Tracey Hutching-Goetz

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My earliest interest in eighteenth-century studies was in fashion: when I was sixteen, I spent a summer sewing myself an eighteenth-century gown. Two years later, at Kenyon College, I had the pleasure of taking classes with Dr. Jim Carson, who introduced me to eighteenth-century fiction and later became my honors thesis advisor. I immediately became hooked by the uncanniness of eighteenth-century fictions. I was fascinated with how eighteenth-century literature was simultaneously familiarly modern and utterly strange. In particular, I loved the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century literature, the way it blended sex with sentiment, pleasure with didacticism, and “formal realism” with absurd plotting.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on my dissertation, Touchy Subjects: An Eighteenth-Century Anatomy of Haptic Sensation. My dissertation recuperates the complexity of the sense of touch—and by extension, the other senses—in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Organized around four forms of touching (nerves, skin, hands, and invisible hands), Touchy Subjects sutures together the experience of embodiment and the narrative and epistemological structures of the period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Even when gender is not the primary subject of my work, I would describe my research as broadly informed by feminist scholarship, especially Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling. At the moment, gender and women studies are at the forefront of my work: I am currently writing the third chapter of my dissertation, “Hands,” which focuses on the fetishization of women’s gloves and hands in eighteenth-century Britain. In “Hands,” I bring together material culture and literary representations to demonstrate a shift in the meaning of gloves: traditionally, gloves connoted elite social status and authority, but, in the eighteenth century, gloves come to primarily signify femininity. In my chapter, I argue that this process was accomplished through pervasive eroticized representations of women’s gloving practices, and that the associated rise of the gloved populace during the period can be understood as a material manifestation of a changing cultural attitude toward the sense of touch.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
As a part of my current research on women’s gloving practices, I recently revisited Norbert Elias’ The History of Manners (the first volume of The Civilizing Process). Rereading Elias, I was impressed by both his analysis of early modern habitus, as well as his ability to draw links between emotional experience, embodied practices, and large-scale political changes. When I feel stuck, I’ve always found reading something out of discipline or field can help provide a new perspective or framework for whatever topic I’m working on. The History of Manners helped me to rethink the evidence, structure, and stakes of my argument.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
​I think it’s great that the Women’s Caucus decided to restart its mentoring program last year, and I would love to see that program expanded to encompass ASECS affiliate conferences. Regional conferences are often the first conference experience that graduate students have and, as such, it’s a crucial time to welcome and engage with women as they enter the next stage in their professionalization. I think it’s important to provide women, especially newcomers to the profession, with both formal and informal opportunities to meet other women in the field.

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