ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the sensuous dispositions that are mobilised on the beach. It focuses on the socio-historical construction of the sensorium' which has transformed a marginal space into a thriving, civilized, pleasure and recreation-orientated outpost of Western life where so many sybaritic impulses of culture have been indelibly concentrated'. The chapter draws on a style of thinking that emphasises the significance of haptic knowledges and geographies, the main examples being the work of Paterson. It constructs on expanded notion of the haptic that emphasises the expressive and sensual dimensions of tactility. Touch produces a distinctive form of knowledge that destabilises the neat, gendered order of the sensible associated with the tourist gaze. Whereas visual epistemologies tend to emphasise a dispassionate and idealistic form of knowledge, touch enables a more performative and embodied relation with the environment. In the sea somatic and interoceptive aquatic tactilities coexist with more ordinary cutaneous forms of touch.
