Skin Studies

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)

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)

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.

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.