Skin Studies

Abstract

In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges.

Keywords

body embodiment skin subjectivity surface

Over the course of the last twenty years, a new subfield has begun to emerge. Now known by many as ‘skin studies’, this subfield takes the body’s surface as its key object of enquiry. Like its more established counterpart, body studies, skin studies is a transdisciplinary project informed by a variety of social science and humanities approaches, such as anthropology, art history, communications and media studies, history, literature, philosophy, psychology and sociology. And like body studies, skin studies has been constituted by and through its ongoing engagements with other subfields such as critical race studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies and sensory studies. While skin studies ‘avoids taking “the body” as its privileged figure’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001a: 1) – focusing instead on how the body’s surface is made liveable, intelligible and meaningful – it makes many of the same assumptions about the skin as body studies does about the body: it is open, processual, relational and sentient; it is human and non-human, material and immaterial, indeterminate and multiple; and, finally, it is crucially bound up with thinking and, indeed, rethinking agency, experience, power, and technology (Blackman, 2008; Featherstone, 2000; Shilling, 2013; Turner, 2008).

Here we might reasonably ask: why does the skin matter so much? In other words, what makes the skin – as both subject and object – deserving of its own subfield? And how, exactly, has this subfield taken shape? To answer these questions, I will introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I will start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I will then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And, finally, I will end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body & Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges.

Skin Matters

Though it is often taken for granted, the skin is in many respects the most fundamental sense organ. We can live without sight, hearing, taste, and smell, but we cannot survive if the greater part of our skin is not intact. The skin is the largest and heaviest part of our bodies and its sensory capacities develop earlier than those associated with the other sensory systems. Despite its significance, however, the skin has only just started to be taken up in a sustained and scholarly manner. As anthropologist Ashley Montagu explains in his now seminal work on the skin in cross-cultural contexts:

One would have thought that the remarkable versatility of the skin, its tolerance of environmental changes, and its astonishing thermo-regulatory capacities, as well as the singular efficiency of the barrier it presents against the insults and assaults of the environment, would have constituted conditions striking enough to evoke the interest of inquirers into its properties. Strangely enough, until relatively recent years, this has not been the case. (1986: 5)

Twenty years later, French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu (1990) makes a similar argument. We rely on the skin for our very existence, he claims, while at the same time taking it for granted:

there is no human being without a virtually complete envelope of skin. If one seventh of the skin is destroyed by accident, lesion, or burns, the human being dies.…The skin is so fundamental, its functioning is taken so much for granted, that no one notices its existence until the moment it fails. (1990: 64)

If the skin often recedes into the background over the course of everyday life, then it also erupts into the foreground through well-established speech patterns (Anzieu, 1989; Benthien, 2002; Connor, 2004). Indeed, the skin’s important place in the collective imagination is revealed by the many common expressions that refer to its structures and functions. For instance, when greeting others we ask them to ‘give us some skin’; when we have a stake in something we claim to ‘have skin in the game’; and when we have survived a traumatic event we say we have been ‘skinned alive’. Similarly, we refer to highly sensitive individuals as ‘thin skinned’, to ruggedly resilient individuals as ‘thick skinned’, and to simple or superficial individuals as ‘skin deep’. All of these expressions make use of the skin as a metaphor for human subjectivity and, in doing so, point to its considerable significance.

The skin’s significance is also tied in no small way to how subjects both maintain and modify their bodies. In terms of the former, the skin is an ever-present part of everyday body care rituals, such as washing and dressing. And in terms of the latter, the skin is always already implicated in piercing, tattooing, scarifying as well as in cosmetic, reconstructive and transplant surgeries. It is, therefore, not surprising that the skin attracts the attention of so many experts. The skin is the object not only of doctors and surgeons, but also of advertisers, allergists, beauticians, entertainers, hygienists, marketers and massage therapists, to name only a few (Anzieu, 1989: 17). The skin confronts and is confronted by us no matter where we are or what we are doing; it is that with which we must actively engage as we constitute ourselves as what French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1965) calls ‘body subjects’. Indeed, if the body is a project, then the skin is one of the most important sites on and across which this project is undertaken. The skin, then, is not something with which we are simply expected to live. It is, instead, something we are expected to work on, work through and, above all, work towards (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001a: 2).

If the skin is an ever-present feature of the subject’s experience of embodiment, then it is also an ever-changing one. As that which lies at the frontier of inside and outside, self and other, subject and object, the skin is characterized by an inherent ‘in-betweenness’ or, as Anzieu puts it, ‘“a half-way”, intermediate, transitional status’ (1989: 17). And the skin’s in-betweenness is everywhere in evidence: it is both superficial and profound; permanent and temporary; delicate and resilient. It protects as it assaults; unites as it divides; and reveals as it conceals. On the one hand, the skin is an absolute boundary, an all-encompassing shield, a defensive armour and a posturally supportive container. It is not only that which holds us together but also that which distinguishes us from others. Here the skin is omnipresent and inescapable: there is no getting beyond it. On the other hand, however, the skin is always already in flux. It is a fluid boundary and a leaky interface. It is configured and reconfigured through affective relations, sensory transactions and social interactions. Far from a sealed off or seamless membrane, the skin is full of folds, pores and orifices that push it into the world and the world into it. As that which has the ability to fold in on itself while maintaining both an inward and an outward orientation, the skin – and the flesh of which it is a part – can be seen to be characterized by what Merleau-Ponty (1968) calls ‘reversibility’.

