Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Southern Cross University and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her new book, A Critical Genealogy of Normality, which she co-authored with Peter Cryle, is forthcoming with Chicago University Press in 2017. This paper, ‘Queer Sensations: Towards an Affective Genealogy of the Modern Body’, was delivered as a keynote address at the ‘First International Conference on Contemporary and Historical Approaches to Emotions’ at the University of Wollongong on 6 December 2016. It draws on recent work in feminist affect studies and cultural histories of emotion to develop the idea of an ‘affective genealogy’. The case of James Tilly Matthews, a man committed to the Bedlam Lunatic Asylum in 1797 for claiming that his body and brain were being controlled by a secret machine, Stephens suggests, is representative of a transformation of the human sensorium by the start of the Industrial Age.