In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I 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.
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.
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.
In this article, we address the question of how masculinities are constructed in advertising for the burgeoning market of men's grooming products. We present findings from a thematic analysis of all grooming product advertisements found in Esquire magazine from 2011 to 2013. Based on the results, we emphasize the ways in which these ads construct "hybrid" and "flexible" masculinities through combining symbols and narratives relating to bodywork, power, heterosexuality, work, family, and nostalgia. While the constructions of masculinity we see in these ads are hybridized and flexible, we argue that men's grooming product advertising should be read as marketing a contemporary "crisis" of masculinity in the context of late-modern consumer culture.
In this interview, Cynthia Hammond sits down with Marc Lafrance in order to discuss the 30-year sketching practice that led to her exhibition, Drawings for a Thicker Skin, in 2012. In this practice, Hammond made small, quick drawings of the clothes she would need for trips or key professional events. As she explains, the drawings were not just essential to knowing what to pack; they were essential to being able to pack. While she never conceived of the practice as art, when invited to exhibit the drawings she found a way to relate this idiosyncratic and private practice to a larger set of ontological concerns. Clothing as a second skin is the key idea here, as Hammond and Lafrance explore what it means to navigate identity, idealized self-image, professional 'passing' and the skin ego.
We examine how 24 adult YouTube vloggers tell their 'acne stories' by means of videos posted on YouTube between 2015 and 2020. In doing so, we study the relationship between embodied experiences of acne and health-seeking practices, particularly as they pertain to managing the everyday life of the body, abandoning medical expertise and embracing lay knowledge, living with disability, and engineering an improved self. Overall, we suggest that the vloggers share a general scepticism about the clinical management of their condition, often eschewing medical treatments while advocating for the modification of lifestyle practices. Ultimately, our study shows that vloggers understand healing from acne as both a personal journey that requires individual initiative and a shared pursuit best supported not by doctors and prescription medication but by an online environment that encourages self-engineering through free-market health care options and neoliberal values of working on the body.
In this article, we carry out a four-part study of why and how those with acne work on their skin. In the first part, we engage extensively with the clinical literature and reflect critically on what it has to offer. In the second part, we present our notion of 'skin work' and how it allows for a consideration of how acne sufferers relate reflexively to the surface of their bodies. In the third part, we discuss our data – which consists of over 200 threads from the electronic support group acne.org – and how we approach it in order to better understand the everyday practices associated with working on the skin. Finally, in the fourth part, we discuss our findings by focusing on three prevalent types of skin work and how they both shape and are shaped by identity categories such as gender and sexuality.
In this article, we argue that mass media representations of obesity operate biopedagogically and, in doing so, teach viewers how to think and feel about what it means to be fat. These teachings are what we call "life lessons"—that is, lessons aimed at instructing viewers in how to relate to both their own bodies and the bodies of others—and are readily discernible in a wide variety of magazines, radio segments, and television shows. We suggest that life lessons of this sort are neither separate nor entirely distinct from public health campaigns, but rather overlap with and, at times, intensify their messages. With this in view, we undertake a four-part analysis of how the North American mass media represent obesity. In the first part, we outline contemporary theories of biopower, biocitizenship, and biopedagogy and how they can be used to make sense of these representations. In the second part, we contextualize them by providing an overview of relevant public health policy such as the United State's Let's Move campaign and the World Health Organization's Prioritizing Areas for Action in the Field of Population-Based Prevention of Childhood Obesity. In the third part, we present a systematic review of the critical literature on representations of obesity with an emphasis on the North American media landscape. And in the fourth part, we submit an episode of the popular television program Nip/Tuck to an in-depth critical examination as a case study of how mass media representations of obesity function biopedagogically. In the end, we show that the representations we discuss not only reflect public health priorities but also reproduce neoliberal ideas about how to manage the life of the human body.
