Discover Top Posts Tagged with #skin studies

Jan 1, 2020

Julia Skelly, Skin and Scars: Probing the Visual Culture of Addiction, 24 Body & Society 193 (2018)

Abstract

What does considering skin carefully and specifically illuminate about addiction, addiction discourse and/or the visual culture of addiction, that more general considerations of the body do not? What light is shed when we talk about skin and addiction? I want to propose in this brief article that in looking at addiction and addiction discourse through the lens of skin studies, we see with even more clarity the thinness of the argument that addiction is legible from corporeal evidence. I conclude that while we may want skin to tell us things about others, it nevertheless behooves us to be wary of what we think skin tells us about addiction.

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but rather what disturbs identity, system, order. (Kristeva, 1982: 4)

From Body to Skin

In the introduction to High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (2002: 15) argue that: ‘The body…that returns, stubbornly and excessively, in addiction discourse, does not return us to a stable human identity or natural being, but rather testifies to a materiality that resists these categories.’1 Here Brodie and Redfield make clear that, in the context of addiction studies, the body is not a passive product of biology but rather an irreducible material agent. In this way, the body as it is understood in addiction studies is not unlike the body as it is understood in body studies. Indeed, like scholars of the body, scholars of addiction approach bodies not as natural substances that come before society and culture, but as thoroughly socialized and enculturated phenomena that are as much individual as they are collective (Hickman, 2013; Huggins, 2006).

Addicts, or those who are perceived to be addicted, have long been viewed as threats not only to their own bodies but also to the social body. This view has persisted despite the fact that there is no definitive test that can detect addiction in the body. Blood tests can test for drug use and brain scans can show how the brain changes when it is exposed to drugs or drug-related paraphernalia (Hickman, 2013). But the body itself is an unreliable narrator when it comes to identifying addiction. Of course, this has not stopped artists and other producers of visual culture from using the body to communicate to viewers that a person is an addict. It is, therefore, crucial for those concerned with addiction to interrogate visual representations of addicted individuals in order to problematize rather than reproduce beliefs about the relationship between addiction and the body.

Calling into question the ‘traditional Western conception of a “self” that resides within a bodily core’ (Slevin, 2008: 45), the burgeoning subfield of skin studies also builds on many of the insights of body studies. In her book The Body: The Key Concepts (2008: 1), Lisa Blackman notes that body studies scholars are critical of the notion of the ‘natural body’ and ‘all the assumptions this notion brings with it’. Far from natural, bodies are ‘materialized … through particular conceptions of normality and abnormality’ (2008: 12). Like Blackman, I argue that the addicted individual – or, again, the individual who is perceived to be addicted – is materialized as abnormal through a range of gender, class and race-related discourses. This apparent abnormality is, I contend, neither essential nor innate; it is constituted through a variety of collective forces, including visual culture.

As my title suggests, I am concerned in this article with probing the visual culture of addiction by means of skin in order to illuminate some of the problems with the historically accepted belief that addiction is legible on the body.2 In identifying the skin as a site for addiction scholarship, I am – as feminist theorists Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey put it – interested in:

posing the question of how skin, becomes, rather than simply is, meaningful. To ask such a question is to suggest that the skin is always open to being read. If the skin is always open to being read (and being read differently), we can also consider the ways in which these various techniques for reading produce skins in specific and determinate ways. (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001: 1)

Feminist theories such as these are productive for scholars of addiction because they allow us to interrogate how the surfaces of the body have been, and continue to be, read for difference, deviance and pathology. Indeed, in the visual culture of addiction, skin is frequently read for signs of addiction that are not ‘naturally’ occurring but are, instead, inscribed on the skin by a human agent in order to mark an individual as ‘addicted’.