The skin is in a constant state of sensory activity and awareness. For even when it is not touched by others, it regularly touches itself. Of all the paradoxical phenomena associated with the skin, the most fundamental one – for both Merleau-Ponty (1965) and Anzieu (1989) – is touch. Insofar as it is felt on both the inside and the outside and is experienced by both the subject and the object, touch can be seen as not only paradoxical but reflexive. In fact, for Merleau-Ponty, the skin is special insofar as it is capable of what he calls a ‘double sensation’. Using the example of one hand touching the other, Merleau-Ponty explains that a double sensation refers to being both the object and the subject of touch.¹ And while the role played by the skin in the double sensation is left implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s work, it is made explicit in Anzieu’s. He writes:

In fact, tactile experience has the peculiarity in comparison with all other sensory experiences of being at once endogenous and exogenous, active and passive.…This double sensation, passive and active, is peculiar to the skin. Tactile sensation procures the basic distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and it is the only one that can provide it…(1989: 63)

The notion of the double sensation demonstrates that the skin is enabling: it allows us to sense and perceive our life-worlds as well as to be sensed and perceived by them. But the skin can also be disabling, particularly when it is felt to have failed. Failed skin is bad skin: skin that disappoints and sometimes even disgusts us when it does not do what we wish it would. Here the failed skin becomes a strange or, indeed, estranged skin: it angers us, eludes us and preoccupies us for days, weeks and sometimes years on end. It is hardly surprising, then, that the skin is the site of a sprawling commercial economy, driving consumer practices on levels ranging from the daily use of soaps and cosmetics to the more technologically complex trade in grafts, injectables, surgeries, and transplants. In an age of stem-cell skin cultures, 3D printing and a wide range of increasingly accessible and affordable medical procedures, we could be forgiven for thinking that there is something almost invincible about the skin. Yet when we treat the skin as though its malleability and plasticity know no bounds, we are quickly reminded of its extraordinary fragility. We can use the most innovative techniques at our disposal, but attempts to make the skin into something it is not are often met with resistance. The skin bruises, oozes, and shape shifts. It recovers in unpredictable ways and gives rise to scar tissue for which we did not ask and about which we can do very little.

If the skin can be disabling on an individual level, then it can also be disabling on a collective level. Even a cursory consideration of the cultural politics of gender indicates that women in the west have long been expected to show more skin than men. Whether it is in the context of advertising, television, film or pornography, women’s skin is often on display and – as the history of western beauty standards makes clear – it is not unusual for them to be appraised and assessed on the basis of this display. Unlike men, women have been expected to care for their skins through elaborate and expensive cleansing routines, lotion applications, body hair removal and, in an increasing number of cases, botox injections and facelifts. Similarly, women have been entreated to ‘perfect’ the appearance of their skin by means of foundations, concealers, blushes, eye shadows and lipsticks. Whereas a man is in many cases considered more masculine when he has rough or scarred skin, a woman is considered less feminine when hers is not soft, smooth and blemish-free. Women are expected to make their skin sparkle through the use of products such as lip gloss and nail polish and accessories such as earrings, necklaces and bracelets. And not only are women’s skins expected to look and feel good, they are expected to smell good too: they are to be clean, fresh and perfumed at all times.

Like the cultural politics of gender, the cultural politics of race indicate that racialized skin is inscribed by power relations, objectified by oppressive stereotypes and all too often assaulted by state violence in ways that the non-racialized skin is not. Black skin, for instance, is often understood in and through what Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon calls the ‘epidermal schema’. In Black Skin, White Masks (2008), Fanon argues that this schema reduces black individuals to their skins through the creation, perpetuation, rigidification and sedimentation of a ‘white gaze’ and, by extension, a ‘white-scripted blackness’ (Nielsen, 2011: 363). This white-scripted blackness focuses on differences in skin colour while emphasizing so-called ‘natural distinctions’ between racial groups on the basis of these differences. And although Anzieu and Merleau-Ponty avoid the racialized specificities of the skin by presuming that all individuals share a similar ‘body ego’ or ‘corporeal schema’, Fanon considers these specificities at length, showing how the racialization of black skin is characterized by a play of surfaces. In other words, race has no depth precisely because there is nothing beneath the first surface (the white mask) but a second surface (the black skin). So when some scholars, like Anzieu and his predecessor Montagu, claim that the skin is something that we tend to forget over the course of everyday life, it is worth remembering that not everyone has the privilege of forgetting their skin in the way these scholars describe. Forgetting about the skin is, in many respects, a privilege – one from which those with racialized skin are less likely to benefit.

The gendered, sexualized and racialized complexities of the skin demonstrate the extent to which it is shared by the individual and the collective. And this is only becoming more so, as the skin’s visibility is intensified by its increasing exposure on a variety of online platforms such as social media and hard-core pornography websites. Stretching beyond its materiality, the skin is projected into virtuality as new frontiers of embodiment are made possible by fast-paced technological developments. Similarly, current trends in both medical research and bioartistic production have begun to transform the skin in ways that challenge our understanding of its place in the order of things. For instance, scientists have succeeded in taking skin cells from patients with heart failure and transforming them into beating heart tissue that might one day be used to treat the condition (Kelland, 2012). Similarly, bioartists have experimented with hybridization techniques in an attempt to blend human skin with that of animals and everyday objects (Solon, 2011). Here the skin is quite literally both human and non-human, but it is important to remember that not all of these experiments are successful. In some cases they are, but in others, they are resisted by the skin and its often inscrutable agency, resulting in failed medical initiatives and unexpected artistic outcomes.

