Turned from view: Navigating the productive potential of shame through the whirlpool approach

Abstract

Shame is a painful, isolating, and slippery emotion, with a long history of being used to silence, control, and marginalise vulnerable populations, notably women. However, shame can also be generative, enabling individual transformation that can restore social connection.
In this thesis, I develop the ‘whirlpool approach’—a feminist-informed mode of creative practice-led research—to explore the productive and relational potential of shame that was first identified by U.S. psychologist Silvan Tomkins in the 1950s and later expanded upon by feminist and cultural theorists from the 1990s onward. The whirlpool approach draws on the embodied, affective, gendered, circular, and entrapping nature of shame to create an ongoing fluid and circular process of idea generation and analysis that moves continuously between my original creative writing, feminist theory, and analysis of key creative works. In doing so it offers a new conceptual framework for creative practice-led research that emphasises the dynamic, propulsive and creative energy generated by the clashing interplay of the exegesis and creative work.
Through both my creative work, the novel Turned from view, and my exegesis, my development and use of the whirlpool approach aims to contribute to redressing the lack of academic study of shame by exploring how dominant negative representations of this emotion can be challenged. Drawing inspiration from American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story A descent into the maelström, and the sailor’s escape from the jaws of Norway’s Moskstraumen whirlpool, I draw on the possibilities afforded by the feminine sublime, in which meaning is rendered “infinitely open and ungovernable” and radically uncertain (Freeman 1997:11), to explore the “uncertain possibility” of being “lost from view’’ in shame (Munt 2007: 100). I then argue that the productive possibilities of this emotion can emerge when one is ‘turned from view’ in the liminal vortex of shame.
The whirlpool approach is also shown to be adaptable to other creative practice-led research projects, particularly those that aim to examine silenced, marginalised, embodied, and emotionally charged foci in novel ways.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Bethaney TURNER (Supervisor)