Narrating Shame and Shaming

What if shame is not something disabled women must overcome to tell their stories, but a narrative affect that shapes both the stories they tell and how we receive them? Katrin Röder examines verbal and graphic narratives, vlogs, and performances by female-identified British and Indian Anglophone writers with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and mental distress from 1981 to 2023. Bringing together popular culture and experimental life writing by award-winning authors, the study shows how many of these works resist reduction to marketable spectacles of difference. Instead, they confront and deconstruct shame and stigma surrounding femininity, disability, illness, and cultural difference.