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EJW0010.1177/1350506813519983European Journal of Women’s StudiesBissenbakker Frederiksen

Article EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
2018, Vol. 25(1) 102–115
How to bring your daughter © The Author(s) 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506813519983
DOI: 10.1177/1350506813519983
Shame, accountability and the journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw

necessity of paranoid reading

in Lene Kaaberbøl’s The Shamer
Chronicles

Mons Bissenbakker
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract
This article takes The Shamer Chronicles, the teenage fantasy series by the Danish author
Lene Kaaberbøl, as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical thought experiment.
It shows how Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy allows us to link shame and paranoid/reparative
reading with the figure of the feminist killjoy. The Chronicles can be read as a meditation
on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic figure who
insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination. The article
elaborates postcolonial criticisms of shame theories, showing how racialisation makes a
difference in which forms of shame are marked as (un)acceptable. Rather than dismiss
shame theories altogether, the article explores how such criticisms can be integrated
into, and thus further qualify, a critical shame reading of The Chronicles.

Keywords
Affect, fantasy literature, feminism, feminist killjoys, paranoid reading, shame

In recent years, queer theory has turned to shame as an affect that promises new ways
of thinking about queer political struggle. A key point for queer theoretical approaches
to shame is to not regard this affect merely along the lines of good and evil but rather
to deconstruct the naturalised valorisations attached to shame. Although many queer

Corresponding author:
Mons Bissenbakker, Centre for Gender Studies, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 120, København S,
2300, Denmark.
Email: thc211@hum.ku.dk
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 103

theoretical studies have focused on shame as a central factor in othering and subjugat-
ing practices (e.g. Butler, 1997), some – such as Eve K Sedgwick – insist that it would
be mistaken to simply regard shame as a ‘toxic’ and ideally divested part of identity.
Rather than distancing itself from shame, queer theory should aim for ‘asking good
questions about shame’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 64, 63), recognising shame as ‘integral to
and residual in the process by which identity itself is formed’. Some queer shame theo-
rists suggest that shame holds anti-normative potential for political solidarity and pro-
test as shame marks the position of exclusion (see e.g. Halperin and Traub, 2009) while
others insist on shame’s potential for reminding us of our obligation to ethical
responsibility.
But how are we to imagine such potential? Looking to the field of literature as inspira-
tion, I suggest Danish author Lene Kaaberbøl’s teenage fantasy series The Shamer
Chronicles as an example of a queer feminist affect theoretical imagining. Literature can
be seen as a particularly interesting imaginary room in which thought experiments can
take place. Literature must take its starting point in existing social discourses, yet it may
use these discourses to create an imaginary space in which the ‘not yet’ can be dreamed
up. Such a space can be found in Kaaberbøl’s Shamer series, which I take as an example
of how one might think about shame’s potential as a call to social justice. In the follow-
ing, I will give a brief overview of the concept of shame that has informed queer think-
ing. I will then turn to a reading of The Shamer Chronicles, which I suggest offer an
understanding of the shaming gaze as a form of paranoid reading and celebrates ‘the
Shamer’ as a feminist killjoy who uses shame as an indicator of accountability. The final
part of the article elaborates postcolonial criticisms of shame theories, particularly with
respect to racialisations of shame. Racialisation thus seems to make the difference
between which forms of shame the books mark as (un)acceptable. Rather than dismiss
shame theories altogether, I explore how such criticisms can be integrated into, and thus
further qualify, a critical shame reading of The Chronicles.1

Approaches to shame
Shame is a relatively well-investigated theme within psychological, philosophical, bio-
logical and anthropological studies. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to guilt and (to
some extent) shame as connected to social patterns of control may be seen as forming an
almost common sense understanding of shame today (Freud, 2000 [1905]). Sartre’s phe-
nomenological descriptions of how shame thematises the experience of exposure to and
dependence on the Other are also influential (Sartre, 1992 [1943]). Darwin’s description
of the human phenomenon of blushing inspires a more biological approach to shame
(Darwin, 2007 [1872]) while anthropological understandings of shame often position
themselves either in continuation of or opposition to the anthropologist Benedict’s claim
that entire cultures may be categorised as either guilt (connected to actions) or shame
(connected to identity) cultures (Benedict, 2005 [1946]).
One thinker who has been especially influential in queer approaches to shame is psy-
choanalyst Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins is important for queer theoretical thinking because
his descriptions of affect transgress a simplistic understanding of affects as either bio-
logical constants or social constructs. Tomkins also offers a non-repressionist approach
104 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

to shame, which he regards as biologically rooted yet primarily interpersonal. Shame

must be found in relationships between (groups of) individuals and has a productive
(rather than a Freudian repressive) relationship to identity. Tomkins’s concept of shame
offers a non-oedipal conceptualisation of identity that does not let subjectivity begin in
(natural) identifications but rather in the individual’s dependence on social recognisabil-
ity and communication.
According to Tomkins (1995: 133), shame is the affect that most intensely indicates
that the individual’s identity is at stake: ‘Shame strikes deepest into the heart of man …
shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul.’ Shame is experienced as some-
thing that strikes ‘deep’ into the subject because it points to the individual’s absolute
dependence on sociality. The fundamental form of shame is thus not prohibition but
rather exclusion and the cessation of social communication. The moment of shame is a
moment of self-reflection through the social gaze. Shame marks the complex experience
of the discomfort of the excluding gaze of others and the fear of the disappearance of the
social gaze altogether: that is, the experience of becoming so radically an Other that there
is no longer a gaze to meet.
Tomkins’s thinking has been highly influential to Sedgwick’s understanding of shame.
Shame must be understood, Sedgwick argues, as both a physical-biological reality and as
a social phenomenon with simultaneous socialising and individualising qualities crucial
to subject formation. Drawing on Tomkins’s investigations, Sedgwick is interested in
how shame calls the subject into existence as both included and excluded. The experi-
ence of shame highlights the subject as dependent upon recognition from others and
therefore as vulnerable to the threat of social expulsion (Sedgwick, 2003: 35ff.). As such,
shame is connected to the individual’s sense of dignity and integrity. But since shame is
fundamental to identity formation, integrity cannot be secured by severing oneself from
shame. To Sedgwick, shame reminds us of our relationality. Shame holds potential for
establishing solidarity with other shamed subjects and for thinking of identity in terms of
becoming and transformation (Sedgwick, 2003: 35).
This mode of thinking about shame has inspired queer scholarship, notably the influ-
ential conference and later anthology Gay Shame (Halperin and Traub, 2009) and Elspeth
Probyn’s Blush (2005). While Gay Shame tends to place its faith in shame because of its
affiliation with the excluded Other, Probyn (2005: ix) points to shame as a self-evaluating
and potentially transformative affect of fundamental importance to ethics: ‘[W]e cannot
live without it, nor should we try’. In particular, it is shame’s connection to the possibility
of self-transformation that I will use as a guide for my reading of The Chronicles.

The queer-feminist potential of The Shamer Chronicles

Rather than being external to subjectivity, shame can thus be viewed as constitutive of
identity and as a condition for ethical transformation and responsibility. Such an approach
to shame may be read as an overall theme in The Chronicles, in which shame is figured
as a basic condition for a socially just society. The Chronicles consist of the tetralogy The
Shamer’s Daughter (2006 [2002]), The Shamer’s Signet (2005 [2003]), The Serpent Gift
(2005 [2003]) and The Shamer’s War (2005 [2004]). Its narrative takes place in the fan-
tasy world of the Skay-Sagis Isle, a Scandinavian-Scottish Mediaeval universe infused
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 105

with fantastic elements such as dragons, sorcerers and sea serpents. Ten-year-old Dina,
her brother Davin and their baby sister Melli live in a small village with their mother,
who is a ‘Shamer’: a person able to solve crimes by looking into the conscience of a
suspect to see if he or she carries shame over certain guilty deeds. As the Shamer’s
daughter, Dina has (much against her will) inherited her mother’s shaming ability. The
drama begins when Dina’s mother is summoned to the castle city of Dunark to pass
judgement on the young lord Nico Raven, who stands accused of having killed several
members of his family. Using their Shamer powers, Dina and her mother soon realise
that the murders are part of a conspiracy against Nico arranged by his half-brother
Drakan, of the totalitarian Dragon Order, with the aim of taking over the Lordship of
Dunark. Dina and her mother refuse to commit perjury and consequently find themselves
on the run from the Dragon Order’s persecution. Together with Nico and the clans of
Skay-Sagis, Dina and her family embark on a long journey that finally leads to the over-
turning of the Dragon Order and the birth of a new form of government. Nico renounces
his title as Lord and instead arranges for his ex-lover Carmina to become Lord of Dunark,
overseeing Skay-Sagis Isle’s transformation into an emerging democracy.
The Chronicles have received several Nordic and international prizes (including the
Nordic Children’s Book Prize, Best Disney Novel Writer of 2001 and two nominations
for the Marsh Award) and premiered as a musical theatrical play. While Kaaberbøl’s lit-
erature is thus well known among a European youth audience, academic literary studies
have paid the books little attention because the fantasy genre is traditionally considered
to be a somewhat inferior form of literature. However, exclusion from the ‘fine arts’ is
also what makes fantasy literature inspirational for radical thinking. In her queer read-
ings of shame, Sally Munt (2007: 185) highlights fantasy’s connection to the adolescent,
kitsch, illogical and unreasonable (aspects that have a tradition of stereotypical associa-
tion with the feminine) as precisely what makes the genre a possible reservoir for imagi-
nation: ‘Fantastic writing provokes readers to think differently, it reveals the silent truth
of hegemony … perhaps the fantasy genre at best could be a Foucauldian episteme that
pushes open human knowability.’ As Jacqueline Rose (1993) suggests, children’s fiction
is always also about and ‘for’ adults since it reflects an adult construct of childhood and
(through this) a construction of adult subjectivity. Indeed, The Chronicles can be seen as
narrating an image of the adult that the narrator would like the child to grow into. In the
spirit of Sedgwick (1991), who asks for more affirmative psychoanalytic literature on
‘how to bring your kids up gay’, I will suggest the Shamer books as a fantasy guide for
bringing kids up (to be) feminist killjoys who insist on shame as a pointer to
accountability.
In other words, I see a queer-feminist potential for The Chronicles. One most obvi-
ously encounters this potential in the books’ criticism of patriarchy as well as in their
representations of gender. Even though the narrative’s loyalty is on the side of the
Ravens, it also exposes the Ravens’ Lordship as built on an unjust patriarchal ideology.
The macho ideals of Lord Raven cause his son Nico (whose abilities as a swordfighter
leave much to be desired) to feel shamefully incapable. Moreover, it is the Ravens’ patri-
archal inheritance system that has deemed Nico’s half-brother Drakan an illegitimate
heir, providing the direct reason for the book’s master conflict – namely Drakan’s hatred
of the Ravens.
106 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

The books’ gender representations form alternatives to those of traditional fantasy

literature. They figure several strong women heroes and leaders capable of competing
with men on their own terms. Forms of femininity that are independent of men’s approval
are generally celebrated: Carmina, the soon-to-be Lord of Dunark, dresses and fights as
well as any man; Dina and her best friend Rose are characterised by their sharp tongues,
defiant tempers and strong dislike for social injustice; and a number of women clan lead-
ers and sages become indispensable helpers on Dina’s journey. But The Chronicles also
investigate and value alternative masculinities: Nico Raven is a pacifist who wants to
become a school teacher instead of a Lord; Dina’s brother Davin dreams of fighting like
a man – but learns that killing is a disgusting business; and the blacksmith boy Tano
eventually wins Dina’s heart – not by being brave and manly but by fashioning a pretty
clasp for her rebellious hair. A sensitive boy assisting his girlfriend with fashion tips (‘a
queer eye for the straight girl’?) represents a more idealised form of masculinity than that
of the books’ swordsmen who come off as somewhat brutish.
This appreciation of alternative gender roles is also reflected in The Chronicles’ por-
traits of alternative family structures: Dina herself is the biological offspring of the moth-
er’s relationship with her former lover Sezuan, but her two siblings are the donor children
of a friend. Dina’s mother raises her three children as a single mother, and she eventually
adopts Dina’s friend Rose (and, to some extent, Nico) into the family. Nico’s ex-lover
Carmina is led to believe that Nico (who she loves) is dead so that she may concentrate
fully on her role as leader rather than ending up in marriage. This idealisation of alterna-
tive gender roles, romantic alliances and family forms can be read as a queer opening that
provides alternatives to traditional heteronormative plots, though, as I shall consider
later, they may also be read as part of a homonationalist discourse.

Reclaiming shame
The most queer-feminist feature of The Chronicles, however, consists of the books’ re-
evaluation of shame. In this respect, the books can be understood as addressing tradi-
tional affiliations between shame and femininity. As feminist scholars have argued,
shame itself can be seen as socially and conceptually connected to the feminine. Bartky
(1990: 92–93, 85) argues that ‘[w]omen, more often than men, are made to feel shame in
the major sites of social life’ and that shame comes to constitute women’s ‘affective
attunement to the social environment’. In a reading of the shamed female body in con-
temporary women’s writing, Bouson connects shame to Kristeva’s concept of the abject
and argues that shame and disgust are ‘associated with the abject maternal – and female
– body of our culture’ (Bouson, 2009: 4; Kristeva, 1982). Biddle (1997: 231) argues
through Bataille that, with respect to the sexual act, ‘it is women’s position alone to sig-
nify shame’, and Halberstam (2005: 226) stresses that shame is ‘a gendered form of
sexual abjection: it belongs to the feminine’. In contemporary popular (anti-feminist)
mythology, we are also presented with the claim that women and shame are connected,
namely, that women are able to shame men into obedience. A quasi-misogynist belief
would have it that mothers hold a particular ability to manipulate children by causing
them to feel shame: ‘Mummy isn’t angry – she’s disappointed!’ as a popular Danish
phrase goes, sarcastically mimicking this presumed feminine talent for shaming.
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 107

