Shame, the Church and the Regulation of Female Sexuality

Miryam Clough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415786935
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351850506
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

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.

1 Overview

The reflexive nature of shame

While the narrative that follows may appear somewhat confessionary, my intention is primarily illustrative. That said, a degree of self-revelation in writing shame appears to be part of the territory.¹ I was encouraged, early in this project, by Charlie Glickman’s (2005) refreshing assertion in his doctoral thesis that he was his primary research tool. Glickman places value on trustworthiness and authenticity over objectivity (p. 4 citing Lincoln and Guba 2000); the pursuit of the latter, he says, ‘tends to obscure bias and confuses being factual about observations with being distant from the phenomenon being described. All distance ensures is distance; it does not ensure objectivity’ (p. 4 citing Scriven 1998).² However impartial we endeavour to be, we each filter our thinking through the lens of personal experience. I could choose to adopt a detached stance, but the direction of my research and my observations would nonetheless be informed by my personal agenda. Better to declare this openly and let the reader ‘decide where I stand’ (Glickman 2005, 5). There is enough secrecy and obfuscation involved in shame. I would rather be transparent.

The overall focus of this study is by no means autoethnographical. However, my desire to understand my experience in relation to the environment in which I was immersed is precisely what motivated me to undertake this research. Tom Inglis, whose work on the Irish infanticide investigation known as the Kerry babies’ case contributes to the ideas expressed in this volume, makes some interesting points about his motivation for academic inquiry:

One of the reasons I am a sociologist is to help me understand how I came to be the way I am. In trying to understand myself, I try to understand the culture and society within which my sense of self became constituted. How have my nationality, gender, family, education, religion, class, suburban upbringing and the media influenced who I have become, the stories I tell about myself?

(Inglis 2003, 14)

He continues, ‘to understand who I am, I have to understand the “other” in my life – that which I am not’ (2003, 14). Not only do these varying social and cultural factors (nationality, gender, family, education, religion, class, upbringing – whether suburban, urban or rural – and the media) influence the perspective of the writer or researcher, they also affect the subjects of a study such as this one. Thus this same set of factors (with all their specific variables) would have impacted on the lives and stories of girls and women in Irish Magdalen laundries, just as they impacted in different ways on the priests and nuns who ran the institutions, and the Irish state and populace who were aware of their existence and, arguably, utilised them as a convenient dumping ground for transgressive women.

In addition to his observation quoted above, Inglis declares a personal interest in his engagement with the Kerry babies’ story. There were some parallels between the Kerry investigation and the investigation into the death of his own child, and he notes that in telling and retelling the story of his son’s death, he came to understand it better and to come to terms with it (2003, 15). To understand my sense of shame, I look to understand the experience of other women whom the church has shamed and to understand the institution – the ‘other’ of which they and I were a part – which did the shaming, as well as to understand a man who sought to alleviate his own overwhelming sense of shame by shaming me. Like Inglis, who had ‘difficulty with the way Mr. Justice Lynch constructed the truth about what happened’ in the case of the Kerry babies (2003, 15), it will be evident that I have difficulty with the way the truth about female sexuality is constructed by the patriarchal church and the way, within the framework of the church’s rhetoric of sexuality, the truth about my sexuality was constructed by one of its clergy. I cannot claim to be compassionate in seeking to understand this, but I am very curious about it and committed to examining it as honestly as I can.

Shame, if we acknowledge its presence in our lives, is a reflexive emotion. It has its origins in our early attachment and socialisation experiences and is therefore at the root of our deepest insecurities. If we confront shame, we are forced to confront our fundamental anxieties. Because of its role in attachment and interpersonal relationships, shame encourages us to think about what is important to us, our core beliefs and values, and perhaps to reassess these at times. Its reflexive nature is perhaps one reason writers about shame seem to begin from their own experience and to draw on their personal experience to illustrate their work. Breaking the silence about shame is another reason. Shame flourishes when it is most insidious, so foregrounding a shameful dynamic can be an effective way of bringing it to a halt. Shattering the illusion that shame only happens to inadequate others is another (Pattison 2000, 5).

