Male and female shame: a corpus-based study of emotion

Abstract

In this study, I investigate the representation of the emotion terms shame, ashamed and shameless in relation to women and men in late twentieth-century British English. The study is based on analyses of examples of shame retrieved from the British National Corpus with the specific aim to study in what contexts men and women express shame or are associated with it, and evaluate whether the emotion is represented as negative or positive.I present two general models of shame, where the first model concentrates on a negative connection between shame and pain, exposure and embodiment, and the second model describes shame as a necessary ingredient of social life that makes people recommit to socially sanctioned behaviour and values. Most examples of women's shame in the material correspond to the description given in the first model, whereas the majority of the examples of men's shame correspond with the second. The two models illustrate how shame functions to preserve hierarchical gender structures.