Living Across and Through Skins

What if our bodies did not stop at the edges of their skin? What if corporeal existence occurred as much across and through our skins as it does within them? According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea. Early in the twentieth century, a view of human existence as patterns of behaviour or actions shaped by the environment was elaborated by John Dewey, one of America's most influential philosophers. Underscoring the relevance of Dewey's thought to contemporary issues and debates, Sullivan brings Dewey into conversation with continental philosophers - especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - and feminist philosophers - Judith Butler and Sandra Harding - to extend thinking about the body in new directions. Giving special emphasis to topics such as the role of habit, the discursivity of bodies, communication and meaning, personal and cultural structures of gender, the improvement of bodily experience, and understandings of truth and objectivity, Living Across and Through Skins acknowledges the importance of the body's experience without placing it in opposition to psychological, cultural, and social aspects of human life. By focusing on what bodies do, rather than what they are, Sullivan prompts a close look at concrete, physical transactions that might be changed so as to improve the human experience of the world.