Thinking Through the Skin

by Ahmed; Sara

• ISBN13: 9780415223560
• ISBN10: 0415223563
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-10-12
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of plates	vii
Notes on contributors	ix
Series editors' preface	xiii
Acknowledgements	xiv
Introduction: dermographies	1	(18)
Sara Ahmed
Jackie Stacey
PART I Skin surfaces	19	(66)
Cut in the body: from clitoridectomy to body art	21	(15)
Renata Salecl
Mortification	36	(16)
Steven Connor
Skin memories	52	(17)
Jay Prosser
Skin-tight: celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity	69	(16)
Imogen Tyler
PART II Skin encounters	85	(90)
Eating skin	87	(17)
Elspeth Probyn
Open wounds	104	(20)
Tina Takemoto
Carved in skin: bearing witness to self-harm	124	(19)
Jane Kilby
Three touches to the skin and one look: Sartre and Beauvoir on desire and embodiment	143	(17)
Penelope Deutscher
`You are there, like my skin': reconfiguring relational economies	160	(15)
Margrit Shildrick
PART III Skin sites	175	(62)
Inscribing identity: skin as country in the Central Desert	177	(17)
Jennifer Biddle
`My furladies': the fabric of a nation	194	(15)
Chantal Nadeau
`That is my Star of David': skin, abjection and hybridity	209	(14)
Shirley Tate
Robotic skin: the future of touch?	223	(14)
Claudia Castaneda
Index	237