ABSTRACT

This 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.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Dermographies

part |2 pages

PART I Skin surfaces

chapter 1|15 pages

Cut in the body

From clitoridectomy to body art

chapter 2|16 pages

Mortification

chapter 3|17 pages

Skin memories

Remembered skins

chapter 4|16 pages

Skin-tight

Celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity

part |2 pages

PART II Skin encounters

chapter 5|17 pages

Eating skin

chapter 6|20 pages

Open wounds

chapter 7|19 pages

Carved in skin

Bearing witness to self-harm

chapter 8|17 pages

Three touches to the skin and one look

Sartre and Beauvoir on desire and embodiment

chapter 9|15 pages

‘You are there, like my skin’

Reconfiguring relational economies

part |2 pages

PART III Skin sites

chapter 10|17 pages

Inscribing identity

Skin as country in the Central Desert

chapter 11|15 pages

‘My furladies’

The fabric of a nation

chapter 12|14 pages

‘That is my Star of David’

Skin, abjection and hybridity

chapter 13|14 pages

Robotic skin

The future of touch?