Sex Roles (2007) 57:461–462
DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9254-9
BOOK REVIEW
Shameless in the City ... and in the Country
Shameless: Sexual Dissidence in American Culture. Arlene Stein, New York, New York
University Press, 2006. 211 pp. $21.00 (paperback) ISBN 0814740286
Lisa D. Brush
Published online: 2 June 2007
# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007
Between the covers of Shameless, feminist sociologist
Arlene Stein (Rutgers University) collects an array of
thoughtful essays on sexuality, feelings, community, and
cultural representation and struggle. The cultural and
political events, artifacts, and practices to which Stein
refers stretch from the 1970s to the present, and the book
includes some of Stein’s previously published writings over
a period spanning the early 1990s through 2005. Stein’s
writing gracefully bridges the concerns of cultural studies—
to analyze the structures of feeling through which people
make and contest meaning in our disparate worlds—and
feminist scholarship—to analyze the logics of gender, race,
class, and sexuality as principles of social organization in
identity, everyday life, social movements, and broader
institutions. Similarly, the material in Shameless connects
disparate social worlds and political struggles through
themes of community, dignity, and longing that help
explain the longevity and intensity of the culture wars
over sexuality, family, and expression in contemporary US
life.
Shameless is “about” many things, including the lure of
rock music for rebel grrls, the varied social–emotional–
political lives of women coming out as lesbians in the
“heady, shape-shifting time” (p. 118) of the 1980s, and the
painfully awkward justificatory rhetoric of anti-gay
activists. Stein captures with particular clarity and humor
the perhaps regrettable fraction of a second when some of
us actually cared whether On Our Backs columnist Susie
“Sexpert” Bright got knocked up using fresh or frozen.
L. D. Brush (*)
Sociology, University of Pittsburgh,
2425 Posvar Hall,
Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA
e-mail: lbrush@pitt.edu
[Reviewer disclosure: I just had to laugh, recalling the
“somewhere between goofy and sexy” photo accompanying
Bright’s column titled “Absolutely Pierced” in the Nov–
Dec 1989 issue that Stein mentions (p. 44). Bright published
one piece of my fiction, rejected another, and then very
prettily begged me to write a piece on How To Tell S/M Play
From Battering that the editorial staff eventually turned
down as “too academic” for the magazine for the adventur-
ous lesbian. I also attended one of JoAnn Loulan’s work-
shops.] But Shameless is far from being a glib celebration or
snide condemnation of either dildo-slinging sex radicals or
their finger-wagging Others. Stein writes with insight and
compassion on such current issues as the powerful role of
shame (and emotions more generally) in political life and
social mobilization, the social formation of conservative as
well as progressive values and movement activists, and the
double-edged sword of memorials and metaphors of
victimization and trauma.
Stein provides three interesting and important points-
of-view on 20 years of debates over sexual practice,
politics, and culture in the US. One comes from the sexual
dissidents (many of whom are now fashionably and
affectionately known as queers, but whom Stein specifical-
ly and respectfully names as lesbians) whose pioneering
efforts to constitute what social theorists such as Fraser
(1989) sometimes call counterpublics flourished in the
times and places Stein chronicles. By exploring the
differences of thought and practice that characterized
the contentious and lively cultures of coming out and
rocking out in the 1980s, Stein creates an archive of a
vital moment of debate and activism in diverse lesbian
communities. Stein provides a distinctively lesbian
perspective on a period that now seems distant not only
in time but in political possibility. She also sets up her
analysis of the backlash that followed on the heels of
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that fleeting moment of flourishing cultural production
and critique.
Another compelling point-of-view comes from the
religious right, the efforts of which to organize against
“special rights” for lesbians and gay men constitute the
lion’s share of the second half of the book. Stein shines
as both ethnographer and cultural analyst as she places
her interviews with grass-roots activists in the context of
broader efforts to effect a right turn in US politics by
replacing a no-longer-viable anti-Communism with re-
vived traditional notions gender, sexuality, and family
centered on protecting communities from the homosexual
peril.
