Webliography

Guiding Question:

“‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’ asks Donna Haraway. Discuss the idea of skin in relation to how we might imagine our future embodiment.”

1. Mary Flanagan & Austin Booth (ed), Re: Skin, Google books, (2006) (accessed 27 August 2010).

This online source is a book comprising a series of scholarly essays discussing perspectives on skin. It is recent and each one of the authors has been chosen to write in the book based on the quality of his or her works. As such, it is a scholarly source suitable for a university-level essay. The book is also highly relevant to the guiding question. The authors each focus on different elements of skin and embodiment but the overall theme of the book is how progression in technology is allowing us to modify and merge our skins, leading to a new kind of embodiment. The introduction states that the use of a broad range of technologies to alter the physical body, such as plastic surgery, tattooing and skin-grafting, is creating new frameworks for thinking about the body. The authors generally argue that our bodies do not end at the skin now and nor will they in the future.

2. Susan Ballard, ‘My viewing body does not end at the skin’ (accessed 27 August 2010).

This essay is written in the first person, is relatively short and does not include a date of publication. These are factors that could indicate that the article is not at the required scholarly level. However, the author is a university lecturer, referencing has been used and a list of scholarly sources provided, and the essay provides much more than a simplistic analysis of the issues. Regarding relevancy, the author explicitly states that throughout the text she invokes Donna Haraway’s question “why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” As such, the essay at least deals directly with the first part of the guiding question, namely the idea of ‘skin’ and ‘bodies’. She analyses the ways in which technology enters our bodies on a molecular level and creates a new sense of the corporeal body, thus addressing how ideas of skin impact on how we might imagine our future embodiment. As she writes, “the boundaries that demarcated the body itself were questioned. Skin was no longer a decisive barrier.” However, her specific guiding topic is one that relates these ideas of skin to a discussion of entrapment when viewing images. For this reason, this source would need to be supplemented by other less-specific sources in order to provide a well-rounded analysis of the guiding question.

3. Lea Schick & Lone Malmborg, ‘Bodies, embodiment and ubiquitous computing’, Digital Creativity, 21 (2010), 63-69 (accessed 7 September 2010).

Lone Malmborg is an associate professor at a Denmark university and Lea Schick wrote her masters thesis on shared embodiment. This, combined with the length and indepth analysis of the article, indicates that it is a scholarly article suitable for a university-level essay. It was published in 2010 and contains analysis of other recent scholarly work on the topic. As such, it will supplement well the other sources in this webliography that are slightly older. The article is directly on-point, advocating “the future of the body as a distributed and shared embodiment; an unfolded body that doesn’t end at one’s skin, but emerges as intercorporeality between bodies and the technological environment.” The authors discuss how pervasive technologies and sensor-network technologies are leading the way for a new embodiment where the body and the skin will be the true protagonists. The authors posit that our future embodiment should be one in which our bodies do not end at the skin, and that current ideas of skin allow for us to imagine such an embodiment.

4. Abby Wilkerson, ‘Ending at the Skin: Sexuality and Race in Feminist Theorizing’, Hypatia, 12 (1997), 164-173 (accessed 7 September 2010).

This article was written by an assistant professor of writing at an American university who has a Ph.D concentrating on women’s studies. This, combined with the length and indepth analysis of the article, indicates that it is a scholarly article suitable for a university-level essay. It also includes referencing and a list of scholarly sources used. It was written in 1997, which is recent enough for a discussion of these issues, especially considering Haraway’s Manifesto was written in 1984. The article is directly on point and provides an in-depth level of analysis with a focus on bisexuality and race. The author argues that a future embodiment where bodies extend beyond the skin, suggestive of subversive possibility though it may be, is premature. She argues that the desire to believe that bodies extend beyond the skin is appealing to white feminists who are keen to imagine a future embodiment free of race, due to a desire to disavow their whiteness because of the despair and shame at racism and white privilege. However, the author argues that moving to a future embodiment free of race without taking responsibility for whiteness will make it impossible to dismantle racism. As such, the author posits that we should not yet imagine a future embodiment where our bodies extend beyond the skin.

5. Susanna Paasonen, ‘Thinking through the cybernetic body: Popular cybernetics and feminism,’ Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 4 (2002) (accessed 27 August 2010).

This article was written for a peer-reviewed online journal created at Bowling Green State University in America. The journal is dedicated to promoting experimental work expressing views that do more than merely affirm what is already believed. While this article may not be as scholarly as required for a main source of the essay, it may be useful as a tool for encouraging original thought about the guiding question. While any university-level essay should be thoroughly referenced, the point of using references should always be to write an essay arguing a point or making an original statement about the essay question. For this reason, using a source such as this can be useful for generating critical analysis of the topic. The author challenges the obsession towards embodiment in cyberdiscourse, arguing that this is caused by the tendency to think of bodies as something that one has, rather than something one is and does. She describes skin as central in re-thinking the relations of individuals, bodies and technology; as a boundary assumed to contain subjects inside while keeping others outside. The author posits that imagining our future embodiment in terms of our bodies extending beyond the skin is a utopian ideal.