Rather than rejecting these historical and popular fantasies, however, Kaaberbøl takes
them seriously and investigates their subversive potential. The Chronicles suggest the
ability ‘to shame’ as a capacity that can reappropriated and celebrated as an ethical-
political superpower. This shaming power is highly valued as an indispensable part of the
clan world’s juridical system as the Shamer is able to determine with certainty the guilt
of a suspect:

Mama sighed. ‘When something has been stolen. Or when some man or woman has hurt
another, perhaps even killed … that is when they send for the Shamer. There are people in this
world who are capable of doing evil without feeling much shame. And there are people so good
at hiding their shame, even from themselves, people who can think up a thousand excuses, until
they actually believe they have a right to hurt, steal, or lie. But when they come face to face
with me, they can no longer hide. Not from themselves, nor from others. Most people possess
some sense of shame. And if I come across one of the very few who don’t … well, I can make
them ashamed if I have to. Because I have a gift that I have learned to use.’ (The Shamer’s
Daughter: 13–14)

Thus, where as feminist theory has criticised the socially established connections
between femininity and shame, Kaaberbøl celebrates this connection and replaces the
shamed female body as a site for social control with women Shamers as the guardians of
social justice.

The shaming gaze as paranoid reading

My ambition in the following is to connect three queer and feminist concepts in the read-
ing of Kaaberbøl’s books, namely shame, paranoid/reparative reading and the feminist
killjoy. My claim is that the Shamer can be read as a feminist figuration that allows us to
imagine, through the means of fantasy literature, how these three concepts may inform
one another. I suggest a relationship between shame, paranoia and killjoyism because
they each in their own way concern the possibility of social criticism and accountability.
If shame is about the relationship one has to the ethics in which one is personally invested,
both paranoia and killjoyism are about calling attention to social injustice. I will begin by
considering how paranoia and killjoying may be connected to ‘shaming’ before turning
to the books’ suggestion for a reparative utopian imagination.
It is particularly the Shamer’s gaze that offers a way of thinking about paranoid read-
ing as a form of vision connected to accountability. When a Shamer looks someone in the
eye, she sees everything of which the person is (consciously or unconsciously) ashamed.
The Chronicles describe the Shamer’s gaze as an automatised, involuntary and painful
act that the Shamer cannot control by any means other than looking away. Re-experiencing
the shameful moments together with the suspect, the Shamer browses through his/her
shameful memories to investigate whether there is guilt beneath the suspect’s shame. The
idealisation of the truth-seeing gaze may be understood as a claim to objectivism since
the gaze has traditionally functioned as the symbolic tool of masculine knowledge pro-
duction within (for example) science and medicine. I will suggest, however, that the
Shamer’s gaze should be seen as reclaiming access to truth and as such that the books
108 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

insist upon a ‘non-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world’ (Haraway,

