Suchergebnisse

Can we think of racialized skin as dress, as a form of fashion-consciousness? Instead of seeing this question as trivializing the history of denigrating corporeality attached to the raced subject, through a reading of Josephine Baker this paper argues for the importance of separating "skin" from a biological schema in order to consider its ability to reflect and activate different states of racialized consciousness and corporeality. Through a study of Baker's intricate and performative relations to various fashionable surfaces—from modern buildings to modern dress to her own shimmering skin—this paper traces Baker's spectacular invention of "skin-fashion" and its importance for how we think about style and racial visibility today.

This article meditates on the possibility of thinking about both psychoanalysis and contemporary critical analysis without the drive toward symptomatic reading. It argues that the instrumental expectation placed on the diagnosis of symptoms (of illness and of ideology alike) and the subsequent promise of transformative change have led to a series of critical impasses in liberal criticism. This essay contends that the failures of psychoanalysis (failures to produce stable meaning, to procure cure, to exorcize the past, to segregate health from illness, and so forth) may be precisely all the places that render psychoanalysis not only interesting but ethically vital to social critique and political consideration.