“When Peggy Shinner asks, ‘Can we not have words?’ she has no intention of giving up on language. Bikini. Occupy. Lesbianism. Apology. Words and their archives are the girders of this collection—essays as gorgeous idiom excavations, language as keys to systems that forbid and sometimes liberate. Shinner’s stunning etymologies accrete into stories and analyses that revise the unseen and rebuild from the variants, in the process transforming the wreck of shame into a navigable morality that might just keep us afloat.” —Barrie Jean Borich, author of Apocalypse, Darling
“A literary acrobat, Peggy Shinner juggles memoir and social criticism, tossing seemingly unrelated ideas in the air like flaming torches. The thrill comes in watching them spin. Obsessed with hidden meanings of words, Shinner is also a keen observer of silences, especially her own unspoken apologies to a long-dead mother. At turns mournful, meditative, angry, and electrifying, Shamewreck is a wonder of a book.” —Miles Harvey, author of The Registry of Forgotten Objects
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.
Peggy Shinner is the author of You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body, which was longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A lifelong Chicagoan, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize. Her work has appeared in BOMB, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere.
Contents
ContentsSum Effects
Bikini / le bikini / Pikinni
you are beautiful
Slave Key
An Excellent Good Worde
They Had Not Anything to Lay to My Charge
Face
Dirt
Can We Not Have Words?
Semantic Field of Distress
Acknowledgments
