Re: Skin

by Flanagan, Mary; Booth, Austin

• ISBN13: 9780262062602
• ISBN10: 0262062607
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-30
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

In re: skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin-as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins-by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods-but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies. The book's agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of "body criticism"; a writer uses "faux science" to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another's sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the "skin" of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re: skinclaim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture. Contributors: Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alicia Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Illustration Credits	p. ix
Editors and Contributors	p. xi
Introduction"	p. 1
Inside, Outside, Surface	p. 17
"The Man Who Plugged In" (fiction)	p. 19
"Safety of Skin" (nonfiction)	p. 51
"Making Room for the Body: From Fragmentation to Mediation" (nonfiction)	p. 81
"On Morphological Imagination" (nonfiction)	p. 103
Transgression	p. 115
"Fur Manifesto" (fiction/nonfiction)	p. 117
"Ganger (Ball Lightning)" (fiction)	p. 143
"Perfect Twins" (nonfiction)	p. 159
"Lynx and Strand" (fiction)	p. 179
"Readers of the Lost Art" (fiction)	p. 231
"The Black.Net.Art Actions: Blackness for Sale (2001), The Interaction of Coloreds (2002), and The Pink of Stealth (2003)" (fiction/nonfiction)	p. 245
Mapping the Visual and the Virtual	p. 251
"Eye Contact: Fine Moving Hands and the Flesh and Blood of Image Fabrication in the Operating Theaters of Interventional Radiology" (nonfiction)	p. 253
"Seminal Space: Getting under the Digital Skin" (nonfiction)	p. 265
"Skin" (fiction/nonfiction)	p. 293
"Reskinning the Everyday" (nonfiction)	p. 303
"Performing Blackness: Virtual Sports and Becoming the Other in an Era of White Supremacy" (nonfiction)	p. 321
"Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology" (nonfiction)	p. 339
Index	p. 355
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