This article examines the 2023 YouTube plagiarism scandal, which revealed that James Somerton—a popular queer video essayist—plagiarized most of his work and financially exploited his followers. Drawing on constitutive rhetorical theory, Martha Nussbaum’s theories of shame, Mary E. Triece’s work with rhetorical reconstitution, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan's work on sugrophobia (the fear of being duped), the article analyzes the Somerton scandal as a moment in which a digital community extends an invitation to shame that creates space for individuals to sit with the discomfort of shame and engage with that experience to reconsider and renegotiate community values and norms.
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Kathryn T. Burt (2025) studied this question.
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