Mónica Degen
The Reciprocity of Touch
Skin is our largest organ and mainly associated with our exterior appearances and identities, such as ethnicity, age, gender, lifestyles, or public performances. Skin can be regarded as the envelope to our self. Indeed, Didier Anzieu (1990) goes so far as to develop the concept of the “skin ego” to describe how what we sense haptically and even skin itself shapes our sense of self.
Skin shapes and affords our most primordial sense: the sense of touch. We establish our immersed experiences of reality through touch: “Hand and feet, lips and face; the skin mediates touch inside and out, environment and individual in continuous kinesthetic flow” (Foster 1999:55). Skin can simultaneously connect and separate us from our social and emotional world. For example, during the pandemic, people could not feel kinetically or through their skin their friends or loved ones, and consequently perceived loneliness more acutely. Mediated contact, such as zoom or phone calls, while alleviating our sense of detachment, did not replace the emotional reward and contact that being in touch with others produces in real life. Yet, despite living in an increasingly digital and visually dominated world, touch is a central sense in the development and use of digital technologies. As Paterson (2006: 694) argues, visceral information is generated through the forces and motions that are reported back from our fingertips as we type on our computers, and the “feeling of the weighted switches when turning on and off the virtual world”. And, as digital technologies have morphed computers into the palm of our hands, we hold, navigate, or swipe across our smartphones moving through physical and virtual space simultaneously (Degen and Rose 2022). Even when walking alone at night, the touch of the phone might provide a sense of security as we know we can reach out to someone – a mediated contact that makes us feel in charge and engaged.
Through the sense of touch, we are constantly connected to our surrounding environment in a twofold process. Touch, the possibilities of the skin, immerse us into the living materiality of the world. We can feel the cold wind or snowflakes on our face, or the warmth of a woolen, scratchy jumper on our arms; we feel the hard bench through our raspy trousers; the soles of our feet step on the hard pavement or soft, wet grass. But touch can also be non-directed as we bump into things, fall over a stone, and become startled by their materiality or consistency.
Even when walking alone at night, the touch of the phone might provide a sense of security as we know we can reach out to someone – a mediated contact that makes us feel in charge and engaged.
In our daily lives, skin is central to our relationship with the world: we perceive not only objects and the material world through the receptors of our skin but we are also constantly engaged in navigating our relationships with others through our kinetic relations. Our relationships with other people, both those close and distant, are constantly checked through our monitoring of distance and proximity of skin and touch. Close skin-to-skin contact is needed to establish intimacy with those whom we care and trust: from lovers entwined in a kiss, a mother caressing her child, to friends kissing hello, or business partners shaking hands. Each exchange exemplifies a different degree of kinetic closeness and is carefully monitored through the hierarchy of skin: tongue, lips, cheeks, hands. And intimacy, the contact or closeness of skin, can rapidly turn into danger when it is unwanted or perceived as a threat or risk.
The pandemic, Covid 19, further illustrated the complex duality of skin: skin can carry germs – the unknown – skin and touch can be linked to pollution and contagion; yet simultaneously, skin is linked to our emotional self, and its use and perception reflects love and care (or aggression and danger). According to Classen (1998), touch is “the sensorial snail” as it involves feeling one’s way gradually through an object rather than capturing it at once. For visually challenged, the world is a gradual exploration, not immediately captured through the eyes. Yet, how can touch be possibly mediated through a screen? While advances are being made through immersive technologies and environments, the Covid-19 lockdown across the world starkly illustrated the complications of mediated contact. Perceiving loved ones visually and auditorily through screens provides a sense of emotional closeness, yet also highlights their sensorial and spatial distance – a feeling of longing and loss when we press the “leave” button.
References:
Anzieu, Didier, and Turner, ChrisT. (1989). The Skin Ego. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Classen, Constance (1998). The Colour of Angels. London: Routledge.
Degen, Monica M., and Gillian Rose (2022). The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Paterson, Mark (2006). “Feel the Presence: Technologies of Touch and Distance”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(5): 691-708.
Foster, Cheryl (1999). “Texture: Old Material, Fresh Novelty”. In Aesthetics in the Human Environment, edited by P. von Bonsdorff and A. Haapal, pp. 48–69. Lahti, Finland: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy.
Leonardo Custódio
The Baile Funk Experience in Peripheral Rio, one summer in the 1990s
In my teenage years, music helped me politicize Blackness (Sterling, 2001). Other senses too. For example, experiences on my skin were fundamental for me to move past Blackness as a mere matter of “skin color”.
I would like to invite you to join me on a night out in my hometown, Magé, in peripheral Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As you read, make sure to access the links where you can watch the videos that illustrate some of the experiences and places I describe. Feel free to watch fragments or the full videos. It does not matter if you do not understand Portuguese. You might want to have headphones on.
Ready? Let’s go.
It’s evening, one summer in the 1990s. We are in Magé, Rio de Janeiro [https://youtu.be/o6_ExCBgcBo?si=2wURcHG6Y7aPrMqP] Summer can be very hot and damp. Mosquitoes abound. Our skins are moist with sweat.
We are walking to the local Baile Funk (Sneed 2008). A Baile Funk (“baile” is Portuguese for party) was and remains where most peripheral youth go to hang out, dance, compete in creativity community contests, and make out. Also, for organized group fighting. Yes, you read that right.
As we walk, we gradually listen to the bass and the electronic beats [https://youtu.be/vwjFyjdiQNE?si=VA_bxyE5Ihk1El7I] blasting at the distance.
