Wearable Techne: Dressing Knowledge in Early Modern England

Today's modern phenomenon of "wearable technology" promotes capitalism's investments in reproducing laboring bodies while also deeply destabilizing the "human" and what a body is. But this work of technology connects right back to the earliest usages of the term in the English language. In this talk, Professor Lee Emrich will explore the phenomenon of wearable technology as we might conceive it in early modern England. Her talk will briefly touch upon early English Bibles' discussions of the first dressing of Adam and Eve before turning to the first English pastoral play. Both sources suggest that a "Fall," whether from Edenic or Arcadian social ethics, is caused by the development of assemblagic, hybrid human subjectivity, which renders knowledge into a negotiated, mediated process—that is, it turns knowledge, including knowledge of self and others, into "work." Both texts also deeply lay the fault of such changes on the shoulders of women—Eve and a character aptly named Techne. Her talk will argue that wearable technē or dressing knowledge—the knowledge of getting dressed but also the knowledge embedded in dress or costume—localizes anxieties of gender, labor, and subjectivity in Early Modern England.

Lee Emrich teaches at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream. She is a scholar of Early Modern English literature with interests in studies of gender and sexuality, performance and embodiment, labor and professions, and technology. Her book project explores the entanglements of professional performance and wearable technologies. Her interest in thinking about professional environments stems from her own varied work background: she has worked as a cardiac ICU nurse and in literature departments and writing programs. Her work has appeared in Imagining Transmedia with MIT press and Zócalo Public Square and will be a part of the forthcoming collection Early Modern Asexualities, edited by Liza Blake, Cat Clifford, and Aley O’Mara.