re:skin

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, tattooing, 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 "e;body criticism"e;; a writer uses "e;faux science"e; 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 "e;skin"e; of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re:skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.ContributorsAustin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alice Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein