Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Shamewreck: Essays

Shamewreck: Essays

Shinner, Peggy

Paperback

Series: 21st Century Essays

Biographies GeneralLetters & EssaysWomen's Studies

Publisher Price: $21.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date February 9, 2027

ISBN10: 0814260047
ISBN13: 9780814260043
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
Published: Feb 9 2027
Pages: 180
Weight: 1.00
Language: English
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.

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