Regardless of the skin’s complex contemporary transformations, it remains one the most basic and indispensable things about us. Serving as both our sensorimotor foundation and our first instrument of interpersonal engagement and exchange, the workings of the skin appear to suggest – as do 20th-century writers such as James Joyce and Paul Valéry – that the surface of the body is the deepest part of the human being (Anzieu, 1989; Connor, 2004).² The skin makes occupying a place in space and time possible. It is what allows us to have a perspective on the world and allows the world to have a perspective on us. The skin is an archive of past experience, a cartography of identity, a site of vulnerable pleasures, a carapace of often uncompromising pains, and a dynamic – if often embattled – screen onto which selves, others and societies project feelings of love, hate and everything in between. For these reasons, the skin studies subfield is worthy of further formalization. As we will see, this subfield moves away from common-sense assumptions that stage the skin as a crude container, a one-sided screen or an impenetrable shield. Instead, skin studies understands the body’s surface as fundamentally ‘co-constituted, co-enacted and co-evolving’ (Blackman, 2010: 4) in the multiple contexts of experience, power and technology.

The Emergence of Skin Studies

Despite the fact that it is still emerging, skin studies is established enough at this point to lay claim to what might be called a ‘canon’ of key texts. To adequately describe it, we must begin with Jay Prosser’s ground-breaking book Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Published in 1998, Prosser’s work on transsexual embodiment made a number of crucial contributions to the subfield of interest to us here. More specifically, this work attempted to make a critical return to the material specificities of the lived body and, in doing so, to provide scholars with an alternative to prevailing post-structuralist accounts. Prosser turns to Anzieu’s work in an attempt to answer the question ‘what is the status of the body’s surface that the transsexual in changing sex reconfigures?’ (1998: 65). Focusing in particular on Anzieu’s then largely unknown model of the skin ego, Prosser develops what is still seen as one of the most insightful theories of transsexual embodiment on offer (1998: 65).

If Prosser’s work on changing sex is part of what has established him as a key figure in the now burgeoning subfield of trans studies, then it is his critical engagements with and imaginative applications of Anzieu’s psychoanalytic approach that make his work so important to skin studies. Praising Anzieu’s ‘wonderfully uncomplicated literalism’, Prosser organizes his work around one of the psychoanalyst’s key arguments: namely, that the development of the self is rooted first and foremost in the experience of the skin (1998: 65). As is now well known, Anzieu bases this argument on Freud’s remarks on the bodily ego as they appear in ‘The ego and the id’. Here Freud claims that the early ego is based on the psyche’s ‘projection of a surface’ as it is ‘derived from bodily sensation’ (2001 [1923]: 26). Drawing on Anzieu’s reading of Freud, Prosser claims that ‘the body’s physical surface or encasing provides the anaclitic support for the psychic apparatus: the ego, the sense of self, derives from the experience of the material skin’ (1998: 65). Prosser concludes that Anzieu’s model of the skin ego has the potential to be useful to critical scholars insofar as it ‘works to reconstitute and sustain the material body’ as an object of critical enquiry (1998: 66).

Skin studies has been informed by Prosser’s work in two key ways: first, it has heeded his call to take the embodied experience of the skin seriously; and, second, it has continued to privilege the work of Anzieu. In both of these ways, Prosser’s work can be seen to set the stage, as it were, for the first edited collection on the body’s surface: Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s Thinking through the Skin (2001b). Published in 2001, Ahmed and Stacey’s collection is a key part of the skin studies canon. In a compelling and now widely cited introductory essay, Ahmed and Stacey suggest that thinking critically about the skin can allow for ‘new and different ways of thinking about lived and imagined embodiment’ and ‘has the potential to break down the dichotomous elaborations of inside/outside, surface/depth and self/other that often permeate accounts of embodied subjectivity’ (2001a:1). They point to a number of thinkers – such as Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon – whose work appears to have been especially helpful to critical scholars who seek to ‘break down [these] dichotomous elaborations’ in order to reconsider and, ultimately, reconceptualize both the individual and the collective lives of the skin. Like Prosser’s work, Ahmed and Stacey’s collection can be seen as an imaginative response to the ‘disembodying’ accounts of power and subjectivity ‘brought centre-stage by the impact of dominant models of structuralism and poststructuralism, which placed language both literally and metonymically at the centre of theories of culture’ (2001a: 4).

Though it was published over 15 years ago, Ahmed and Stacey’s edited collection remains a model of critical skin studies scholarship for at least three reasons. First, it is transdisciplinary insofar as it accounts for a wide range of analytical approaches including, but not limited to, continental philosophy, contemporary psychoanalysis, cultural historiography, popular media studies and social anthropology. Second, it engages with both the public and private complexities of embodied experience and, in doing so, reflects critically on how they are lived on and across the skin. And, third, it is characterized not by theoretical orthodoxy but by a wide variety of perspectives that combine to create an elegant and eclectic reading of the subjective, embodied and social aspects of the skin. Informed in many ways by the key tenets of body studies, Ahmed and Stacey can be seen to have a played an important role in the emergence of the skin studies subfield.

One year after Ahmed and Stacey’s Thinking through the Skin appeared, Claudia Benthien’s acclaimed book Skin: On the Cultural Border Between the Self and the World was released. Published in English in 2002, the book was the first full-length study to explore the skin from a critical perspective. Blending historical anthropology with what she calls ‘cultural constructivism’, Benthien sets out to make sense of the ‘central metaphors, topoi and mental images’ that have shaped modern western understandings of the skin (2002: ix). In doing so, she tests her hypothesis that ‘the integument of the body has become an increasingly rigid boundary in spite of the fact that medicine has penetrated the skin and exposed the interior of the body’ (2002: 1). Exploring artistic, literary and scientific works, she finds that ‘as late as the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, [the skin] was still understood as a porous, nonclosed surface’ (2002: 14). Yet this understanding began to change in the 18th century, with the rise of the bourgeoisie and its concomitant conventions. Now, according to Benthien, the skin is anything but a ‘superfluous’ boundary in the collective imagination; if anything, the skin’s boundary structures and functions have ‘taken on even greater significance’ (2002: 11).

