The doctor's knife [Review of Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (PM Press, 2020)] (original) (raw)
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CRC Press eBooks, 2022
Should we care about what lies behind the surface of the cultural objects we value? If a feature is invisible to our senses, does its existence really deserves our attention and concern? Engineers like doctors obviously needs to know about anatomy, materials... bones and skin diseases. Their job is to preserve what society cherish and their mean of action requires this knowledge. But should said society be concerned only by failures of plastic surgery and facade cleaning, overlook the viscera and leaving their cure to the experts? And should these last understand their duty as not only caring for what people see but also caring for what they, themselves, have the privilege to see? These are the questions that the paper tries to develop and discuss.
Rosenthal + Vanderbeke - Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone
2015
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores representations of skin in literature, art, art history, visual media, and medicine and its history. The essays collected here probe the symbolic potential of skin as a shifting sign in various historical and cultural contexts, and also examine the material and organic properties of the body’s largest organ. They deal with skin as a sensual organ, as an interface or contact zone, as the visual marker of identity, and as a lieu de memoire in different periods and media. In its material characteristics, skin is regarded as a medium, a canvas, a surface, and an object of both artistic and medical investigations. The contributions investigate representations of skin in sculpture, painting, film, and fictional, as well as non-fictional, texts from the 16th century to the present. The topics addressed here include the problematic representation of racial identity via skin colour in various media; the sensual qualities of the skin, such as smell or taste; the form and function of tattoos as markers of personal, as well as collective, identity; and scars as signifiers of personal pain and collective suffering.
The Edge of the Skin and the World
Artist Profile, 2021
I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer—the advisor Paul Judelson—at dinner a while back. Over cheese, Judelson told me about this artist I “had to see” because, I was told, Burford is Australian, living over here, and making the kind of subversive visual images that compel writing (at the time “here” was the United States, pre-Covid, before Australia’s borders effectively closed). Now, perhaps wisely, Burford is home. We’re chatting between New York and Darwin, then Los Angeles and Darwin, as he settles into his practice on domestic soil for the first time in over two decades.
In this paper I draw upon Foucault's concept of the clinic, as well as his later work on the ‘care of the self’, in a consideration of the problems that are diagnosed, and the treatments that take place, within the beauty salon. As biotechnology descends to the sub-molecular level, so those spaces that are linked to the laboratory through the diffusion of knowledges, practices and material products—such as the salon—are also reworked. Traditionally the locus for an array of experts in both body and mind who instruct (mostly) women on how to care for the self, salons use a series of ‘cutting edge’ treatments to pamper and groom the body, correcting as it does so various problem areas such as the skin. I argue, using interview material from salon managers and employees, for the beauty salon as a key site wherein health and medical knowledge is disseminated, and the clinical gaze is brought to bear.
Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future
In this paper, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I will start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I will then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterise the skin studies subfield. And finally, I will end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society's special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges.
Skin Deep: the skin as repository for the Body Modification and the Female Body conference
Skin Deep: the skin as repository This illustrated paper describes an ongoing art-based research project which investigates the materiality of fat female skin through the medium of textiles. In weight-gain, arguably no other organ is physically altered and visually modified than the skin. Flesh, viscera and bones reside relatively undisturbed as the mass of the body grows around. As the fat swells beneath the skin, the body transmutes towards the discursive fat person. The stretch-marks are the indices to what the skin endeavours, or endeavoured, to contain. With dramatic weight-loss, often following bariatric surgery, skin becomes a phantasm for the body it left behind, a stark reminder of the undulating cascading fatty borders between self and the world. ‘New’, socially acceptable body, resides within the flayed skin of ‘old’ (fat) socially unacceptable body and thus leading to further surgery to ‘normalise’ the body. My practice-led research is inspired by Groven’s et al recent study of female weight-loss surgery patients who adjusted to the intestinal changes, but, compounded by the social gaze, the excess skin was problematic as the body was coded as ‘new’ and ‘old’ (Groven, 2012). My reading also focuses on Benthien’s cultural study of the skin, who argues that the female body is both a container and surface as her body is ‘other’ to the paradagmatic male and her skin is the concealing veil which is coded with her femaleness (Benthien, 2002). Drawing on analogies between skin and cloth, both functioning as surface and concealment, I seek to disembody the stretch-mark and scars by rendering them on the surface of the cloth as embroideries. In addition to this paper will be an exhibition of these textile works. keywords: social gaze, skin, fat, body, beauty, surgery, art
The Biological Subject of Aesthetic Medicine.
Feminist Theory 14(1): 65-82. , 2013
This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and 'female nature' are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled with social constructions of beauty, race and female reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Brazil, I focus on plastic surgery, but also analyse how this specialty is linked to Ob-Gyn and endocrinology. I argue that medical procedures instantiate a biologised model of beauty I call 'bare sex' (Edmonds, 2010) that is defined in terms of racial traits, anatomy, reproductive processes, hormones and 'secondary sexual traits'. While this is a historically specific model, it is also one that is inscribed on patients, altering anatomy and physiological processes. It thus has the potential to create a biological self-awareness that cannot fully be accounted for by a social constructionist analysis.
Skin Matters: An Interview with Marc Lafrance
Theory, Culture and Society
Following the Body & Society special issue, Skin Matters: Thinking Through the Body's Surfaces (vol. 24, 1-2), Tomoko Tamari conducted an interview with the special issue editor, Marc Lafrance. He argues for the skin as an interface, which both resists and reinforces binary oppositions. Lafrance is particularly interested in the relationship between the skin and subjectivity, focusing on those who are suffering from traumatic stigmatizing experiences. This theme is also elaborated in the debates around the issue of human-made skin in 'regenerative medicine'. He argues that while the development of medical technology for human-made organic skin tends often to be welcomed, the actual experience of face-transfer patients following skin graft surgeries is one of physical and psychological hardship along with a complex sense of self-wholeness and 'reflexive embodiment'. Reflexivity is also an important phenomenon encouraged by the media and social media, which constantly feature representations of the skin.
Embodied semiotic artefacts: On the role of the skin as a semiotic niche
2014
The skin can be described as a niche structured by semiotic artefacts (tattoos) that work as symbolic–indexical devices (dicisigns). New biocompatible technologies responsive to organic and environmental variations change the role of the skin as a semiotic niche. New devices are transforming the skin into a niche of interactive interfaces. In this article we introduce a variety of techno-scientific artefacts, which are readily available, and their main characteristics. We are interested in the recent proliferation of devices based on biotechnologies that can be coupled to the body, especially epithelial (superficial or invasive), and how they change what we know as ‘embodied communication’.
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