Shame and the gendered nature of social control. An interactionist analysis

“Young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, but are restrained by shame” - Aristotle. Shame not only gives painful feedback after transgressive behaviour, shame can also prevent people from transgressing norms. Particularly important for social control is a positive and forward-looking variant, a sense of shame ("Aidos"). According to sociologists such as Scheff, Goffman and Cooley, people are constantly anticipating shame in real and imagined social interactions. Interestingly, criminological research has repeatedly found that females anticipate higher levels of shame than males when contemplating delinquent behaviour. Moreover, these gender differences appear to account for a substantial part of the gender gap in self-reported offending. This presentation will deal with an obvious question raised by these findings: Why and under what circumstances do females anticipate stronger feelings of shame than males ? In other words, in what sense is social control gendered ? I will illustrate how a (symbolic) interactionist analysis of shame can help us to address this question.status: publishe