What Shame!: Prolegomena to Memoirs from a Time of Queer Immaturity Cover Image
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Co za wstyd! Pamiętnik z okresu queerowego dojrzewania: prolegomena
What Shame!: Prolegomena to Memoirs from a Time of Queer Immaturity

Author(s): Błażej Warkocki
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Literary Texts, Psychology, Fiction, Sociology, Short Story, Individual Psychology, Social psychology and group interaction, Social Norms / Social Control
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: queer; shame; affect; masculinity; Witold Gombrowicz; ‘Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity’

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the short story ‘Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer’ from Witold Gombrowicz’s debut collection ‘Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity’ (later published under the title Bakakaj or Bacacay in the English translation). Warkocki reads this collection as a ‘memoir of negative affects,’ with the opening story being a story about shame. Drawing on Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Warkocki suggests that shame is an affect that interpellates the identity of the outcast and the misfit. Thus the short story represents a particular instance of queer performativity.

  • Issue Year: 2016
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 88-105
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Polish