1991: 187).
It is the involuntary character of the Shamer’s gaze, however, that makes it tempting
to think of it as a form of paranoid reading. Here, I draw on Sedgwick’s characterisation
of two different modes of analysing: the paranoid and the reparative. The paranoid
mode tends to be that of the deconstructivist, who anticipates given power structures
(e.g. heteronormativity) and therefore also continually finds and repeats her criticism of
those very structures. Although paranoia usually refers to seeing something that ‘is not
really there’, Sedgwick does not claim that the structures one criticises are just personal
delusions. Rather, she suggests that the ‘paranoid’ identification of actual oppressive
realities must be supplemented by a more ‘productive’ mode of reparative reading that
presents the reader with non-normative narratives and alternative possibilities for identi-
fication (Sedgwick, 2003: 123–152). Sedgwick does not suggest the two modes as oppo-
sitional, but she does point to them as different optics that supplement each other rather
than overlap. Regarding The Chronicles, I suggest that we understand the shaming gaze
as a form of paranoid reading since it almost always finds shame where it looks for it. As
I shall return to, The Chronicles also contain an image of reparative reading to supple-
ment the paranoid but without dichotomising the two as Sedgwick tends to do.
In linking paranoid reading with shame, I suggest the Shamer’s gaze as an instrument
of analysis that shows the ethical implications of a subject’s actions. It allows us to imag-
ine shame as the foundation of a socially just society and as something to appreciate and
honour. This appreciation can be seen as connected to what we may term accountability
(Collins, 2000). Kaaberbøl’s books can be said to reclaim shame as that which holds
people and institutions socially accountable. The Chronicles try out and criticise differ-
ent modes of connecting shame and sociality without rejecting the connection as such.
Instead, they point to the Shamer’s ability to hold someone accountable to his or her
actions as an ethical and politically preferable way of connecting sociality and shame.
Looking a suspect in the eye, the Shamer and the person in question share a social gaze
on the suspect’s actions: ‘ “You are a merciless mirror …,” he whispered. But the image
is very clear’ (The Shamer’s Daughter: 63). In shame’s merciless mirror, the Shamer
brings about the experience that ‘by the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the
position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear
to the Other’, as Sartre (1992 [1943]: 302–303) puts it. Probyn suggests that one of the
reasons shame can be considered transformational is precisely that it makes one an object
of one’s own gaze. Just as shame may call a subject into existence as unworthy (for
instance when one is hailed through shaming names), shame may also present a possibil-
ity for change: ‘shame puts one’s self-esteem on the line and questions our value system’
and can, for instance, ‘have to do with a strong interest in being a good person’ (Probyn,
2005: x). Shame may serve as the cause for transformation so that one is retuned to the
type of ethics in which one is otherwise invested.
The Chronicles present the Shamer’s gaze as an invitation to such personal transfor-
mation (if the convicted so chooses) and connect shame to accountability, understood as
a willingness to accept one’s guilt. Although shame is presented as the window through
which the Shamer accesses a person’s potential guilt, this does not mean that guilt and
shame must be understood as the same thing. Both anthropological and psychoanalytic
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 109

studies have suggested guilt and shame to be two principally distinct phenomena.
Traditionally, guilt is connected to a subject’s actions (what one has done), whereas
shame relates to identity (what one is) (Lewis, 2008; Natanson in Ahmed, 2004: 105;
Sedgwick, 2003: 37). Tomkins, however, does not principally distinguish guilt from
shame. Rather, he treats shame, guilt, shyness, embarrassment and humiliation as parts
of a continuum of ‘shame–humiliation’ that thematises the question of the personal
identity’s relationship to sociality (Tomkins, 1995: 133–134). The Chronicles can be
read along Tomkins’s understanding of shame–guilt as they do not portray guilt and
shame as two disconnected phenomena but rather point to their possible connection as
an important ethical matter. Shame without guilt and guilt without shame are portrayed
as two opposite but equal forms of evil. Dina’s friend Rose, who is ashamed that her
brother beats her, acts as the books’ counterpoint to Drakan, who feels no shame over
being guilty of murder. The Chronicles seem to suggest that a certain amount of shame
is necessary in order to accept one’s guilt and undergo ethical transformation whereas
shame that is solely connected to matters for which one is not responsible (e.g. being the
object of violence) is portrayed as disempowering and destructive. ‘Good’ shame, how-
ever, calls a person to social and ethical accountability by making one an object of one’s
own gaze.
Thus, The Chronicles may suggest alternatives to shame’s role in contemporary affect
theory. Most significantly, the books resist the temporality of shame suggested by
Tomkins, Biddle, Sedgwick and Probyn, who tend to locate the origins of shame in
infanthood. Instead, The Chronicles figure shame as connected to the awakening of
adulthood (Dina’s shaming abilities only present themselves at around the age of 10) and
as dependent on a continuous social doing. In this respect, the books also differ from
another commonly held truth of shame theories: both advocates for and critics of shame
seem to agree that shame is nearly impossible to escape – either because of its existential
qualities (Tomkins, Sartre, Sedgwick, Probyn) or because shame sticks to hierarchically
subordinated bodies (Bartky, Bouson, Biddle, Halberstam, Hemmings). The Chronicles,
however, suggest the reverse, namely that shame must be understood as a precarious
affect that could easily be lost if societies do not struggle to hold on to it: without
Shamers, society would lose its sense of shame.

