**Please note that the location of this event has been changed to HQ 136**
Professor Valerie Traub’s talk will focus on Frances Beaumont’s adaptation of an Ovidian erotic narrative, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, to examine the role of blushing in the racialization of sexuality. As a bodily response to a range of affects—erotic desire, emotional longing, envy, shame, fear, and even anger—the blush has multiple meanings. But the meanings of the blush change across time. The blush becomes implicated in the conferral and denial of human status in early modernity because it racialises sexuality while also sexualising racial difference. By the late seventeenth century, this bodily-affective phenomenon had become an indicator of a racialised sexuality, whereby an affectively self-reflexive subject of erotic desire is composed as generically, in its very essence, white. In particular, the capacity to express, by means of blushing, the complexity and ambivalence of one’s desiring state becomes part of the performative repertoire of white erotic subjectivity.