an arrangement based on saving money, and eliciting mutual dislike, and then, after the widow sold her house, she lived in a nursing home, on Medicaid. When she lived with us, we shared a bedroom. She complained of the cold. Her bed was against the wall by the window; every night she asked me to move it. She was afraid of drafts. She wrapped herself up in cardigan sweaters and wore hose rolled at the knees. Often she held herself. Her breasts were massive, a geologic formation. Years later she had to have one of them removed. Once there was a Peeping Tom in the window, his face a dark outline against the glass. I was equal parts frightened and flattered. Be careful, she used to say, about almost everything.
Her father, a peddler, Russian-born as well, had sold sundries off a cart. He’d stocked other people’s shelves with goods, iron goods according to one census report and junk according to another, until he fell off his cart and died.
Cuprins
Contents
Sum Effects
Bikini / le bikini / Pikinni
you are beautiful
Slave Key
An Excellent Good Worde
They Had Not Anything to Lay to My Charge
Face
Dirt
Can We Not Have Words?
Semantic Field of Distress
Acknowledgments
Sum Effects
Bikini / le bikini / Pikinni
you are beautiful
Slave Key
An Excellent Good Worde
They Had Not Anything to Lay to My Charge
Face
Dirt
Can We Not Have Words?
Semantic Field of Distress
Acknowledgments
Descriere
Essays that excavate shame in all its iterations as they explore etymology, sexuality, popular culture, the nuclear age, and growing up female in twentieth-century America.