Event Information
This is a book about skin. The strange wonderfulness of our bodily covering. What happens to it when something goes wrong. How the world responds to imperfection and difference. It’s about how skin makes us who we are.
Skin Deep explores beauty, ageing, imperfection, health and illness, all of which are closely related to skin, and interrogates whiteness, both historically, structurally and through current notions of white fragility and victimhood. Paradoxically, skin is a barrier and a point of contact. It is miraculous, our biggest organ. It heals itself! It’s wafer-thin! Skin cells remake themselves!
Skin Deep is available in the Library and from all good booksellers such as the Constant Reader who will have copies of the book for sale on the day.
About the Author
Phillipa McGuinness has interviewed plastic surgeons, dermatologists, burn survivors, beauticians, melanoma sufferers, people who suffer from body dysmorphias, victims and perpetrators of racism, and all kinds of people who are and are not comfortable in their own skin, to write a book where science meets art and culture, history and politics. Philosophy too, given skin is the point where our self, and our self-perception, struggles with or embraces the way others see us, and the way we see ourselves.
Visitor Information
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