Shame and the feminist killjoy

Shame is thus suggested as something valuable, but as explained, not all forms of shame
are presented as ‘good’. In order to unpack the forms that The Chronicles idealise, I pro-
pose to read the Shamer as a killjoy figure. I am interested in how the Shamer allows us
to think of paranoid reading and the insistence on accountability as connected to the act
of disturbing the affective comfort of the normative. I rely here on Sara Ahmed’s figure
of the feminist killjoy (2010). Ahmed suggests the feminist killjoy as a figure with politi-
cal potential. The killjoy exposes the inequalities, unfairness, or unhappiness of others as
a precondition for the happiness of the privileged, making the norm momentarily uncom-
fortable for those who otherwise never notice the privileges they enjoy.
Although Ahmed criticises the tendency within queer theory to celebrate shame (see
below), I suggest that The Chronicles open up a possibility for combining appreciation
110 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

of the transformational and ethical implications of shame with the figure of the killjoy.
Indeed, we might think of the feminist killjoy as a Shamer inasmuch as she interrupts the
good mood of consensus and insists on staying with bad affect (shame) in order to exam-
ine the underlying injustice to which it points: meeting the Shamer’s gaze forces one to
examine one’s own faults and complicities, making one immensely uncomfortable. Dina
is a feminine killjoy and also a feminist killjoy who criticises patriarchal structures and
insists on accountability. One may indeed recognise the faith of the Shamer as parallel to
that of the feminist: one whose particular gaze cannot be turned off but is involuntarily
activated in the face of what is considered to be injustice. This makes the Shamer a per-
petual carrier of bad news that spoils the good mood of consensus. Being a Shamer/femi-
nist killjoy provides one with eyes that inevitably detect all of the wrongs of the world
and prompts one to point them out to people who would rather not hear about them, What
is significant about The Chronicles, however, is how they idealise this gift of shame.
Although uneasy around her, the clan society acknowledges its need for the Shamer’s
killjoy vision in order to function as an ethical society. The Chronicles thus imagine a
world where being a Shamer/killjoy is respected and even made the basis of the juridical
system.
The books, nevertheless, consider the social consequences of being a Shamer, and the
Shamer’s path is depicted as painful and somewhat lonely. To spare common folk the
pain of unintentionally meeting the Shamer’s gaze, Dina and her mother are forced to
live at the village edge in the intimacy of the chosen few who can bear to look them in
the eye. The books maintain that, in spite of the loss of happiness involved in being a
Shamer, one must choose this path. The story’s ending is thus not ‘happy’ per se in the
sense that it suggests an escape from discomfort. The Chronicles never suggest that
Dina’s life as the village’s future Shamer will be easier than if she were not a Shamer. But
the Shamer’s duty is not a ‘happiness-duty’ (Ahmed, 2010: 127ff.). Rather, her duty is to
use shame to create more discomfort in order to secure a more just society. By orienting
herself toward shame at the expense of social happiness, Dina insists on being an ‘affect
alien’ (Ahmed, 2010: 41ff.) whose affect is not in line with others and who brings affec-
tive disturbance to the social order.
This idealisation of shaming, however, also entails a problematic paradox: is the
Shamer to be understood as someone who stands outside the normative order to keep an
eye on the potential injustices of normative society? Or is she rather to be understood as
securing the good mood of consensus by restoring moral and societal order? Her position
on the border of the village suggests that she is an outsider to normativity, but her taking
part in the clans’ juridical system suggests that she is also situated inside of normative
society. The Chronicles thus seem to want the Shamer to be at once inside and outside of
normative order, and Kaaberbøl’s rigid dichotomisation of the Shamer’s good shame
with the Dragon Order’s evil shame may be understood as her (somewhat unconvincing)
means of balancing this paradox.

Reparative readings: Imagining otherwise

Another way in which The Chronicles handle the paradox of being at once inside and
outside the normative is by suggesting Dina as a new form of Shamer. Unlike her mother,
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 111

