Touch and sociability [ Communication ]
… High Court Judge, Dudley Ryder kept a diary. It recorded, amongst other things, his concerns about his own masculine performance in company, especially in relation to women, together with anxieties about his breath being bad and his risk … the late eighteenth-century conception of chastity was not simply an issue of virginity but had become a complex social performance marked by a range of signs that amounted to a public display of purity. The battles over women’s hands, and … own social standing and saw that as dependent upon the judgments of those who shared their social worlds, such normative performances were to be respected. Moreover, these norms were also set out, perhaps especially for the aspiring middle …
Conduct | Conventions | Dance | Gender | Kissing | Propriety | Touch
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