Professor Luna Dolezal: A Sartrean Analysis of Pandemic Shaming

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In the UK, as elsewhere, “pandemic shaming,” that is, publicly naming, shaming and blaming individuals and groups for not properly following the public health rules put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19, or for simply conducting poor pandemic practices (such as hoarding toilet paper or improper hand washing) was a widely reported phenomenon during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during lockdowns. In this paper, I turn to Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the undifferentiated other in the experience of the look, and his insistence on shame as a foundational relational affect, in order to give a robust theoretical frame to understand how pandemic shaming circulated in “blended spaces”, both online and offline, in targeted and diffuse manners. Sartre’s voyeur example will be posited as illustrative of the iterative shame phenomenon that occurs in instances of pandemic shaming, that have been frequently characterised by shaming backlashes. In addition, Sartre’s writing on the French occupation of Paris will be explored to show a deeper relevance of his philosophical account of shame as a result of the particular socio-historical circumstances from which it arose.

Luna Dolezal is Associate Professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter where she leads the Shame and Medicine Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is author of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015) and co-editor of the books Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (SUNY Press, 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave, 2018).