Review of Re: Skin by Dene Grigar - “Think of aphorisms involving skin. “Beauty is only skin deep” suggests the difference between the superficial and the genuine, with the word “only” hinting at skin’s lack of importance in the measurement of one’s true value. “Thinned-skin” hints to a failing of character. “No skin off my nose” is a flippant response signifying we do not care what another says or does. “Give me some skin” reduces intimacy of a physical connection to the imperious slapping of another’s flesh. So pervasive is skin as a “significant border,” a “boundary between one’s self and the surrounding . . . world” that Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth have devoted a whole book “on the contentious situation” of it (1).

And true to their promise Re:Skin is a very compelling book that explores skin in a variety of genres, from numerous perspectives, penned by a wide range of scholars and artists. As the editors point out, the Re:Skin “is a complex understanding of the ways in which difference, especially gender difference and bodily difference, is marked and constituted” (5). It will be hard for anyone looking at the images or reading the various works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship to remain unconvinced. Flanagan and Booth make their point well, organizing works into three sections: “Inside, Outside, Surface,” “Transgression,” and “Mapping the Visual and the Virtual.”" Continue reading >>