By bridging careful historical research with original cultural analysis, Benthien’s book is a key example of how to do critical scholarship on the skin in the context of the literary and the visual. But here Benthien is not alone. In fact, two years after Benthien’s book was published, Steven Connor (2004) released an in-depth cultural history of the body’s surface, and it too drew heavily on both literary and visual culture. Connor frames his analysis around the range of ways in which the skin is made manifest, both literally and metaphorically, in everything from everyday language to epic literature. His chapters focus on topics such as complexion, exposition, disfigurement, impression, stigmata, colour, unction, aroma and itch. Over the course of these chapters, Connor successfully shows that the skin must no longer be understood as a mere border, container or membrane but must, instead, be understood as an all-encompassing ecology in and through which relations with self, other and society take shape.

In The Book of Skin, Connor (2004) presents a cultural history of the body’s surface. In doing so, he argues that ‘if one were to read the cultural history of the skin solely in medical terms, there would be three stages to be distinguished’ (2004: 26). In the first stage – which includes both the classical and the medieval periods – the skin was often understood as a screen; it was, in other words, ‘that unseen through which the body must be seen, the ground against which the body figured’ (2004: 26). In the second stage, however, the skin was understood mostly as a membrane. Characteristic of the Enlightenment period, this understanding of the skin was ‘concerned principally with the elimination of wastes’ (2004: 26). And in the third stage – the stage that corresponds with the modern period – the metaphors of the skin-as-screen and the skin-as-membrane are replaced by another metaphor: that is, the skin-as-milieu. Borrowing Michel Serres’s (1998) concept of the ‘milieu’, Connor understands the skin as neither active nor passive, inside nor outside, subject nor object, but rather as bound up in a wide range of changing and contingent relations with the world. For both Serres and Connor, the skin is where the world and the body meet; it is, in other words, that which ‘intervenes in the things of the world and brings about their mingling’ (Serres, 1998: 97).

The pioneering work of Jay Prosser (1998), Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (2001b), Claudia Benthien (2002) and Steven Connor (2004) changed the scholarly landscape where the study of the skin is concerned. Together these four texts provided scholars with new tools for thinking critically about the body’s surface, not merely as a metaphor but also as a subjective, embodied and social phenomenon. After this small but significant body of work appeared just under twenty years ago, the skin studies subfield began to burgeon. For instance, in 2006, a second edited collection entitled Re: Skin was published. Edited by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, the collection considers the relationship between the skin, the body and technology in an age of when we are able to not only modify our skins more than ever before but also ‘cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies’ (2006: 1). The book is wide in scope and includes scholarly reflections on the skin as well as creative projects and works of fiction. The collection’s contributors examine a wide variety of topics, including computational interfaces, fake fur, pregnancy, sexual sensations, and race in the digital age. Overall, the book reflects on what it means to live in a technological culture and, in doing so, ‘[conducts] a multidisciplinary inquiry into [the] boundaries and borders of surfaces…by incorporating and implicating the metaphor, the physicality, and the cultural narratives of skin’ (2006: 2–3).

Shortly thereafter, in 2008, the first special issue on the skin appeared (Emberley, 2008b).³ The issue was edited by Julia Emberley and published by the journal English Studies in Canada. Emberley’s introduction frames the critical study of the skin in biopolitical terms, considering how ‘the skin responds to power’ (2008a: 6). By way of example, she discusses how the skin of Inuit children was appropriated by so-called medical experts in the 1950s for the purposes of conducting skin graft experiments. Showing how Inuit skin served as a site of both regulation and resistance, Emberley’s introduction lays the foundation for her overview of the issue’s contributions which, as she puts it, ‘[set] out to explore the contestations and regimes in and around the truths written on skin historically, geopolitically, psychoanalytically, materially, and poetically’ (2008a: 6).

A year later, in 2009, the journal Body & Society published a special section on the skin, profiling the work of Marc Lafrance, Erin Manning and Dee Reynolds. Lafrance’s article presented a critical review of the work done by contemporary Anglo-American psychoanalysts such as Esther Bick and Thomas Ogden, claiming that they provide body theorists with innovative approaches to making sense of the relationship between the skin and the self (Lafrance, 2009: 3). Reynolds (2009) responded to Lafrance’s article by considering Bick and Ogden’s work in the context of dance and, in doing so, reflected on how it opens up opportunities for thinking about how ‘[dance] can lead to heightened awareness of body surface and sensory contiguity’ (2009: 30). And finally, Manning presented a critique of the work reviewed by Lafrance – particularly its tendency to emphasize ‘the skin’s capacity to serve as a container for experience’ – by arguing that the skin is best seen as a ‘multi-dimensioned topological surface that folds in, through and across spacetimes of experience’, resulting in a ‘dynamic form of worlding that refuses categorization’ (2009: 42).

Four years later, in 2013, the conference ‘Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone’, took place at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany. The organizers, Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke, sought to organize the conference around ‘artistic reflections of skin-related themes in literature, art, media studies, and anthropology’.⁴ The conference aimed to bring academics from various disciplines together in order to discuss the skin given its neglect in the scholarly literature on the body. These discussions gave rise to a collection of the same name edited by the organizers and published in 2015, addressing topics in the areas of medical and political history, modernist and postmodernist literature, film and fine arts. Like much of the scholarship that attempts to ‘[deal] with skin in its own right’, the collection considers the skin as ‘a sensual organ, an interface, a marker of identity, a memory space, a medium and an object of investigation and representation’ (Vanderbeke and Rosenthal, 2015: 3).