Despite many references to the body in scholarship on addiction, skin itself is rarely named. The skin in these accounts is the goes-without-saying, the obvious, the hypervisible but unnamed surface of the body. The question that we must ask, then, in this special issue on skin is: What does considering skin carefully and specifically reveal about addiction, addiction discourse and the visual culture of addiction that more general considerations of the body do not? What light is shed when we talk about skin and addiction? I want to propose in this brief article that, in looking at addiction and addiction discourse through the skin, we see with even more clarity the thinness of the argument that addiction is legible from visible, corporeal evidence. We may want skin to tell us things about others, but it behooves us to be wary of what we think skin tells us about addiction.

Dirty Skin, Dirty Addict

The body’s surface – its skin – is often thought to reveal something about the invisible: personality, identity, interiority, psychology, health. The question for artists concerned with addiction to alcohol and drugs has long been: how to represent the invisible? In the visual culture of addiction, the skin is a canvas that is used to represent the unrepresentability of addiction. More specifically, it illuminates the anxious desire in Western societies to be able to read addiction from the body (and, more precisely, from the skin). Since at least the 18th century, artists have employed a range of strategies to make addiction legible through visual signs inscribed on the body. Skin is a canvas in the visual culture of addiction, but skin is also read for signs of addiction in lived culture.

If skin is a semiotic system, and indeed a crucial semiotic system, within addiction discourse, then it is worth considering its key signifiers and signifieds. For example, in the visual culture of addiction, dirty skin usually signifies poverty, but when combined with other signifiers – such as bottles or drug paraphernalia – dirt on the skin can signify either alcoholism or drug addiction. This is as true now as it was in 1751 when British artist William Hogarth produced his engraving Gin Lane, which was frequently copied by other engravers (Figure 1). This famous image shows an intoxicated woman in the middle of the urban scene with a male child falling out of her lap. That the central figure is female is significant because, historically, the most reviled kind of alcoholic or addict was the ‘bad mother’. This trope remains central in contemporary film, which frequently shores up the link between addiction and failed motherhood. Hogarth used a number of visual signs that would have been legible to his audience as indicators of the woman’s ‘problem’ drinking: her grotesque facial features, stringy hair, ragged clothing and dirty skin, the last of which Hogarth produced by engraving repeated lines on the woman’s arms and legs. He also etched dark marks on her right leg that can be read as either patches of dirt or open wounds.

Figure 1. Anonymous after William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751. Source: Wellcome Collection.

The visual strategy of representing female drinkers with dirty skin in graphic satire was a common one in the 18th century.3 Contemporary films also employ the strategy of representing drug addicts with dirty skin. One example is Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play (2009), a movie about journalism and political corruption. While the film is not about addiction per se, there is a minor white female character to whom we are introduced in a scene when she is sitting in a hallway staring at the male protagonist (played by Russell Crowe). The girl’s hair and face are filthy. In a later scene, she stands against a building, and her whole face is covered with a thin layer of dirt, with darker smudges on her forehead and left cheek. There is also what appears to be a sore on the corner of her mouth. We learn soon after that she is a heroin addict.

In her book on drugs and film, Susan Boyd (2008: 173) has observed that the strategy of representing female addicts with messy hair is frequently used in Hollywood movies. She also makes the important point that when white female addicts are depicted in films they are often under threat from ‘racialized others’, which underscores the racist ideologies that are central to addiction discourse (Reeves and Campbell, 1994). According to Boyd (2008: 148): ‘Protecting White women from racialized others in the nation and from encroachments at the border remains a dominant theme in official drug discourse.’ Indeed, white women’s use of drugs has often been represented as a threat to their very whiteness, whether in 19th- and early 20th-century representations of white women consuming opium with Chinese men (Kohn, 2001: 57) or in more contemporary films representing white women consuming heroin or crack with black men. Significantly, the white female addict in State of Play has a black boyfriend (also an addict), who is murdered in the first scene of the movie. In the visual culture of addiction, white women are frequently racialized by their drug use, and representing white women with dirty skin visualizes this discursive transformation from white to non-white or less-than-white.

