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Abstract
This article situates recent attempts to regulate the end-of-game handshake in youth team sports within a broader context of the troubling of touch within pandemic culture. It suggests that the end-of-game handshake is most productively understood as simultaneously: embodied ritual, form of intimate touch, and legal gesture. The analysis invites readers not only to understand the handshake as a complex and meaningful quotidian ritual, but also to see it as an increasingly unstable mode of handwork. The end-of-game handshake, in particular, highlights the clash of values between sport’s imperative to re-establish the normative hetero-masculine haptic order between players at the conclusion of the match, and pandemic culture’s framing of the skin of the palms as dirty and its corresponding requirement, asked of all prudent subjects, that we hygienically manage our everyday haptic contact. In this way, the contested fate of the end-of-game handshake in pandemic culture highlights the multiple ways that touch is understood as a volatile practice demanding regulation.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Eva Morin for her research assistance and is grateful to Marc Lafrance for his support and constructive engagement with these arguments.
Notes
1. It is important to note that we are not asserting pandemic culture as a universal phenomenon, but are specifically limiting our discussion to the Anglo-American context.
2. By haptic I mean to capture both the sense of touch but also of proprioception, particularly in relation to exteriorized objects.
3. In French, propre means clean, appropriate to, or one’s own.
4. Other handshakes that are frequently cited as ‘making history’ include that between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Russian leader, Nikita Krushchev, between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Russian Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, or the fateful handshake between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
5. It is telling that in Mark Paterson’s (Citation2007) book, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technology, he devotes an entire chapter to the ‘virtual’ (transAtlantic) handshake in 2002 between PHANToM haptic devices at MIT (Boston) and UCL (London). It is interesting to me both that it was the handshake that the researchers and their marketing teams opted to demonstrate and that Paterson does not reflect at all on the cultural, social or intersubjective importance of this particular mode of handwork.
6. As a communication studies and legal studies scholar, I am focusing my questions (and reading) primarily on socio-cultural interpretations of the handshake, with a muted gesture towards some elements of phenomenology. I do recognize the fascinating body of literature within philosophy generally, and phenomenology, ethics and deconstruction, in particular, in which the handshake can be a potent element in thinking through relations of touching and being touched. Key thinkers in these debates are Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy (although not all treat the handshake in detail).
7. Of course, this does not recognize that the hand, itself, or the grip of the handshake, itself, can still be used as a sort of weapon, certainly as a medium of aggression, a contingency noted in Bennington (Citation2008).
8. This form of handshake was also prevalent in Liberia and came under assault during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (see Doyle Citation2014).
9. There is already an emergent (and problematic) paradigm for the criminalization of the infection of another as a result of the non-disclosure of HIV status, disproportionately visited upon HIV+gay men (see Kirkup Citation2015 for an insightful discussion of this issue).
10. A number of authors note with seeming interest that sometimes the handshake doesn’t work properly, seamlessly or is not carried out smoothly, but few actually study this phenomenon as anything other than something which needs to be “fixed” (e.g. Goffman Citation1971; Hall and Hall Citation1983; Schiffrin Citation1974).
11. “Refusal to respond can generate an unbearable amount of awkwardness, embarrassment, and social tension, in addition to amazement. Observers may also bestow stigmatized identities upon whichever participant is viewed as offending the moral order” (Hall and Hall Citation1983, 257).
12. While I certainly concede that touch has received far too little scholarly attention and is often figured at or near the bottom of the Western classical sensory hierarchy (with its Aristotelean roots), I am not invested in claims to single it out as unique or to elevate it over other senses. We live in and through our senses in a completely entangled and inseparable manner.
13. This notion of touch is obviously indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (Citation1968) discussion of the reversibility of touch in The Visible and the Invisible.
14. Here I am particularly inspired by Judith Butler’s (Citation1997) use of J.L. Austin in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.
15. I am focusing specifically on young men’s sport in this analysis because in many ways, boy-boy touching in sport is even more highly regulated according to a hetero-gender normative order than girl-girl touching.
16. Hibbits’ communal function runs the risk, in my view, of working to imply a social leveling function for the legal gesture. It must be noted that communities are hierarchical forms of social organization, even when sharing a common experience such as the performance or recognition of a shared legal gesture.
17. I borrow the rich and evocative term, “skinscape” from David Howes (Citation2005).
19. I borrow this apt turn of phrase from Marc Lafrance from his generous feedback on this essay.