VISCERAL CULTURE: BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS IN EIGHTEENTH‐CENTURY BRITISH PORTRAITURE

Abstract

This essay engages art history and visual culture more fully with the visceral spaces of gendered and racialized subjectivities, by focusing on an involuntary bodily performance, the blush. Towards the end of the eighteenth century British artists in particular represented their female sitters with pale, white skin and strikingly flushed cheeks. What did the blush as a corporeal eruption mean in a culture where the circulation and mixing of blood was a cause of great anxiety? The essay suggests that far from being just a marker of beauty or virtue, blushing cheeks of the so‐called British Fair also came to signal racially. The gendered concept of whiteness that became legible in the depiction of European woman's blushing skin will here be seen as both an expression of anxieties about racial purity and a means by which the English formulated ideals of femininity and nationhood.

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