Finally, in 2016, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University sent out a call for interdisciplinary research projects on the skin. The call invited projects relating to a variety of different ‘historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, geographic territories, and social contexts’.⁵ More specifically, it encouraged scholars to submit proposals pertaining to topics as diverse as mythological works, religious traditions, philosophical reflections, psychoanalytic theory, intersectional perspectives and biopolitical imperatives, to name just a few. The sheer number of potential projects outlined by the call suggests that critical study of the skin is becoming increasingly important in the context of the contemporary academy.

As skin studies has begun to establish itself as a subfield in its own right, the scholarship on the body’s surface has become more varied and voluminous. Below I retrieve, compile and review this scholarship as it relates to four key areas: body modification; racialization; psychoanalysis; and the senses. By providing a critical summary of some of the work that characterizes the skin studies subfield, I hope to encourage more intellectual exchange on this emerging area of enquiry.

A Brief Overview of Skin Studies

When we look at what is being done across the humanities and social sciences, we see that skin-related scholarship is both more advanced and more abundant than we might have thought. More suggestive than exhaustive, the overview that follows is intended as a general introduction to skin studies rather than a definitive ‘state of the field’. I discuss the work that strikes me as most relevant to body studies scholars and, in doing so, focus on that which is critical in nature and reflexive in orientation.

Body Modification

A number of suggestive studies on how the skin is bound up in body modification projects have appeared over the course of the last ten to fifteen years. For example, Patricia MacCormack (2006) sets out to problematize the tattooed body, particularly the female tattooed body, as an ‘example of the philosophical complexities of thinking the body’s surface as a frontier between self and culture’ (2006: 57). Claiming that the skin is ‘a series of planes which signify race, gender, age and such’ (2006: 57), MacCormack’s work considers how tattooing alters these planes ‘through the affects it evokes’ (2006: 59). MacCormack draws not on phenomenology or psychoanalysis, as is often the case in skin-related research, but rather on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’ and Lyotard’s notion of the ‘great ephemeral skin’. She concludes that ‘[tattooing] and skin itself occur in an equivalent interstice, forming and forcing the disjunction between matter and thought, inside and outside, self and other, and philosophy and affect’ (2006: 80).

Like MacCormack, Maurice Patterson and Jonathan Schroeder (2010) explore tattooed bodies – and particularly the bodies of heavily tattooed women – and how they are made legible on and through the skin (2010: 254). Working within a consumer culture theory framework, Patterson and Schroeder’s reflections on the skin suggest that ‘[it] vividly embodies key tensions in consumer culture – particularly between liberation, celebration and agency on the one hand and repression, disciplinarity and conformity on the other’ (2010: 263). Despite the fact that the body’s surface has been ‘strangely peripheral’ to consumer culture research, the authors argue that its ‘liminality, its in-betweenness and ambiguity…contrive to make it a powerful medium for the further exploration of embodied identity and consumption’ (2010: 254). Drawing on feminist theory, consumer culture theory and the existing scholarship on tattoos, Patterson and Schroeder use the three metaphors of ‘skin as container, skin as projection surface, and skin as cover to be modified’ as ‘framing devices’ that allow them to better understand the relationships between femininity, skin and consumption (2010: 257).

Not unlike MacCormack (2006) and Patterson and Schroeder (2010), Emily Grabham (2009) explores how the skin is made legible in modern western countries. Grabham, however, is not interested in tattoos but rather in how surgical technologies can be seen to ‘flag’ the skin in politically charged ways depending on the context. She argues that ‘just as nation is imagined and produced through everyday rhetoric and maps and flags, it is also constructed on the skin, and through bodies, by different types of corporeal “flagging”’ (2009: 64). Drawing on critical scholarship relating to belonging, property, skin and somatechnics, Grabham considers two case studies of skin flagging: first, ‘surgeries that work in the UK to align white bodies with a white nation’; and, second, ‘US media coverage of Iraq invasion veterans with prosthetic limbs’ who are made to ‘signify corporeal belonging through technological transcendence’ (2009: 64). Grabham shows that the surgical procedures she examines ‘embed the nation into the surface of the skin’ while providing scholars with intriguing examples of ‘how surfaces, shapes and capacities of bodies come to have nationalistic significance’ (2009: 66).

Taking a different approach to a similar object, Rachel Hurst’s work explores cosmetic surgeries and those who undergo them. In her book-length study Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography and Skin (2015), Hurst considers how the surface of both the photograph and the skin are put in the service of a symbolic order that stages the former as ‘a promising surface, full of infinite transformative possibilities’ and the latter as ‘a less promising surface that, while capable of miraculous transformation, imposes limits on what surgery might accomplish’ (2015: xv). Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Anzieu and Lacan, the skin-related scholarship of Prosser, Benthien and Connor as well as contemporary feminist approaches to cosmetic surgery, Hurst suggests that modern western cultures are characterized by a ‘surface imagination’; that is, by the collective fantasy that modifying the surfaces of our bodies will result in the large-scale transformation of both our public and private lives (2015: xviii). An innovative contribution to the skin studies subfield, Hurst’s work provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between the skin surface and the photographic surface.

Racialization

Considerable critical work has been done on the skin in the area of race and racialization.⁶ Much of this work is inspired by Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and relates in various ways to colonialism, diaspora, hybridity and performativity. Almost a dozen scholarly works published over the course of the last twenty years bear titles that refer directly to that of Fanon’s book and the racialized play of surfaces it implies. Most of these works pertain to the skin in the context of marginalized racial or ethnic groups, such as Black Africans (Heaton, 2013); African Americans (Gubar, 1997); Asian Americans (Yang, 2013); Middle Easterners (Dabashi, 2011); the Afro-British (Tate, 2005); the Afro-Caribbean (Beriss, 2004; Mielants, 2007; Vergès, 1997); and Indigenous people (Coulthard, 2014). Some of them also relate to white populations and how their whiteness is created and sustained (Alexander, 2004; Goldsmith, 2003). Taken together, the works demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Fanon’s contributions to thinking critically about how power structures shape – and are shaped by – the relationship between the skin, the self and the social.