With the tickets, the multitude of sweaty, young, mostly Black and Brown people squeeze into the hall. Before entering, there’s a search for weapons. Hands up. The male guards slide their hands from our fingers to our toes, carefully squeezing our waist and thighs. Female guards do the same to the girls. The memory of the invasive touch of off-duty, often crooked police officers lingers forever. Somehow it bonded all of us.
Did I say the hall? Well, I actually meant a hot and damp futsal court or an abandoned storage building with few windows. No fresh air. We don’t care about that, though. Instead, we hug each other and jump together to the high-decibel beats [https://youtu.be/19toUmhOumk?si=pJbzMxRqBPEVJSEc].
The deafening sound system makes skin part of the communication. We need touch. We hold each other close to speak and listen. We pinch to warn, pull to protect, drag to go and get a drink.
Different from workdays, the sweat doesn’t bother us. Instead, it works like wet glue tying people – known or unknown to each other – together in the same feeling of extreme sensations: joy, fear, excitement… the sweaty skin is a personal, yet shared stamp of belonging.
The deafening sound system makes skin part of the communication. We need touch. We hold each other close to speak and listen. We pinch to warn, pull to protect, drag to go and get a drink.
At some point, the DJ plays the opening of a sequence of beats [https://youtu.be/XOQSaI4Lqrs?si=ugEf2XbTH0bpgCG1] known – and by many expected – to incite fights. The slow beginning of the track allows us to move away from the middle of the crowd. We hold hands and rush away as the beat picks up. They light the fireworks. Soon the generalized, yet organized fighting [https://youtu.be/LixN8lz4j-o?si=IMfAsDFKRTFm5DEy] starts. The air reeks of testosterone. Punches fly. Skins will carry scars and bruises to be described with pride forever.
In deep fear and excitement, we look and clap our hands, jump around and push one another as we walk out. I go ahead. You come after me, with your hands holding my shoulders. We walk and swing in sync, as if not to want to stay, yet not willing to miss anything as we leave. My skin sends a false sense of safety to you through your palms. Outside, we anxiously hug and laugh in awe as our skins touch in reassurance: we will count the days until we do the same all over again.
This is how skin made our Black teenage experience whole. The joys and dangers were intimate, politicizing the experiences we experienced together in our weekly rituals growing up in a peripheral, semi-rural town where legacies of slavery still created a sense of collective trauma and shared pain (Summers 2021).
References:
Sneed, Paul 2008. “Favela Utopias: The Bailes Funk in Rio’s Crisis of Social Exclusion and Violence”. Latin American Research Review 43(2): 57–79. doi:10.1353/lar.0.0031.
Sterling, Cheryl 2012. African Roots, Brazilian Rites: Cultural and National Identity in Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Summers, Brandi T. 2021. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup
Thinking Through Skin
A trip to a television news studio begins with a mandatory trip to “make-up”. Here, the skin of hosts and guests is sprayed with a thick layer of a delicate mix of talc, iron oxides, silica, and other components of foundation. If it wasn’t, I was once told, people would “look as if they had just risen from a hospital bed”. It is assumed, I suppose, that the natural color (which to a discouragingly disproportionate degree in the context of Danish television news is along the paler shades of the spectrum) and irregularity of people’s skin captured on camera in the studio light would distract viewers from understanding the current affairs discussed. As if thoughts are transferred or disrupted by the visuality of skin.
Not all who are on TV need to bother about being smothered with foundation, however. Those who are miraculously rescued from beneath the havoc and rubble caused by earthquakes and human-made bombs also appear on TV. Whether they want to or not. “The subjects of disaster are sentenced to be photographed”, as Azoulay (2012: 18) reminds us. They do not go through a mandatory trip through “make-up”, but their skin is smothered too – in a thick layer of a delicate mix of shale, sand, clay, and other ingredients of bricks and cement. If it wasn’t, would they be on TV? For them, the smothering of their skin signals their passing from whatever position of privilege they held previously, before becoming a victim with the rare yet not necessarily desired privilege of being on TV.
The smothering of skin is not the only guardian of visual privilege. Irrespective of smothering, we are taught to see people’s skin in different ways, including through images. Photographic depictions of human skin continue to be guided by racializing and colonial logics (Abounaddara 2012; Sealy 2019). In addition, well before a shutter is pressed, the camera technologies that allow viewers to access these sights in the first place have been encoded to see skin. Differently. Just as human beings learn to sense in different ways, media devices learn to sense in different ways. How they learn is important. It is not technological limitations, but design that leaves students of color discriminated against when taking digital exams as their faces are not recognized properly by facial recognition technologies (see for instance Meaker 2023). Around the 1970s, when Kodak color palettes were developed to better portray brown shades, it was not out of an interest to properly show dark tones of human skin; rather, it was in response to criticism from chocolate and wooden furniture companies who complained that photographs in their advertisements did not portray the right colors of their products (Roth 2009).
Perhaps some thoughts are transferred or disrupted by the visuality of skin after all.
References:
Abounaddara Collective. 2015. “The Right to the Image”. Vera List Center for Arts and Politics; https://www.veralistcenter.org/publications/a-right-to-the-image-for-all.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2012. Civil Imagination. A Political Ontology of Photography. Verso: London and New York.
Meaker, Morgan. 2023. “This Student Is Taking On ‘Biased’ Exam Software”. Wired. April 5. https://www.wired.com/story/student-exam-software-bias-proctorio/. Accessed August 23, 2024.
Roth, Lorna. 2009. “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity”. Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (1): 111–36.
Sealy, Mark. 2019. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Times. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Featured image by Ilya P on Unsplash
