Description
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Re: Skin by Flanagan
This book talks about skin as boundary and surface, metaphorically and physically: creative and critical perspectives on skin and bodily transformation as it intersects with digital technologies. In "Re: Skin", scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin - as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins - by plastic surgery, tatooing, skin graft art, and other methods - but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies. The book's agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss.
A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of "body criticism"; a writer uses "faux science" to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another's sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the "skin" of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice.