Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/05/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Come discover the curious world of the nineteenth-century electric corset in this week’s Humanities Center Colloquium. Join Sara Phenix, Associate Professor of French, on Thursday, February 5th at 3:30 pm in 4010 JFSB. Her presentation will explore its cultural impact, technological failures, and what this strange garment reveals about our own electrified age. Refreshments will be served.
Title: Current Affairs: Love & Wearable Technology in Nineteenth-Century France
The electric corset was among the oddest technologies produced during the nineteenth century. It promised consumers restored health by generating curative electromagnetic energy through a system of embedded magnets, steel stays, and copper wiring. As both medical appliance and sartorial support, the electric corset seized on the possibilities of therapeutic electricity while using fashion to introduce electromagnetic technology into the feminine sphere. The electric corset entangled flesh and fabric, volts and viscera, quackery and couture—all in the name of progress. This device thus represents the convergence of serious debates in nineteenth-century France about the interrelation of technology, fertility, and fashion. This paper examines the playful and positivist discourses of the media surrounding this (alleged) wonder garment. The spectacular malfunction of high-tech corsets in nineteenth-century plays and prose exposes the absurdity of electrical pseudoscience while delineating the limits of bourgeois positivism. The chaotic libidinal entanglements produced by these technological failures also betray profound cultural anxieties about conjugal fidelity and the future of Third Republic France. Furthermore, the electric corset invites us to think about our own relationship to technology in the electrocene—a period defined by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy as the epoch of electrically and digitally dominated human life, where we contend with the ubiquity of widespread surveillance, machine-mediated relations, and the specter of post-human agency.
About our presenter:
Sara Phenix is Associate Professor of French at Brigham Young University. She earned her PhD in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Dix-Neuf, and Romance Notes. Her presentation today comes from her current book project titled Bodice Politic: Corsets & the Future of Fin-de siècle France.