A more recent film also uses skin as a canvas for signs of addiction. In Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), the Oscar-winning film about a young black gay man named Chiron, the protagonist’s mother is a crack addict. In an early scene she is shown with clear skin, wearing what appears to be a nurse’s uniform. In a subsequent scene, her facial skin is still unblemished, but she is shown smoking crack wearing a tight red tank top. In the second act of the film, the audience ‘knows’ that her addiction has progressed because her hair is messy and her skin is now make-up free and there are visible blemishes or scars on her chin. Mechthild Fend, one of the few art historians currently working on skin, states: ‘The face’s potential to signify has often led to the metaphoric association with canvas and paintings – both face and canvas are surfaces on which colour and line work and produce meaning’ (Fend, 2017: 5). In representations of female addicts, dirty skin and blemished faces signify not only addiction but also failed or deviant femininity.

In her work on ‘behavioural addictions’ such as sex, gambling and shopping, film scholar Varpu Rantala (2013: 107) argues that movies that ‘[visualize] these addictions’ do not necessarily employ ‘external surfaces of socially marked bodies, imagined as polluted by substances, and framed with dirt…’ In other words, representations of so-called behavourial addictions differ from many representations of alcoholics and drug addicts. Rantala’s phrase ‘external surfaces’, of course, is a gloss not only on clothes but also skin. The reference to dirt is also significant; we will recall that the young white female addict in State of Play is depicted with a dirty face. The limitations of using skin as a semiotic system with which to communicate active addiction is illuminated when comparing the white female addict in State of Play and the black female addict in Moonlight. Whereas the white female addict’s whiteness must be almost completely obscured by dirt, in racist ideologies the black body has historically been associated with dirt (for more on this see McClintock, 1995). The dirt used to signify addiction on a white female body racializes that body as non-white or less-than-white; the black female addict is therefore doubly tainted by problematic discourses that link both blackness and addiction with dirt.

All Signs Failing

In February 1920, the New York City Narcotic Clinic released a statement written by physician S.D. Hubbard that explicitly acknowledged the assumption that addiction was legible from physical evidence on the body. His statement, however, also demonstrated the fallibility of this assumption:

We do not know who the addicts are, nor how many there are of them, either here or elsewhere in this country. Why? From opinions expressed, and from the literature on this subject, we have been led to believe that addiction was allocated with definite physical stigmata; pallor, emaciation, nervousness, apprehension, sniffing, needle puncture markings, and tattoo skin evidences; but in actual experience with hundreds of acknowledged drug addicts, persons actually seeking their drug, we find, like weather indications, all such signs failing. (quoted in Terry and Pellens, 1928: 33)

When we look at skin in the visual culture of addiction, we often find certain ‘physical stigmata’ present, including sores, scars and ‘track marks’. Skin, as previously noted, has provided artists with a blank canvas, so to speak, upon which to inscribe signs of addiction. In the visual culture of addiction, the skin speaks, and it speaks to those who are looking for something very specific, namely evidence of addiction.

In a discussion of contemporary visual culture (including art photography, fashion imagery and anti-drug propaganda), Timothy Hickman has observed:

Everyone knows what a junkie is supposed to look like: hollow cheeks, panda eyes, a haunted expression, wasted, decadent, desperate. And yet, narcotic addiction, as a physiological or psychological condition is invisible. It offers no infallibly visible markers of its presence. (Hickman, 2002: 119)

This invisiblity has been a cause of anxiety in the West for centuries, and it explains why there has been an anxious desire to identify visual signs that ostensibly make addiction legible from the body. The skin, then, is the visible surface that has been repeatedly used to turn something invisible, something unrepresentable, into something visible and representable. If an addict can be identified from signs on their body, they can be categorized, classified and, if necessary, contained and punished. As Susan Zieger (2008) has shown, there are parallels here with the desire to identify and punish homosexual men in the late 19th century. Like the homosexual, the addict and alcoholic have been classified, pathologized and punished, and visual culture has been crucial for both discourses of sexuality and discourses of addiction in crystallizing and circulating the physical signs that these figures ostensibly exhibit.

