Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotion. Edited by Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2019) 285 pp. $110.00 cloth $32.00 paper

Abstract

Performative approaches to the body are increasingly influential within history, but especially in the history of emotions where it provides a model for emotions as embodied cultural phenomena. This collection grapples with this methodological approach, arguing for its uses especially in interpreting emotion on the surface of bodies—that is in gestures, facial expressions, as displayed in photographs or film, or otherwise communicated by the body to observers. As is explicitly addressed in a chapter by Rob Boddice, the collection attends to a debate in the field about whether nonlinguistic, responsive behaviors, like blushing, are biological or cultural, firmly and unsurprisingly locating them in the latter category. With an introduction, eleven chapters and an afterword, the contributors provide an array of perspectives from medieval to modern. They strongly emphasize histories of emotion that intersect with the history of medicine and the ways by which observations of the body have contributed to science in the modern era, probably because physicians believe such observation to be more “truthful” than patients’ descriptions of their own feelings.The collection has four sections, each with two to three chapters and a brief introduction, although the larger themes are generally consistent across the volume. The first three chapters explore medically oriented discussions of abnormal emotions—hysteria, “crimes of passion,” and psychosomatic processes in the production of diseases like cancer—to highlight how bodies become emotional through performance. Section 2 attends primarily to the photographed body, in the context of children’s pain in medical settings, theater, and the psychological sciences, as well as in relation to the AIDS crisis that arose from heroin use in the 1980s. These chapters explore technology’s ability to read emotions on the body and to disseminate their images. We have long known that photographs can lie, but the manner in which this technology assumes truth functions in the health domain are suggestive of how emotions come to be displayed.Section 3 develops themes from Section 2, attending specifically to how representations of emotional bodies produce emotional communities. One chapter looks at a twelfth-century Franciscan celebration of Christmas, and another examines representations of the pétroleuses (female revolutionaries) during the Paris Commune. Both show how ephemeral and abject bodies can become sites of political meaning and historical change. Section 4 explores humanitarianism and the suffering body as a specific example of this building of emotional collectives. Three chapters illuminate the different forms that bodies in pain took historically to enable compassionate action, as well as moments when emotional bodies failed to produce such action. Thus, the volume moves from attending to the body’s ability to communicate emotion (not without considerable debate about what it tells us) to its ability to produce collective feelings and community responses. As this book makes clear, the body is never neutral in this process; it is a site of emotion subject to interpretation according to cultural rules.This well-constructed and consistently high-quality collection makes a compelling case for the usefulness of performativity as a mode of biocultural and emotional analysis. The individual chapters involve some remarkable, even moving, case studies, in its analysis of physical representations of emotion in a field where analysis of language continues to remain the dominant mode. The book will interest historians of emotion, medicine, photography, and visual culture, and scholars who engage with ideas about spectacle and modes of observation.