Tactile Imagination: Haptic Spectatorship in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel

This essay examines the concept of haptic spectatorship as evoked in Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play Intimate Apparel, where the sense of touch emerges as a powerful and yet vulnerable way for a Black female protagonist to navigate differences of race, religion, class, and sexuality. The play mobilizes various images of textiles and forms of touch as primary modes of contact and communication across material differences such as race, class, and religion as they mediate feelings between bodies on stage and performative space. Drawing upon phenomenological approaches in recent film spectatorship and theater studies, I argue that the play’s emphasis on tactility offers a critique of ocularcentrism and opens up alternative possibilities for imagining elsewhere. Recent work in film and theater criticism on haptic spectatorship provides a useful lens through which to consider seeing as an embodied and material act as a compelling framework for examining how emotional and physical proximity are negotiated in live theater even within the structure of stage realism. Nottage’s play illustrates how the sense of touch can mediate the world of differences and how the act of seeing can be a fundamentally haptic experience. The essay further proposes that the play creates a quasi-tactile space where the audience can join in the act of touching both cognitively and sensually. The notion of haptic spectatorship challenges us to transform the predominant way of seeing and interacting with the world around us. Intimate Apparel transforms a visual experience—an encounter with racial Otherness in life and in theater—into a more tactile experience.