How to bring your daughter up to be a feminist killjoy: Shame, accountability and the necessity of paranoid reading in Lene Kaaberbøl’s The Shamer Chronicles

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.