The CWS Spring 2016 Brownbag Series continued on Wednesday, March 30, with “Shame Parades,” Dr. Spencer Schaffner’s talk on the connections between writing and shame, punishment and control. An Associate Professor of English, Schaffner explored what he termed the “rhetorical dark arts” during his hour-long presentation, specifically examining how writing is used to produce feelings of discomfort and anguish. In particular, he focused on historical and present-day manifestations of “sign shaming,” phenomena in which subjects are forced to bear handwritten signs against their will for the sake of confessing or publicly disclosing their misdeeds. These processes stand to discipline the individual and force them to reflect upon and ultimately change their wrongdoing ways.
In locating such occurrences in contexts as diverse as Puritan colonies, court-ordered legal sentencings, parental reprimanding, and even episodes of bad canine behavior, Schaffner argued that imposing speech on others creates sets of damning rhetorical associations through the act of writing. Though we often (and unequivocally) construct writing as a tool of liberation, his talk demonstrated how it can alternatively strip people of their agency by demanding complete submission to ideals of authority, ideology, and mandated authorship.
There’s still quite a bit I’m digesting from this presentation, but I keep circling back to Schaffner’s suggestion that these shaming practices emerge from the same transformative rhetorics of writing that circulate in our classrooms. While writing is celebrated for its potential to change students’ lives in teaching contexts, this idea is also harnessed to discipline and condition subjects elsewhere. That these traditions might very well be cut from the same proverbial cloth gives me much to chew on as I continue to work through how I’m positioning the role of writing in my own teaching and thinking.