Dina is gifted with the capacity to combine her Shamer vision with the ability to imagine
something that lies beyond the existing order. As I have argued, the Shamer’s gaze may
be seen as a form of critical paranoid reading. Dina is not, however, solely a paranoid
reader. Her abilities also include a more creative reparative reading: in addition to having
inherited her mother’s shaming abilities, Dina has received ‘the serpent gift’ from her
otherwise-unknown father, Sezuan the magician. Sezuan is a ‘Blackmaster’ – a Pied
Piper of Hamelin character who mysteriously appears in The Chronicles’ third book,
insisting on forming a relationship with his daughter. Although Sezuan is also linked to
problematic orientalising narratives (see below), I wish to focus for now on Sezuan’s
more positive possibilities of radical imagining.
Sezuan’s magical gift is presented as complex. The serpent gift essentially consists of
the power of suggestion by which the Blackmaster manipulates the perceptions of others.
Sezuan does not hesitate to pay for dinner with cheap copper coins that the receiver
believes to be pure gold. He explains away this deception by suggesting it as simply a
different kind of payment: ‘He will remember that his inn had a visit from fine gentlemen
who prised his food and paid him royally. He will remember it with happiness and pride,
and he will boast about it to his neighbours. That is a form of payment too’ (The Serpent
Gift: 227). Dina’s analysis is more realistic: ‘But … that won’t feed his family’ (p. 227).
It seems that if the mother’s gift is seeing and speaking the truth, the father’s gift is that
of deceiving. Sezuan grants brief pleasure over something that is not really there.
In spite of her reluctance toward Sezuan, Dina eventually acknowledges that her
father truly loves her, and as he dies, she recognises that she cares for him, too. Dina also
comes to realise that the serpent’s deceptive power may make one see things that are not
there but that this gift is not all bad. On Dina’s request, Sezuan frees prisoners and chil-
dren from a school-prison-castle by making the guards and schoolchildren simply walk
off during dreams of something beyond the castle. If the gift of shame is the ability to see
things as they are, the gift of the serpent is the ability to dream up the not yet. As such,
the books supplement the Shamer’s gift of paranoia with the Blackmaster’s gift of repar-
ative readings. The oppressed are set free by the power of imagining that something else
is possible.
When fused with the Shamer’s gaze, the serpent gift promises the power of imagining a
different future while simultaneously maintaining an obligation to the truth as it looks
through the eyes of the Shamer. The Chronicles do not figure imagination as a solution to
social problems in itself. Rather, they show reparative reading as a precondition for change
while maintaining paranoid reading as a necessary condition for the reparative imagining
of alternatives. Whereas Sedgwick tends to criticise paranoid readings and argues for valu-
ing reparative readings, The Chronicles might be read as an argument for the value of para-
noid readings and of the Shamer’s gaze as ‘good’ paranoia without which social
responsibility is impossible. One could indeed see Kaaberbøl’s books as a reparative read-
ing of paranoia, suggesting paranoid reading as a highly reparative undertaking.

Left behind
What The Chronicles present as their identification model for the tween reader, then, is a
feminist figuration in the shape of the Shamer who stays with the uncomfortability of
112 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

shame’s paranoid gaze and even insists on it as a condition for the reparative possibility
of imagining otherwise. In other words, I suggest reading The Chronicles as a utopian
imagining of shame as an instrument of critical killjoyism and of paranoid reading as a
claim to accountability. These positive possibilities do not, however, mean that Dina’s
story does not contain pitfalls. Moreover, the pitfalls it does contain seem to reflect some
of the feminist and anti-racist criticisms that have confronted queer idealisations of
shame. Whereas some queer affect theorists such as Sedgwick and Probyn see a political
and ethical potential in shame, others such as Ahmed (2006: 175ff.) point to the potential
circularity of how parts of queer theory seem to argue for a celebration of shame:

I am not sure how it is possible to embrace the negative without turning it into a positive. To
say ‘yes’ to the ‘no’ is still a ‘yes’. To embrace or affirm the experience of shame, for instance,
sounds very much like taking a pride in one’s shame – a conversion of bad feeling into good
feeling.

Ahmed argues that the problem with the proposed ‘yes’ to shame is that this ‘yes’ presup-
poses the possibility of a ‘no’. However, such a ‘no’ is not necessarily available to eve-
ryone. Ahmed emphasises that shame is closely connected to specific gendered,
sexualised, classed and racialised subject positions. Indeed, this is the case in some pub-
lic displays of national shame that sustain racial hierarchies through the idealisations of
shame as a political tool (Ahmed, 2004: 101–122). Hemmings (2005: 561) likewise
highlights gender and race when she points to how social categories make some subjects
already ‘so over-associated with affect that they themselves are the object of affective
transfer’. Bartky (1990: 97) states that transformative experiences of shame may be salu-
tary to a person only insofar as ‘he is not systematically impoverished by the moral
economy he is compelled to inhabit’. The wish for more shame seems to entail a privi-
leged (often masculine) subject position. As Halberstam (2005: 226) argues, ‘when men
find themselves “flooded” with shame, chances are they are being feminized in some
way and against their will’.
As previously explained, The Chronicles engage with this gendered problem by
reworking the connection between shame and femininity. Rather than rejecting shame’s
relationship to women and femininity, Kaaberbøl seeks to negotiate this affiliation, to
resignify it, and to offer a different interpretation of what shame might mean. But if The
Chronicles thus offer a positive revoking of gender’s relationship to shame, they do sig-
nificantly less so with respect to shame’s relationship to racialisation. This seems par-
ticularly reflected in Sezuan, who The Chronicles subtly but unmistakably orientalise.
Sezuan’s title of ‘Blackmaster’ both indicates a warning and hints at racial markers.
Dina’s father is ornamented with unmistakable traits of old and new Western fantasies of
the Oriental: his snake-charming flute and dark hair, his opium-like ‘dream powder’, the
pseudo-Arabic names of him and his brothers (Azuan and Nazim), and their insistence
on greater importance of ‘the family’ relative to its individual members. Dina’s mother’s
fear of and continuous flight from Sezuan adds to the third book an air of Not Without my
Daughter (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991, director Brian Gilbert), albeit suggesting a
rather different ending that counters the portrait of the father as stereotypically evil.
Although Dina’s father is thus rehabilitated, this does not mean that The Chronicles
Bissenbakker Frederiksen 113

