Dr Claire Shaw Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History TSM: body Dr Claire Shaw Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History

the ‘somatic society’

Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein, shot by Steven Meisel, 1995

‘We now have the means to exert an unprecedented degree of control over bodies, yet we are also living in an age which has thrown into radical doubt our knowledge of what bodies are and how we should control them.’ Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, p. 3

It is not individuals who have experience but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces. This kind of historicizing presents a reply to the many contemporary historians who have argued that an unproblematized ‘experience’ is the foundation of their practice: it is a historicizing that implies critical scrutiny of all explanatory categories usually taken for granted, including the category of ‘experience’. Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, pp.779-80.

The study proceeds on the understanding that the senses are historical, that they are not universal but, rather, a product of place and, especially, time, so that how people perceived and understood smell, sound, touch, taste and sight changed historically. […] In the West (principally Europe and North America), as [Constance] Classen notes, “we are accustomed to thinking of perception as a physical act rather than a cultural act”, which suggests we need to expose the senses for what they are: historically and culturally generated ways of knowing and understanding. Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past, p. 3.

More recently, Western queer theory has inspired some historians to challenge this assumption that our task is to find people “like us” in the past. In particular, they ask whether people in the past – even individuals like Alan Turing, who lived and loved relatively recently – thought of themselves as “sexual beings” or imagined they had a “sexuality” at all […]. Some historians propose queering not just the identities we seek in the archives among historical subjects, but a more profound queering of method as well, to enable us to shake off “a gaze defined by presentist preoccupations”. The questions that drive our research into historical sexualities need refinement, our gaze must become more empathetic and imaginative, and we must not simply assume that we will find people like ourselves, or indeed people that we want to emulate, in the past’. Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia, pp. 191-192.