Tactile Communication

Abstract

Touch is a powerful vehicle in the interactions between human beings, with conspicuous potential for aggression, sex and physical coercion. In the “bubble” of privacy that people maintain around themselves, touch perhaps represents the most direct invasion. With its close bodily contact and erotic associations, kissing is a prominent focus for both enactment and regulation. In many Western traditions its public expression has been an important symbolic stage in political or religious communication. There are also the communicative uses of touch in situations of competition and conflict, playful as well as aggressive. Warfare, rape or outright physical coercion communicate through forcibly applied touch, exerting tangible bodily pressures to control others’ bodies in ways usually only too well understood by the participants on both sides. The most typical uses of tactile communication are in and through the immediate bodily presence of interacting participants.

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