The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women's identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women's shame.

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity. Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body—experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject—becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women’s studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.

Femininity is a source of shame for some men and women. Scholarship and therapeutic practice have not reckoned with femininity of its shamefulness in helpful, healing ways. Thus, women and men continue to hide their 'feminine' selves. This book asserts the positive worth and power of femininity for men and women; men's and women's need for validation of their femininity; and the need to create child-rearing and therapeutic practices that achieve incorporation of femininity in men's conscious self-understanding.

Shame strikes at the heart of human individuals rupturing relationships, extinguishing joy and, at times, provoking conflict and violence. This book explores the idea that shame has historically been, and continues to be, used by an oftentimes patriarchal Christian Church as a mechanism to control and regulate female sexuality and to displace men’s ambivalence about sex. Using a study of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries as a historical example, contemporary feminist theological and theoretical scholarship are utilised to examine why the Church as an institution has routinely colluded with the shaming of individuals, and moreover why women are consistently and overtly shamed on account of, and indeed take the blame for, sex. In addition, the text asks whether the avoidance of shame is in fact functional in men’s efforts to adhere to patriarchal gender norms and religious ideals, and whether women end up paying the price for the maintenance of this system. This book is a fresh take on the issue of shame and gender in the context of religious belief and practice. As such it will be of significant interest to academics in the fields of Religious Studies, but also History, Psychology and Gender Studies.

Do you desire deeper freedom? Do you feel restricted by the knots of sin and shame that conceal the true beauty of your feminine heart? Through this collection of raw and redemptive testimonies from real Catholic women, punctuated with guided reflection and contemplative prayer, Carrie Schuchts Daunt of the John Paul II Healing Center offers you an encounter with truth and healing tailored to your specific identities as daughter, sister, bride and mother. Undone ushers you through a vulnerable search for truth through essential spiritual exercises, prayer guides, and reflection material. Sharing personal testimonies of illness, loss of faith, rejection, promiscuity, abortion, broken marriage, infertility, miscarriage, addiction, betrayal, bulimia, and depression, the fifteen women in Undone identify shame and fear as major barriers to their relationships. In their stories, they share how their shame was untangled and their identity restored. This chorus of bold women—including Lisa Brenninkmeyer, founder of Walking with Purpose; Jen Settle, managing director of the Theology of the Body Institute; Debra Herbeck, founder of Be Love Revolution; Judy Bailey, executive director of John Paul II Healing Center; and Jeannie Hannemann, founder and executive director of Elizabeth Ministry International—will encourage you to explore and undo the knots in your own life as well. Daunt shares the same prayer exercises and spiritual reflection material used at the John Paul II Healing Center’s Undone women’s conferences, including inner healing prayers spiritual exercises for identifying core wounds spiritual exercises for renouncing false belief systems reflection questions In Undone, readers find an essential guide to distinctly feminine healing that will leave them willingly and eagerly stripping away the bondage of sin and shame allowing them to become the women God calls them to be.

First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.