‘You are there, like my skin’

The question of difference, and of what is at stake in the relational economies of self and other, has been taken up in feminist thought as possibly the most urgent and critical focus of postconventional theory2 in general. In these reflections on monstrous corporeality, both as a category and in some specific instances – particularly that of conjoined twins – I want to problematise the issue of the normative subject as it is marked by the closed skin boundaries of the body. What concerns me here is the epistemological, ontological and indeed ethical status of those organic beings whose difference is always/already apparent at the surface. In what follows, the reality or otherwise of the bodies to which I refer is not at issue.3 To the extent that all bodies are phantasmatic, what matters is not any empirical claim to anatomical certainty, but the production of a morphological imaginary. And once the normative standard of ordered and sealed bodiliness, against which monstrosity is measured, is understood as an impossible ideal in itself – as something to be achieved rather than as a given – then it makes good sense to take the incoherence of the monstrous as the starting point. I shall be looking, then, at the issue of monstrosity as a manifestation of the always already unstable corpus, and as a difference that defies distinction.