escape the trap of colonialising and othering. The books’ conflict resolution does not
consist in her joining his family (as is her father’s wish). Instead, Dina’s orientalised
father eventually dies, allowing Dina to return to live with her (white) village family
after having absorbed her father’s exotic magic abilities.
This logic of death and survival must be seen as connected to the books’ vision of the
future and how these build upon ethnic othering narratives. Sezuan becomes the bearer
of a specific form of racialised shame through which hegemonic fantasies of Western
modernity’s prevalence over the Orientalised other are reiterated. This happens through
Dina’s journey that mimes and idealises a development from European rural premoder-
nity (over urbanisation and industrialisation) to a rudimentary democracy as the ideal
form of social order. This narrative functions as a pointer to which societies must (not)
be seen as destined for the future: if the fascism of the Dragon Order is rejected as a
viable future, what is left behind is the Ravens’ patriarchal order of lordship and the
Oriental Blackmasters’ familial system, which functions as a matriarchal version of a
patriarchy. Thus, both the Mediaeval Lordship and the Oriental Family are figured as the
past while the Democratic Order and the Modern Family are constructed as destined for
the future and thus for life. As an alternative to these outdated social formations, The
Chronicles present the modern, democratic family as consisting of self-chosen relations
(e.g. adoptions, donor children and lovers). It is tempting to see Dina’s family as reflect-
ing a ‘homonationalist’ fantasy of Western tolerance toward new family forms and alter-
native masculinities/femininities as a sign of its modernity (Puar, 2007). In contrast, the
death of Sezuan can be seen as a rejection of the Oriental/Arab family culture that he
implicitly comes to represent. One could ask whether Sezuan must die because a new
Orientalism imagines ‘the Arab family’ as synonymous with a culture of ‘shame and
honour’ with which The Chronicles do not want to risk having their conceptualisation of
shame associated. Instead, part of the Orient (the serpent gift) is allowed to survive
through Dina’s colonialising appropriation while the Oriental himself must die.

Conclusion
My reading of The Shamer Chronicles suggests that a shame theoretical framework ena-
bles a view on Kaaberbøl’s tetralogy as a reservoir for imagining how shame, paranoid/
reparative reading and the feminist killjoy may be linked. The Chronicles can be read as
a meditation on shame as a form of accountability and the shaming killjoy as a heroic
figure who insists on paranoid vision as the precondition for reparative imagination.
However, in its portraits of various shame cultures, the narrative tends to fall back on
Orientalist imaginations that are subsequently discarded as obsolete forms of life. The
gender non-stereotypical possibilities that the story offers thus seem to form a problem-
atic alliance with the books’ Orientalist inspiration. We may conclude that idealising
shame is not unproblematic – either in fantasy literature, or in queer theory. Indeed, we
may, like Hemmings, consider the deep connections of shame to racist subjectification.
Citing Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon, Hemmings (2005) criticises the idealisation of
shame’s transformational possibilities as conditioned by the luxury of being spared eve-
ryday racist modes of shaming. This should serve as a warning against the uncritical
embracing of shame whilst also pointing to the need for an understanding of shame as
114 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

something that should neither be rejected, nor idealised, but instead carefully scrutinised.
As such, although the image of shame in The Shamer Chronicles is not without its prob-
lems, it offers inspiration for ways of thinking about shame as a call for accountability.
Kaaberbøl’s popular teenage fiction may thus serve as inspiration for how to bring one’s
daughters (M/F) up to be feminist killjoys.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Mathias Danbolt, Benedicte Ohrt Fehler, Katherine Harrison, Kirsten
Juul Nielsen, Marianne Stidsen and two anonymous referees for insightful comments on this
article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Note
1. The much-discussed distinction between affect and emotion can be understood as referring to
‘affect as biology and emotion as culture’ (Ahmed, 2008: 39). Following Ahmed’s invitation
to challenge such a distinction between embodiedness and sociality, I investigate shame as a
socially narrated emotion. However, I mainly use the term affect in connection to shame as I
seek to stress shame’s embodied character.

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