If, according to Fanon, racism can be understood as a racialized play of surfaces, then it is worth reflecting on how these surfaces come to be experienced and understood in contemporary cultures. This is precisely what scholars interested in the cultural politics of skin bleaching set out do to. For example, many scholars consider how skin bleaching is marketed and consumed in a variety of different countries, particularly those in the global South (e.g. Glenn, 2008; Leong, 2006; Mire, 2001; Saraswati, 2010). There are, however, two contributions that stand out as especially important in this area: first, Yaba Blay and Christopher Charles’s (2011) special issue of the Journal of Pan African Studies entitled Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy; and, second, Shirley Tate’s (2015) book-length study entitled Skin Bleaching in Black Atlantic Zones: Shade Shifters. The articles that make up Blay and Charles’s special issue emphasize how ‘[within] the context of global white supremacy, skin color communicates one’s position to and within the dominant power structure’, while examining how ‘those historically subjected to white domination, colonization, and enslavement, have internalized projected notions that the basis of their inferior condition is their skin color’ (Blay, 2011: 37). Tate, for her part, takes a different approach. She is interested in what ‘Black lighter skin means in our 21st-century, “post-race” world’ (2015: 3). Unlike Blay and Charles, her ‘analysis goes beyond the impact of global white supremacy and its market economies, which perpetuate whiteness as ideal and imbricate Black pathology’ (2015: 3) in order to ‘[locate] shade shifting as a “post-race”, self-affirming aesthetic enhancement and choice, in opposition to white supremacy and colourism’ (2015: 4).

Like Tate, Anne Anlin Cheng, in her book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2011), seeks to complicate the assumption that black skin is a straightforward site of domination and subordination. A suggestive example of how to bring skin studies into dialogue with postcolonial studies, Cheng’s work explores ‘Modernism’s dream of a second skin’ (2011: 1) by way of the iconic 20th-century Black entertainer Josephine Baker. Cheng understands the skin in broad terms; it is not just an epidermal surface, but an architectural, filmic, photographic and theatrical surface too. These surfaces constitute what Cheng calls ‘modes of Modernist display’ and serve as the contexts in and through which she ‘[traces] alternative stories about racialized skin, narratives that compel a reconceptualization of the notion of racialized corporeality, as well as of idealized, Modernist facades’ (2011: 7).

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic work on the skin has proliferated at a rapid rate over the course of the last decade. In fact, between 2008 and 2014, four book-length studies relating to skin and psychoanalysis appeared.⁷ The first was Alessandra Lemma’s Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification (2010), which sets out to better understand how individuals modify their bodies and why these modifications matter in psychic, somatic and social terms. Published in 2010, Lemma’s book draws on the work of psychoanalysts like Freud and Anzieu while also drawing on cultural theorists like Elizabeth Grosz and Susan Bordo. From the outset, Lemma emphasizes the importance of the early sensory experiences as they relate to the body’s surface. ‘The importance of the early gazing relationship, and of the skin-to-skin contact, between mother and baby cannot be emphasised enough,’ writes Lemma:

Touch and vision are inseparable, a single axis underpinning the earliest physical experiences.…These early physical and sensory experiences with others are inscribed somatically and lay the foundations for the development of the body self, and hence of the self. (2010: 6)

In 2014, Nicola Diamond published Between Skins: The Body in Psychoanalysis. Arguably the most ambitious of the four books discussed here, Diamond’s interdisciplinary study sets out to ‘fundamentally [challenge] persisting dualisms’ and ‘[put] forward an alternative and possibly more viable model of the body’ (2014: 3). Diamond is interested first and foremost in bodily symptoms and how psychoanalysts ought to make sense of them. As she puts it: ‘there is a need for a more relational understanding of the formation of bodily symptoms: how somatic expression is a communication of which the subject is unconscious’ (2014: 3). Like Lemma, Diamond emphasizes skin-to-skin contact and how it ‘becomes a relational space where an affective connection between persons and the outside world’ is made (2014: 3–4). Drawing on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and neurobiology, Diamond explores how ‘others get literally and metaphorically under our skins, live in our sensations, affect our bodily experience and processes’ (2014: 4).

If the texts I reviewed above are more clinically oriented, then the ones I review next are more culturally oriented. The first of these is Naomi Segal’s book Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (2009). In what is the most thoroughgoing engagement with and application of Anzieu’s work to date, Segal – like Diamond – argues that the ‘body is not just a lived object in space’; instead ‘it communicates something of the self to something of other selves’ through ‘its ability to touch’ (2009: 4). Organizing her argument around Anzieu’s concept of ‘consensuality’, Segal understands the skin as a kind of sensore commune; that is, a site on and across which ‘the perception of all the senses’ is ‘[brought] together…in one place’ (2009: 5). Segal’s project is twofold: first, she critically reflects on Anzieu’s personal background, his theoretical work and the gendered implications of his analytic approach; and, second, she applies these critical reflections to ‘a set of cultural objects, moments, angles or figures from the early nineteenth century to the present day’ (2009: 5). The result is a compelling example of how Anzieu’s work can yield a skin-centred study of culture and a culturally oriented study of the skin.⁸

In 2013, Cavanagh et al.’s edited collection entitled Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis was published. The collection ‘offers a unique contribution to the literature by way of utilizing cultural studies and psychoanalytic modes of inquiry concurrently to theorize skin’ (2013: 13). Because the skin has ‘a biological life, a social life, a fantasy life, a somatic life, a political life, an esthetic life, a life in the “lived body” and a cultural life’, the collection’s contributors adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to ‘[place] the skin at the center of inquiry, rather than using it as a jumping-off point from which to explore “deeper” or “thicker” issues’ (2013: 3). Emphasizing how the body’s surface is bound up with phenomena such as clothing, cosmetic surgery, tattooing and self-harm, the works in the collection suggest that the skin ought to be understood in processual terms; that is, as that which is always already ‘enfolding’. One of the key contributions of the book, the notion of ‘enfolding’ – which suggests a simultaneous folding in and folding out – allows us to think critically about how the skin is made meaningful through the ‘interimplication’ of ‘culture, psychical life and embodiment’ (2013: 2).

Sensory Studies

The critical study of the senses has grown in no small way over the course of the last thirty years. And some of the more interesting work in this subfield relates to the skin and its sensorial implications. Consider, for instance, Laura Marks’ (2000) innovative work on the skin in the context of intercultural cinema and the experience of diaspora. In The Skin of the Film, Marks explores how this kind of cinema ‘[evokes] memories, both individual and cultural, through an appeal to nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell and taste’ (2000: 2). More specifically, Marks claims that these sensory experiences are akin to what she calls ‘haptic visuality’; that is, a mode of visuality that can and often does serve as a multisensorial skin. By applying the notion of haptic visuality to intercultural cinema, she shows how cinematic encounters often trigger a variety of other sensory encounters and, in doing so, provide those living in diasporic communities with embodied experiences of their countries of origin.

Not long after Marks’ book was published, Constance Classen released an edited collection called The Book of Touch (2005). Classen’s collection showcases contributions that relate to the sense of touch in non-western cultures since, as she puts it, ‘the West can hardly be presumed to have the last word on touch when so many remarkable tactile traditions exist around the world’ (2005: 4). One of the more sustained reflections on the skin in Classen’s collection is that of David Howes (2005). Drawing on a variety of cross-cultural data, Howes explores the phenomenon of ‘skin knowledge’; that is ‘the knowledge of the world one acquires through one’s skin, through the feel of the sun, the wind, the rain and the forest’ (2005: 27). Unlike the dualist epistemologies characteristic of western cultures, skin knowledge in the non-western cultures Howes considers ‘[attribute] some form of intelligence to the sentient body’ (2005: 27). Among the Cashinahua of eastern Peru, for instance, the skin, the hand, the eye and the ear are understood to be ‘knowing’ (2005: 28–9). But it is not only human skin that is at issue in Howes’ piece. He is also interested in how the earth is seen to have a skin. For instance, in some mythological traditions, it is clear that ‘skins are for touching and that the skin of the earth therefore invites a tactile response’ (2005: 31). Howes continues: ‘In the realm of myth we have a skin-to-skin relationship with the earth: when we lie on it our skins meet and mingle with the skin of the world’ (2005: 31). As he points out, however, modern western cultures tend not to emphasize the relationship between the skin of the human body and that of the earth. Instead, science continues to ‘peel back’ this skin and, in doing so, replaces it with a variety of technological interfaces, some of which may become ‘alien to our touch’ while others may become ‘second [skins]’ (2005: 37).

Several years after The Book of Touch came out, Classen released the book-length study The Deepest Sense (2012). One of the chapters in the book relates directly to the skin. Here, however, it is not the skin of the human that is at stake but the skin of the animal. Classen is interested in how animal skin was experienced, enjoyed and exploited in various ways over the course of the Middle Ages. She shows that the distinction between human and animal has long been an indeterminate one; after all, humans eat animals, wear animals, live with animals and, in many cases, love animals. Pets, in particular, troubled the binary opposition between the human and the animal insofar as they touch our skins and we touch theirs on an on-going basis: we caress them; we let them sleep on our laps; and we train them through a range of tactile communications in much the same way they do us. But if ‘modes of communication potentially shared…by humans and animals’ were often considered socially valuable in medieval times, then this began to change as writing became the dominant mode of communication (2012: 110). Classen explains:

up until the nineteenth century many texts were written or printed on the very skins of animals, transformed in parchment or vellum.…Imprinting the codes of human authority on animal skins was a potent symbol of the forcible human domination of animals. (2012: 111)

Moving from the Middle Ages to the present day, Sheryl Hamilton’s (2017) work on the prohibition of the end-of-game handshake in an age of pandemic culture is another exciting example of how sensory studies complements and is complemented by skin studies. Hamilton is interested in how the handshake has become a site of both concern and contestation in biopolitical contexts characterized by ‘the constant awareness of, and threat from, global viral pandemic’ (2017: 54). In these contexts, the skin is staged as ‘contaminated and contaminable’ while the hands – and particularly the palms – are presumed to be dirty and dangerous (2017: 54). As a result, the end-of-game handshake has fallen out of favour and is in some cases being replaced by ‘other distanced and distancing gestures or forms of less intimate (namely non-cutaneous) contact’ (2017: 54). By exploring the handshake as an ‘embodied haptic legal gesture’, Hamilton argues that the collective concern around this once customary form of epidermal exchange ‘throws into high relief some of the tensions and contradictions in our contemporary corporeal anxieties’ (2017: 64).

The brief overview I provide above is, as I have already mentioned, a partial one. Because I have focused on four key areas of enquiry, I have had to exclude a number of studies that can be seen to represent significant contributions to the skin studies subfield. For example, there is far-reaching work being done in architecture (e.g. Lupton, 2002); cinema (e.g. Laine, 2007; Pile, 2009); English literature (e.g. Curtin, 2003; Schneider, 2014); fine arts (e.g. Fend, 2017); French literature (e.g. Kay, 2006; Walter, 2013) and history (Chaney, 2017) that may well interest readers of this issue.

New Contributions to Skin Studies

Body & Society’s double issue on the skin consists of a variety of fresh contributions to this emerging subfield that either build on previous research or break new ground altogether. The issue begins with five original articles, the first of which focuses on how the body’s surface is experienced in the context of self-harm. Written by sociologist and anthropologist David Le Breton, the article examines how self-harm is used by young people as a way of coping with the feelings of powerlessness that often accompany the transition to adulthood. Based on over twenty years of fieldwork, Le Breton’s study considers how skin-cutting can be understood as a kind of ‘symbolic homeopathy’, whereby the ‘deliberate and controlled use of pain…acts as a defence against externally imposed suffering’. Rather than a dangerous or destructive activity, Le Breton argues that self-harm can be seen as a survival technique that allows the young person to feel less, rather than more, pain.

The second article picks up where the first one leaves off insofar as it too considers what it means to suffer in and through the skin. Here sociologists Marc Lafrance and R. Scott Carey explore the embodied experience of the most common skin disorder – acne vulgaris – and how it gives rise to what they call ‘skin work’. Based on a thematic analysis of over 200 threads from the electronic support group acne.org, their study suggests that acne sufferers work on their skin in three key ways: through concealing, through medicating and through grooming. Moving well beyond the clinical literature and its often reductive accounts of acne-related suffering, Lafrance and Carey examine these skin work practices and how they both shape and are shaped by identity categories such as gender and sexuality.

The third article, written by literary theorist Naomi Segal, presents a critical reflection on itching and how it has been represented in texts ranging from the Bible to contemporary psychoanalysis through to 20th-century fiction. Like the first two, her article emphasizes the suffering bound up with the everyday experience of the skin. Yet, as Segal shows, compulsive skin scratching is rarely seen as a source of genuine distress. Instead, it tends to be seen as little more than a humorous habit. ‘Pain is tragic’, she explains, while ‘itching is comic’. Segal herself argues against this position, claiming that ‘there is something deadly serious about the compulsion to scratch’. Not only does this compulsion often result in what are felt to be ‘hateful hieroglyphs’ on and across the surface of the skin, it can also lead to experiences of profound social alienation. In one of the few meditations on what it means to have itchy skin, Segal shows that compulsive scratching is a complex way of both unmaking and remaking the body’s boundaries.⁹

In the fourth article, communications scholars Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder take us from the realm of experience to that of representation. They argue that, despite its radical visibility, the skin has been strangely invisible in contemporary scholarship on branding and marketing. And yet, as they point out, ‘the skin is called upon to do things’ in the world of consumer culture. Drawing on the notions of the epidermal schema and the fetish, Borgerson and Schroeder focus on how consumer culture imagery makes the skin appear as though it constitutes the ‘foundational basis of identity and possibility’. Indeed, by reducing those depicted in the images to nothing but skin, the visual culture of advertising and branding can be seen to be bound up with a range of racist photographic practices.

In the fifth and final article, art historian Heidi Kellett explores ‘a mode of representation that privileges quasi-anonymous, fragmented, magnified and anatomized images of skin’. Kellett calls this mode of representation ‘skin portraiture’; that is, a kind of portraiture that reorients the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, all the while challenging dominant cultural conceptions of bodily integrity. For Kellett, skin portraiture is made manifest in contemporary bioartistic works that expand the visual field and, in doing so, allow for a heightened awareness of empathy, reflexivity and relationality. Exploring the skin-as-technology metaphor, she considers how bio-art collapses bodily boundaries while engendering a hyper-haptic mode of seeing beyond both the skin and the subject.

The five original articles are followed by a series of shorter reflections intended to stimulate further transdisciplinary discussion on the skin. Like those of Borgerson, Schroeder and Kellett, these reflections relate to how the body’s surface is represented in visual culture and what these representations say about subjectivity and embodiment in contemporary societies. The first is by French literature and philosophy specialist Christina Howells and considers Jean-Luc Nancy’s meditations on the skin in the context of photography; the second is by feminist theorist Rachel Hurst and examines how the surfaces of the skin and the photograph are collapsed in the cosmetic surgery experience; and the third is by art historian Julia Skelly, who explores how western cultures anxiously seek out evidence of addiction on the body’s surface. These three reflections lay the foundation for the interview with art historian Cynthia Hammond, who complicates the idea that clothing functions as a simple and straightforward second skin. And, finally, the issue ends with an Afterword by anthropologist David Howes. Howes presents us with a series of observations on the skin in the contexts of both the academy and the field while providing us with a brief pre-history of how the skin was studied before what he calls ‘the dermalogical turn’. Put simply, the dermalogical turn is precisely what this special issue seeks to inaugurate: the emergence of a subfield that takes up the skin as an object in its own right and, in doing so, allows us to critically think and rethink our deepest surface.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of people without whom this introduction could not have been written: Mark Doerksen for his indispensable editorial assistance; Homa Hoodfar for her intellectual guidance; David Howes for his helpful suggestions; Shelley Reuter for her useful comments on multiple drafts; and Zara Saiedzadeh for her companionship and support. And finally, I am deeply appreciative of the editors, Lisa Blackman and Mike Featherstone, for believing in me and my vision. It has been both an honour and a privilege to work with them.

Funding

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the financial support I received under the auspices of the grant entitled ‘Law and the Regulation of the Senses’ (435-2015-1416).

Notes

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