Shame, Empathy and Looking Practices: Lessons from a Disability Studies Classroom

Abstract

This article proposes a use of Silvan Tomkins’s concept of shame to understand classroom practices of looking at photographs that represent bodies with visible disabilities. We consider an instance of classroom looking to suggest a concept of intersubjective, authorized public looking and to propose that the experiences of surprise and shame are constitutive of empathetic identification and the kind of social connectedness needed for a shared disability politics.