Shame narratives take on a special significance in which the telling and empathic hearing of shame stories is crucial to their healing, and where those narratives have a bearing on oppressive social systems (the stories of Magdalen women for instance) they bring the capacity for change. Equally, that telling may expose the teller to further shaming judgement. Ellis (2009, 331) argues that autoethnography is dangerous not only in the self-questioning it demands but also in the ‘response and judgments the work itself generates, regardless of the life it describes’. The ability to contextualise and deconstruct shaming judgements can be helpful in overcoming them – indeed this is the intention of this work.

As someone who for the better part of fifty-five years has experienced shame deeply and, at times, toxically, I am (as Glickman puts it) my best resource. This is not to say I am miserabilist about it, in the main. There are many colours of shame. I was fortunate to grow up in a secure family home and have not experienced the appalling toxicity of shame suffered by many of the women and children who were institutionalised by the Irish church and state, for example. My father spent his childhood in a volatile single-parent British family in the 1930s and 40s and was, at seventeen, shipped to New Zealand with his ten-year-old brother, narrowly escaping the institutional abuse that many British children at the time found themselves victim to in Australian church-run institutions. I was twenty-five before he revealed anything of his childhood to me. My mother grew up in a loving home with strict parents and conservative values, and spent her teens in an Anglican girls’ boarding school. The church, other people’s expectations and rigid notions of ‘normality’ and respectability dominated our family life. Shame runs in families and is replicated across generations. ‘The child who is born into a shame-bound family has little chance of failing to develop a sense of chronic shame’ (Pattison 2000, 106). The control, perfectionism, blaming, absence of respect – especially for individual expression – denial of feelings and pressure to conform that characterised my childhood and adolescence are common to families bound by shame (Pattison 2000, 106). Shame has limited me; it has limited my ability to express myself publically, to try things out, to risk ‘getting it wrong’, to take up challenges.

Equally, it is my lived experience of shame that gives me authority to write, that fuels my interest in the dynamics of shame, that allows me to comprehend more fully the theory of shame via the feeling of it somatised in my body. Through living it I know it; through reading, thinking, speaking and writing about it, I begin to understand it. Only by declaring the nature of my interest is my work truly authentic. I am not interested in writing an ‘objective’ account of the shame that affects others – that would be patronising and inauthentic. Nor do I want to bore my readers with too detailed an account of my own experience, and to approach the issue of shame, gender and the church entirely from my own experience would be to limit the discussion to a very narrow reference point.

Thus while my story is at once the origin and driving force of the work, and enables me to illustrate some theoretical points, its significance pales alongside the stories of Joanne Hayes, the mother of one of the Kerry babies, whose painful personal circumstances became the property of the authoritative structures, media and public of Ireland in 1984; the thousands of women who were incarcerated in the two-hundred-year life of Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’ (Smith 2007, 2) and the countless women across the world whose lives are at once influenced and constrained by the church’s teaching and policy.³ The narratives of these women illustrate the workings and consequences of shame in Christian churches and beyond. That said, few would engage with a study of this magnitude without a strong personal commitment to its content and outcome.⁴ We are compelled to engage with the issues dearest to us, and shame is a deeply personal issue.

Introduction to shame theory and the questions which frame the study

Bygones would never be complete bygones until she was a bygone herself.

(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 2003 [1892], 307)⁵

In 2002 I was summoned to my diocesan bishop for a reprimand. My then four-year-long affair with one of his more senior clergy had been reported, and as a candidate for ordination (a course of action I had decided on when a career move for my lover signalled the end of our relationship) I was accountable to the bishop. The priest in question, by then licensed to another diocesan bishop, was not. The onus was on me to speak to his bishop if I wanted to; he was no longer a problem of my diocese. I was told there must not be a scandal. I had to make a choice between the relationship and ordination. At that point, with a thirty-four-year sense of vocation, ordination training, a postgraduate theology degree, a year in a religious order and many, many hours of unpaid and underpaid parish work behind me, I chose ordination. I was advised to make my confession.

The following weeks were difficult. Two clergy I had spoken to in the strictest confidence about the relationship as it was ending saw fit to discuss my situation with others. My refusal to accept a substantial pay cut for my work as a parish administrator led to redundancy. There was a change in diocesan leadership and it soon became clear that ordination was not on the cards. With ‘my’ bishop in retirement I had no recourse to our conversations, nor had I thought to get the course of action we had agreed confirmed in writing. Friends fell like flies. At least, the friends (lay and clerical) who had themselves been in adulterous relationships did. Hardest of all was the gossip. The church is like a goldfish bowl, I had been told by my bishop. And indeed, it was.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt she could come to church no more.

(Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 2003 [1892], 84)

Some months later, disempowered by shame and all hope of ordination abandoned, I chose the relationship. Not long after that I put my spiritual life in a box, sealed it firmly and stopped going to church. For a further five years I struggled on (and off) with the relationship. Fuelled by rage, jealousy, love, pain, compulsion, hatred, obsession, a passion for French holidays and good dinners and, at times, a genuine desire to make it work, I ploughed on. For five years my rational self struggled against her better judgement to justify a relationship with a man who (in the early days) would stand on my bare feet in his shoes, spit in my face and call me a whore. For five years my emotional and affective self wept and shouted and blushed and pleaded and hoped against the odds that one day, it would work out. At times I lost interest, only to be captivated again by a man who would, by his own admission, travel across Europe to be with me. At many points in the story, I felt shame: Shame when he kicked me across the room and I was forced to recognise that I was choosing to stay in an abusive relationship. Shame when he shouted at me loudly in hotel rooms in the early hours of the morning because I wanted sleep, not sex. Shame when he put me down because my income was lower than his or I misread the map or wanted white wine when he’d ordered red.

At some point I began to ask myself questions about shame. Why am I so susceptible to it? Why do I engage with it so strongly? What factors have influenced the development of my shamed self? What contexts are shaming for me? Was I doing shame while he was doing guilt? Was he shaming me (‘you are a husband-stealer’, ‘you seduced me’) to avoid owning and experiencing his guilt? How do shame and guilt differ? If in fact he too was experiencing shame, why was his expression of it so aggressive, while mine was so self-effacing? Why did I feel shame about the relationship in some situations but not others? What role did our respective and intense church backgrounds play in all this? Why, like so many other women who are shamed by partner violence, was I struggling against my own rational judgement to leave?⁶ I began to identify different factors in my shame experience.

Firstly, shame is about being seen (Nathanson 1987, 4). I was aware that, as it progressed, I was not consciously ashamed of the relationship per se. It had absorbed so much of my life that it had begun to feel morally legitimate – I was committed to it, took responsibility for it and had certainly paid a price for it.⁷ I was only able to contemplate ordination when I genuinely believed the relationship to be ending, and I had increasingly viewed his marriage as his responsibility, not mine. I felt shame when the relationship was exposed, and specifically when it was exposed to certain people. I was curious that my discomfort was less acute with the people I love, respect or am close to. They were often direct with me because they could see the relationship was damaging, but they were not judgmental. They spoke openly about it to me and I was able to explain myself. There was a process of dialogue and understanding. They might not have approved of my actions, but they did not think less of me as a person. Braithwaite (2001, xi) notes that it is easier for disapproval to be expressed constructively by, and received from, those with whom we have a strong social bond. Rather, I felt shame in relation to people in the church I knew only slightly or cared little for, even people I disliked or whose views I found difficult to respect. I felt misunderstood, misrepresented. I felt I was seen to be ‘bad’. I did not necessarily value the opinions of those people, but nor did I like to be misjudged or gossiped about. The inability to put my side of the story across and the anxiety that people may have been misinformed contributed to my feeling shamed. Helen Block Lewis identified this aspect of the shame experience as a rupturing of the social bond. ‘Every person, she argued, fears social disconnection, being adrift from understanding and being understood by the other’ (Scheff 2000b, 95). Within the relationship itself I felt shame at the frequent public acting out of his jealousy and rage (and, occasionally, of mine). This, again, was about being seen. I also felt shame at never being good enough. This, I learned, is a product of chronic shame, the sort of shame that is generated in infancy and has its roots in the family dynamic (Pattison 2000, 96ff.). Unfortunately this huge chink in my armour was quickly identified and exploited to the full. Shaming others is a means of both displacing our own shame and taking control; as Pattison (2000, 82) observes, ‘[i]nsofar as it is good at cutting people down to size, making them feel inferior and cowed, it has often been exploited to exact conformity in social relationships of all kinds’....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Overview
• 2 Towards an understanding of shame
• 3 Shame: affect and emotion
• 4 Shaming the feminine
• 5 Embodied shame
• 6 Sexual ambivalence: why men shame women about sex
• 7 Shame and transgressive female sexuality in Ireland
• 8 Reforming the feminine: the Magdalen laundries
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index