<\/p>\n
All welcome and lunch will be provided but please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk for catering purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n History of the Caress: Tactility, Teashops, and the Organization of Desire<\/strong><\/p>\n Simeon Koole, University of Oxford<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u2018immoral conduct\u2019 with teashop waitresses, it examines how customer desire entwined with the shifting labour relations and working conditions of Aerated Bread Company and Lyons waitresses.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s case offers an opening into a broader history of how customer desire\u2014the quality of \u2018being touched\u2019\u2014was 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\u2019 employment rights. This paper therefore examines the mutual interaction between physical and affective touch, showing how thinking intimately about capitalism\u2014through an individual\u2019s bodily intervention in labour relations\u2014helps us to also rethink the history of intimacy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n
\n