Eviction, Home and the Spatiality of Shame

ABSTRACT Rooted in the scene of residential evictions, the present article examines the intersection of shame and eviction through intimate group interviews with family members in gentrifying Mexico City. It makes three contributions: highlighting the role of shame in facilitating evictions, presenting a spatial theory of shame and offering strategies for resolving shame and restoring political agency and connection. Understanding shame beyond its common usage within a moral frame, I rather conceptualise it as a spatial arrangement of mutually exclusive attachments that freeze a subject in stalled indecision. This perspective on shame attends to the torsion and divisions shame creates within the self and beyond, affecting the vital energy a person creates with their home and immediate surroundings. Seeing shame as a function of attachments also influences the logic of how shame is resolved. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2021, I present findings in three sections: first explaining how shame enters scenes of eviction by surprise through the strange encounter with home upended on the sidewalk; second, cataloguing the materiality of abject objects; and third, articulating interpersonal processes for transforming shame, described by women who lived through eviction. The text explores why efforts to restore agency and pride through rejections of shame include a certain risk associated with the magnetic pull between shame and pride. It goes on to suggest a more durable resolution of shame is achieved by engaging with relationships of interest and encouraging a dissipation of intensity across attachments. The article shows how the role of the other can catalyse a transformation in the psychic space, helping the subject to resolve a shame response, weakening the affective hold hegemonic orders have on subjects and, despite not offering closure or coherence, offering arms for holding jumbled fragments and inviting back the vital energy so important for collective movements.