Description
Book SynopsisThis exciting collection of work from leading feminist scholars including Elspeth Probyn, Penelope Deutscher and Chantal Nadeau engages with and extends the growing feminist literature on lived and imagined embodiment and argues for consideration of the skin as a site where bodies take form - already written upon but open to endless re-inscription.
Individual chapters consider such issues as the significance of piercing, tattooing and tanning, the assault of self harm upon the skin, the relation between body painting and the land among the indigenous people of Australia and the cultural economy of fur in Canada. Pierced, mutilated and marked, mortified and glorified, scarred by disease and stretched and enveloping the skin of another in pregnancy, skin is seen here as both a boundary and a point of connection - the place where one touches and is touched by others; both the most private of experiences and the most public marker of a raced, sexed and national history.
Table of ContentsList of plates, Notes on contributors, Series editors’ preface, Acknowledgements, Introduction: dermographies, PART I: Skin surfaces, 1. Cut in the body: from clitoridectomy to body art, 2. Mortification, 3. Skin memories, 4. Skin-tight: celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity, PART II: Skin encounters, 5. Eating skin, 6. Open wounds, 7. Carved in skin: bearing witness to self-harm, 8. Three touches to the skin and one look: Sartre and Beauvoir on desire and embodiment, 9. ‘You are there, like my skin’: reconfiguring relational economies, PART III: Skin sites, 10. Inscribing identity: skin as country in the Central Desert, 11. ‘My furladies’: the fabric of a nation, 12. ‘That is my Star of David’: skin, abjection and hybridity, 13. Robotic skin: the future of touch?, Index
