The Mobility of Shame
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In the first episode of MyTamilDate's podcast: Dating While Tamil, our founder Mathusha Senthil spoke about the notion of shame in the digital space, dating apps in specific:
"Definitely when MyTamilDate, for instance, when that became a thing everyone was like 'oh my god like I could never be caught on that' it was like a shame thing right yet these same people were on traditional dating apps like tinder and it didn't make sense right. Why [do] we carry the shame when it's involved around our culture in our community, yet we're okay with it when we are able to step out of it which is unfortunate but it goes again to talk about how we carry shame when it comes to our identities and how we view sex and dating and intimacy within that bubble."
Shame follows us into public, personal, and intimate spheres, drawing borders around us from the inside out. In the absence of consent culture, shame manipulates notions of intimacy and pleasure, and our minds continuously berate us with questions such as: "What if they see me on this app?" Not wanting to be "seen" on a dating app by members of our community, provokes a deeper discussion around the impact of shame. Who are we hiding from? And although the answer may seem simple at first, it is, in fact, far more challenging to understand and maneuver. The “who” in question isn’t necessarily a person, but our internalized notions around pleasure.
“Shame follows us into public, personal, and intimate spheres, drawing borders around us from the inside out.”
While many of us think of shame as an emotion we feel, for French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre the notion of shame is far more complex. In his seminal work Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes shame as "an ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity."* Central to his theorization of shame, he speaks of "the gaze" or "the look" from the Other that provokes shame. Frantz Fanon further theorizes this notion as the colonial gaze. The moment in which we feel someone is looking at us tells us something about ourselves: What do these moments of shame tell us about ourselves? Whose gaze or "look" are we continually trying to avoid? These questions, informed by Sartre's formulation of shame, help us understand the "why" shame shows up when it does.
I remember hanging out with my friends in middle school at lunch and suddenly feeling my stomach drop, my skin on my face rising in temperature. Why? My friends, who I knew were dating, were holding hands in public. It wasn't the first time I had seen people hold hands. I've seen it on tv and among my other peers at school. But why did I feel shame? I wasn't even the one holding hands with someone. Although not clear to me during this very moment, Shame told me something about myself I learned far later in life. My aversion to touch, including holding hands, hugging, resulted from neglect, lack of displays of affection at home, and the complete silence around any issue about intimacy and consent. This shame, followed me as I got older, and it stays with me, even today.
"What if he sees me on this app?" My friends and I have either asked this question or heard one of us ponder out loud about the possibilities of a particular gaze while on social media apps of all kinds. Thoughts of the possibility of future discomfort muddled every attempt at posting pictures and videos to signing up for a dating app. While the answer to this question is usually: "so what?" the pause created by an underlying fear of being "seen" is far harder to navigate. What is painfully paradoxical about online dating was that the same people we were worried about seeing us, were in fact, the people we wanted to be noticed by. Interrogating the shame that infiltrates intimate spaces, especially in racialized communities, cannot be done without understanding the deep-seated nature of the colonial gaze. This particular gaze, which has for hundreds of years "othered" communities, manufactures the shame we hold in public, private and intimate spaces.
Lately, however, my questions around shame have taken a different turn: How do we subvert this gaze? How do we immobilize shame from entering intimate spaces? While I may not have the correct answers to these questions, I do believe that conversations are a critical starting point.
*Dolezal, L. Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame. Hum Stud 40, 421–438 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9427-7
