Call for papers: Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis

Edited by Sheila L. Cavanagh, Rachel Hurst and Angela Failler
Deadline for submissions: 15 February 2009
Email:  psychoanalysisandskin@gmail.com

The editors of Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis invite contributions for an interdisciplinary collection on the cultural politics and psychoanalysis of skin. We welcome papers that unhinge skin from the biological sciences to examine its layers of significance by way of social and psychoanalytic critique. Skin is the first and enduring medium through which we encounter the world. It delimits interiority and exteriority and, consequently, our relationships to self and others. Skin is laden with unconscious meanings and those we attach to it with respect to gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and racialization, religion, nationality, class, and dis/ability. Moreover, as both “screen” and “container,” skin functions to simultaneously reveal and hide the ways we negotiate identity, body and culture. Perhaps due to these complexities, skin remains an under-theorized yet productive site of inquiry.