The third point-of-view comes from Stein, whose self-
reflective scholarship proves her to be a generous and
courageous companion for attending to both the provoca-
tive and the provoked. What is most compelling about
Stein’s practice and prose as a sociological ethnographer
and cartographer of culture is the way she takes readers to
the affective and political heart of profoundly opposed
libertine and conservative positions. Stein has sustained
long visits in strikingly different social worlds. She has
listened carefully to what people say and how they say it.
As a result, her accounts of the diametrically opposed
projects and structures of feeling of lesbian sex therapist
Joanne Loulan and emotional cultural warrior Jeri
Cooksson are equally credible, productive, and accessible.
Shameless is faithful to the clamor within and between
movements of pride and shame, to the clash of rhetorics of
righteousness and outrageousness. Stein clearly sees the
stakes in the backlashes against movements for the
liberation of women and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered people. Even more significantly, she makes
vital connections between the constellations of affect that
structure starkly different visions of sexuality, family,
privacy, and morality.
The result of Stein’s ethnographic engagement with the
disparate communities that are the settings for her research
thus far is a valuable contribution to several literatures.
Stein joins social movement scholars studying right-wing
movements such as Kathleen Blee (who has studied women
in the Klan and other racist and anti-Semitic groups; see,
e.g., Blee 2002), and studying the role of emotion in
mobilization such as Deborah Gould (who studies pride,
shame, anger, and mourning in ACT UP; Gould 2003) and
Anne Cvetkovich (who has studied trauma and affect in
settings varying from migration and diaspora to childhood
sexual abuse to AIDS activism and carework; Cvetkovich
2003). Stein adds to the cultural studies of shame that forms
a particularly rich vein of research by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (in addition to Gould, Cvetkovich, and others;
Sedgwick 2003). Stein also contributes to the counterpublic
Sex Roles (2007) 57:461–462
producing specifically lesbian-feminist cultural criticism,
joining Cvetkovich and Suzanna Danuta Walters (2001) in
commenting on a range of cultural artifacts, genres, and
practices. Stein’s account of 1980s San Francisco contrib-
utes to the growing number of histories and memoirs of
women’s culture and movements by scholars such as Alice
Echols (1989) and Wini Breines (2006). Her material on
conservative grass-roots organizers in the 1990s adds
an entirely new dimension to work on family values
by scholars such as Arlene Skolnick (1991) and Scott
Coltrane (1996).
In welcome contrast to many works in cultural studies,
which sometimes collapse under the weight of their
theoretical posturing, Shameless is simultaneously rooted
in perceptive fieldwork, driven by big ideas, and remark-
ably free of jargon. The combination of big ideas,
methodological sophistication, and history in Shameless
means that undergraduate readers will likely benefit from
careful discussion. Nevertheless, the accessibility of Stein’s
prose and her timely topic will engage a very wide variety
of readers. In part because it brings together work from
different empirical projects and publication venues, yet
features an original introduction and epilogue that
thoughtfully thread together the individual parts of
Stein’s work, Shameless should inform and stimulate a
broad audience.
References
Blee, K. (2002). Inside organized racism: Women in the hate
movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Breines, W. (2006). The trouble between us: An uneasy history of
white and Black women in the feminist movement. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Coltrane, S. (1996). Family man: Fatherhood, housework, and gender
equity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality,
and lesbian public cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Echols, A. (1989). Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America,
1967–1975. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse, and gender in
contemporary social theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Gould, D. (2003). Passionate political processes: Bringing emo-
tions back into the study of social movements. In J. Goodwin
& J. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements: Structure,
meaning, and emotion (pp. 155–175). Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, perform-
ativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Skolnick, A. (1991). Embattled paradise: The American family in an
age of uncertainty. New York: Basic Books.
Walters, S. D. (2001). All the rage: The story of gay visibility in
America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.