We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.

In recent years, a number of cultural theorists have made important contributions to the study of the body’s surface. Despite their importance, however, none of these contributions provides us with a systematic framework for understanding why the body’s surface — its skin — matters to the extent that it does. In this article, I seek to provide such a framework and, in doing so, to shed light on why the skin and the self seem to share a special and sometimes (...) strained relationship. To this end, I will present a critical introduction to the work of two contemporary Anglo-American psychoanalysts: Esther Bick and Thomas Ogden. Throughout this introduction, I will show how both Bick and Ogden — despite the fact that they are almost completely unknown outside clinical circles — offer up a host of conceptual tools that could prove useful to cultural theorists interested in making sense of the relationship between the skin and the self. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, (...) Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners. (shrink)

This book contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today. “[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images.” — Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review.

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand women's use of makeup in the workplace. The authors analyze 20 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of women who work in a variety of settings to examine the appearance rules that women confront at work and how these rules reproduce assumptions about sexuality and gender. The authors found that appropriate makeup use is strongly associated with assumptions about health, heterosexuality, and credibility in the workplace. They describe how these norms shape women's personal choices to (...) wear makeup. Next, they examine how some women transform the meanings of wearing makeup and, in rare instances, attempt to subvert the institutionalized norms. Although many women find pleasure in wearing makeup, the authors conclude that the institutional constraints imposed by the workplace effectively limit the possibilities for resistance. (shrink)

This paper presents a three-part reflection on the status of the lived body in feminist theory. In the first part, I argue that many influential feminist arguments have neglected questions of embodied experience. In the second part, I introduce the work of five clinically grounded psychoanalysts — Esther Bick, Frances Tustin, Donald Meltzer, Thomas Ogden and Didier Anzieu — while showing that it has much to offer those interested in making a critical return to the concrete specificities of the body. (...) In the third part, I explore the work of feminist psychoanalyst Sue Grand. In doing so, I argue that reading feminist texts alongside clinical texts is a useful approach for thinking the subjective experience of bodily life. (shrink)

With the breakdown of traditional racial boundaries in many areas of the world, the widespread and growing consumption of skin-lightening products testifies to the increasing significance of colorism—social hierarchy based on gradations of skin tone within and between racial/ethnic groups. Light skin operates as a form of symbolic capital, one that is especially critical for women because of the connection between skin tone and attractiveness and desirability. Far from being an outmoded practice or legacy of past colonialism, the use of (...) skin lighteners is growing fastest among young, urban, educated women in the global South. Although global in scope, the skin-lightening market is highly segmented by nation, culture, race, and class. This article examines the “yearning for lightness” and skin-lightening practices in various societies and communities and the role of transnational pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations in fueling the desire for lighter skin through print, Internet, and television ads that link light skin with modernity, social mobility, and youth. (shrink)

The skin is always and already a serietl of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one's subjectivity through one's own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminists, particularly corporeal feminists, (...) have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman's body’. Thinking a tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists, this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin, and possible configurations of skin and world, which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity. (shrink)