Lunchtime work-in-progress seminar: Simeon Koole
Wednesday 30th March, 2016
13.00-14.00, room 3.16, Arts Two Building
All welcome and lunch will be provided but please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk for catering purposes.
History of the Caress: Tactility, Teashops, and the Organization of Desire
Simeon Koole, University of Oxford
What is the relation between desire, touch, and the massification of tea-drinking in early twentieth-century London? This paper provides a history of desire by examining the changing institutional, economic, and material conditions in which it materialized and through which it shaped and was shaped by the sense of touch. Focusing on the consistory court trial in 1932 of Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, for ‘immoral conduct’ with teashop waitresses, it examines how customer desire entwined with the shifting labour relations and working conditions of Aerated Bread Company and Lyons waitresses.
While Harold was grabbing the arms of waitresses and taking them to act on film sets, he also remonstrated with their employers and was assaulted for his unwelcome interest in their conditions of work. Rather than reinforcing the trope of the predatory male customer, Harold’s case offers an opening into a broader history of how customer desire—the quality of ‘being touched’—was made determinate only by specific capitalist conditions shaping the life and labour of teashop waitresses, conditions themselves manifested by particular instances of physical touch as he intervened to support waitresses’ employment rights. This paper therefore examines the mutual interaction between physical and affective touch, showing how thinking intimately about capitalism—through an individual’s bodily intervention in labour relations—helps us to also rethink the history of intimacy.
Lunch is available from 12.45, and the seminar begins at 1pm. QMUL is a 5-minute walk from Mile End tube station and Arts Two is building 35 on this campus map.