Description
This paper brings together post-structural feminist work with the literature on Ontological Security,
to explore the productive role that gendered feelings of guilt and shame play in the formation of collective subjectivity. Drawing on the existential anxiety literature, OS scholars have highlighted the role of guilt and (self-)shame in subject-formation processes, suggesting that subjects’ sense of Self is often shaped by a quest to (re)establish moral purpose in their lives when failing to meet external expectations. I combine this literature with Judith Butler’s work on the heterosexual matrix, to argue that these feelings are inherently gendered, as they are associated to failing to meet the expectations of heteronormative frameworks of recognition. The paper illustrates this argument though an analysis of the (re)negotiation of the defeat in World War II and the non-intervention in the 1990-91 Gulf War in the Japanese security policy discourse. I show how shifting refence objects of shame and guilt are produced within heteronormative frameworks of recognition and (re)produce deeply gendered notions of subjectivity.
