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For a Queer Feminist Class Politics of Shame

It’s rather curious. A book in which the author, Didier Eribon (2013a), vehemently demonstrates that we always also experience class relations sexually, and that there is a class dimension inherent to every form of sexuality – indeed, that without this interrelation, one is not able to consider one thing nor the other – unexpectedly becomes a bestseller. The enthusiastic German reviews – with the exception of that by Dirck Linck (2016) in Merkur – overwhelmingly act once again as if one can be separated from the other. Often enough, they degrade the author’s homosexuality to the status of a footnote to a class analysis untouched by it. Yet the author himself asserts that shame is the mode of functioning of both sexual and class-specific stigmatization.[1] Why does that not lead to sounding out the sexual dimension of shaming in the countless professions of class-specific shaming following the publication of the book?