The Blackened body and White governmentality: Managing the UK academy and the production of shame

In this article, we conceptualize the production of shame in the Blackened body as a mechanism of White governmentality in UK academia. By identifying shame as a racist anti‐woman form of governmentality that is utilized by universities to silence, alienate and degrade women of colour, we conceive how shame is imposed on her body as a form of disciplining by the White academy. We term this governmentality of recoding her corporeal body and affectivity as pornographic in its capacity and quest to possess her body and manipulate her senses. This recoding occurs within a libidinal economy that structures psychic and emotional life. For management, disciplining the racialized woman derives both pleasure and shame. For the racialized subject, the shame is carried in her body and transformed from a pornography to a psychology of power in which she re‐narrates herself as a body in deficit; lacking networks, motivation, likeability and so on. We posit that understanding the production of shame as a mode of disciplining of the Blackened body in the White academy provides a means for recovery, agency and solidarity for the Blackened body.