GIS Interdisciplinary Seminar: 'Disturbed and Deviant Sociability'

GIS Sociabilités seminar 'The Politics of the ‘Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'

Eight thematic session on 'Disturbed and Deviant Sociability', 9 January 2025 (17:00 - 19:00) at Université Paris Cité, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges (room 830)

- Helen Berry (Univ. of Exeter) - 'Queer Sociabilities and Family Life in Eighteenth-Century England'

- Charline Granger (Univ. de Montpellier Paul-Valéry) - 'Spectateurs déviants et sociabilités alternatives'

Session chaired by Naomi Pullin (Univ. of Warwick) and Jennifer Ruimi (Univ. de Montpellier Paul-Valéry/IUF)

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85731626017?pwd=zrfznVFr0bdFkvOlrNXFzAs5JnhCcp.1

Abstracts & bios: 

'Queer Sociabilities and Family Life in Eighteenth-Century England'

This paper departs from many of the assumptions about what constituted queer sociability in eighteenth-century England in that it does not posit the relationship between queerness and the household-lineage family as necessarily antagonistic. Focusing on case studies drawn from the social elite, it explores how queer family members could be integrated and indeed obsessed with cultivating and continuing family ties, fortunes and legacies by many means, including sociability among kind and neighbours, and in many respects saw themselves as part of a continuum or ‘lineage’.  Other features of queer sociability among ‘family of choice’ could be more disruptive, entailing the formation of intentional queer households which refused or subverted what Anthony Delaney has recently termed ‘heteroregulation’.  This could include elaborate (and privileged) construction of queer domestic spaces and the blurring of heteroregulated lines of hierarchy and deference (according for example to status, gender, and perceived race).  The history of families comprised of individuals who did not conform to heteronormative binaries in terms of sex and/or gender, and in relation to the diversity of domestic configurations characterised by nonconformity (e.g. centring around same-sex couples) offers fresh insights into the role of sociability in forging identities and ties of affect and economic/cultural entanglement in the Georgian era. 

Helen Berry is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and has published extensively on the social history of Georgian England, including Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England (Routledge, 2003), which was based on her doctoral research on periodical literature and coffee house sociability.  The Castrato and His Wife (Oxford University Press, 2011) explored the world of Baroque opera, celebrity and gender nonconformity in eighteenth-century Europe.  A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, her most recent book, Orphans of Empire: the Fate of London’s Foundlings (Oxford University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.  She is co-editor with Elizabeth Foyster of Rethinking the Family in Early Modern Britain (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2026).

'Spectateurs déviants et sociabilités alternatives'

Au XVIIIe siècle, les spectateurs sont tumultueux, et beaucoup plus ceux qui occupent le parterre que ceux qui se trouvent dans les loges. Ils sont une perpétuelle menace pour les acteurs et les dramaturges dont ils risquent toujours de faire tomber la pièce. Mais au-delà du désordre des comportements et de la disparité des réactions individuelles, des groupes et sous-groupes se forment, des sociabilités alternatives se cristallisent autour de manifestations communes d'approbation ou de désapprobation. Ces sociabilités alternatives peuvent être réelles (cabales d'applaudisseurs, de bâilleurs ou de siffleurs) ou fantasmées par les dramaturges et théoriciens, qui tentent, à travers des modèles scientifiques, comme l'électricité, de rationaliser le tumulte des spectateurs. 

Dans cette intervention, nous nous proposons de donner un aperçu de ce feuilletage de sociabilités alternatives, dans la seconde moitié du siècle et jusqu'à la veille de la Révolution. Il est travaillé par une question politique de fond : quels sont les groupes sociaux dont la sociabilité, pendant les spectacles, est au fond la plus déviante ? Le public du parterre ne recèle-il pas, dans son énergie erratique, le germe non pas d'une convenable "sociabilité" de spectateurs, mais d'un véritable esprit civique, identité d'un peuple qui trouve sa source dans la turbulence ?

Abstract in English 

'Deviant spectators and alternative forms of sociability'

In the 18th century, spectators were rowdy, and those in the stalls were much more so than those in the boxes. They were a constant threat to actors and playwrights, always at risk of ruining the play. But beyond disorderly behaviour and disparate individual reactions, groups and subgroups formed, and alternative forms of sociability crystallized around common expressions of approval or disapproval. These alternative forms of sociability may be real (groups of applauders, yawners or whistlers) or imagined by playwrights and theorists, who attempt to rationalize the tumult of the audience through scientific models, such as electricity. In this presentation, we propose to give an overview of this layering of alternative forms of sociability in the second half of the century and up to the eve of the Revolution. It is driven by a fundamental political question: which social groups are ultimately the most deviant in their sociability during performances? Does the energy of the parterre audience not conceal the seeds not of proper spectator ‘sociability’ but of a true civic spirit, the identity of a people rooted in turbulence?

Charline Granger est chargée de recherche au CNRS, rattachée à l’Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières (IRCL). Spécialiste du théâtre des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, elle travaille à la croisée des arts du spectacle, des études littéraires et de l’histoire des sciences. Elle est notamment l’auteure d’une monographie intitulée L’Ennui du spectateur. Thermique du théâtre (1716-1788) (Classiques Garnier, 2021).