ABSTRACT
This book takes the ‘skin’ not only as its object, but as a point of departure for a different way of thinking. We seek to think about the skin, but also to think with or through the skin. Such an approach engenders a way of thinking that attends to the forms and folds of living skin at the same time as it takes the shape of such skin, as it forms and re-forms, unfolds and refolds. Whilst this collection stages an intimate dialogue with the growing feminist literature on lived and imagined embodiment, it avoids taking ‘the body’ as its privileged figure. Instead, it focuses on ‘the skin’, as the outer covering of the body that both ‘protects us from others and exposes us to them’ (Cataldi 1993: 145). In making this shift, we call for a skin-tight politics, a politics that takes as its orientation not the body as such, but the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds. ‘Thinking through the skin’ is a thinking that reflects, not on the body as the lost object of thought, but on inter-embodiment, on the mode of being-with and being-for, where one touches and is touched by others.
