Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 305-315 - Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif WOMEN'S STUDIES INTERNATIONAL FORUM ELSEVIER Shame and honour: The violence of gendered norms under conditions of global crisis Shelley Feldman Development Sociology, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University, 391 Uris Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853-7801, United States SYNOPSIS Available online 5 March 2010 ARTICLE INFO Santi Rozario (1992)) creatively and subtly explores shame and honour to understand village life in Doria, Bangladesh. Moving beyond descriptive accounts and causal explanations, she examines the values that guide village norms and the political economy that constitutes their implementation. In this paper, I contribute to the effort to understand gendered interpretations of normative practice by highlighting the institutional and regulatory regimes that constitute and legitimate forms of rule that appeal to idioms of shame and honour, fear, and humiliation. Engaging a moral regulation analytic of overlapping civil, religious and customary norms and expectations, I suggest that sanctions for noncompliance can reveal women's agentic capacities in decisions about suicide. @ 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In a brilliant exploration of sati, Lata Mani (1998) draws attention to how discourses of modernity were negotiated in early 19th century India and how arguments over sati situate and reveal tensions between colonial and nationalist histor- iographies. Focused on social reform, Mani's analysis illus- trates how discussions of sati actually reveal women's liberal benefactors, the social reformers of the period, while erasing its very subjects-Hindu widows.1 But, if we wish, instead, to draw attention to Hindu widows, how might we capture the relationship between social reform and the experiences of those whose life choices generate reformist concern? This is not a simple task, as Antoinette Burton (1999, 1282) cautionary remarks suggest, since Mani's account omits the "vexed question of what we can know about the historical experience of the widow given the virtual impossibility of access to her testimony." Surely, if we could gain direct access to women's understandings of sati, we could begin to acknowledge the specific conditions that led to their decisions to commit suicide.2 A window on this practice may be available through texts, testimonials and interviews, but if we seek to make visible the negotiations that frame women's choices and how they understand their options, particularly among those who we may acknowledge as choosing suicide, evidence is unlikely to be available. We have no real possibility of understanding how women negotiated with individual, family, and community norms in deciding on suicide as an option in the contex of shame and dishonour. The situation here is similar to that of the place of women- raped, murdered, and killed to maintain the family's honour- in the 1947 Partition. As Menon and Bhasin (1998) and Butalia (1998) remind us, in the absence of historical records, literary texts can provide a window onto such events. Menon and Bhasin (1998, p. 7) argue that literature "can be considered a kind of social history not only because it