In the late 19th century, the homosexual and the addict were anxiously visualized through medico-moral discourses, which were constructed through both texts and images (Zieger, 2008: ch. 5). An 1881 illustration showing the result of subcutaneous injection was reproduced in a text entitled Drugs that Enslave: The Opium, Morphine, Chloral and Hashisch Habits, which was written by H.H. Kane (a pseudonym for Harry Hubbell) of New York City (Figure 2). This image illuminates the relationships between the inside and outside, between self and other, between (addicted) individual and society that skin so volubly signifies in the visual culture of addiction. Here scars and wounds index not only drug injection, but also the identity drug user/addict. The excessiveness of this image, as ostensibly empirical evidence, speaks to the anxious repetition of certain visual signs (physical stigmata) in the visual culture of addiction. This is not to say that medical imagery representing drug users is (always) fictional, but rather that images like this one are not objective or free from human intervention, nor are they necessarily reliable evidence of addiction. In late 19th-century America and Britain, there was a desire to be able to identify, and therefore control, drug users and addicts.4 This image resulted from that desire, which was inextricably bound up with legal and moral discourses.5 The skin in this image is a semiotic system that says, if not screams, addiction as an embodied experience and addict as a recognizable identity.

Figure 2. Illustration showing the result of subcutaneous injection, 1881. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Mechthild Fend (2017: 10) argues that from the late 18th century onwards, there was a:

new focus on the surface and the borderlines of the body and a new understanding of the skin as physical demarcation of the self…. [The] word ‘skin’ rather than ‘flesh’ is used with increasing frequency when referring to the surface or substance an artist imitates when painting the naked parts of a human body. This process runs parallel, and is connected with, the medicalisation of skin that has emerged since the seventeenth century, when the organ of touch and its colour came under intensified medical, including microscopic, scrutiny.6

The medicalization of skin is excessively evident in Kane’s text on ‘drugs that enslave’. In a chapter entitled ‘Accidents Incident to the Subcutaneous Use of Morphia’, Kane writes:

There are certain dangers attending the temporary or continued use of morphia by the hypodermic syringe that deserve careful attention, in order that, if possible, they be remedied. The first is the production of abscess and inflammation. The majority of those who use morphia in this way are badly scarred. The skin is thickened, reddened and covered with bluish and reddish discolorations. Abscesses just forming, formed, or commencing to heal, are found here and there. (Kane, 1881: 71)

Turning to the illustration cited above, he observes:

In the accompanying cut…is shown the condition of the skin in a male nurse at Bellevue Hospital, who was a habitué. The photograph from which the cut was made was taken but a short time before death. In the case of a young married lady, the skin, everywhere that the dress covered the body in front, and the limbs over, was scarred, contracted and discolored, as though she had been badly burned and then pricked all over with India ink. (Kane, 1881: 171)

Kane identifies three different kinds of media in this passage: the cut (the engraving or print), the photograph (which is not included in the text but which would have signified empirical evidence in the medical context at this time), and the skin itself. In alluding to the woman’s skin as looking as though it had been pricked all over with India ink, Kane is on the one hand evoking the image of tattooed skin (which is, significantly, mentioned as one form of ‘physical stigmata’ in the New York Narcotic Clinic’s 1920 statement), and on the other, he imagines skin as paper, a material and discursive link that has a long history, according to Fend (2017: 9). Fend observes that the subcutaneous zone was ‘an eighteenth-century neologism’ (2017: 85). In employing the term ‘subcutaneous’ in the title of the cut, the author also evoked the image or concept of the (invisible) inside of the body, even while representing (only) the outside surface, namely, the top layer of the skin.

Interestingly, Kane later qualifies his earlier statement about the majority of morphia users developing abscesses:

Those patients who exercise great care in regard to cleanliness and manner of injecting are rarely troubled with abscess. Thus one patient of mine had used morphia subcutaneously in large amount, for over six years, injecting every time, and that several times daily, into a spot upon one thigh, that could be covered by a small tea-saucer and has never yet had either inflammation or abscess. (Kame, 1881: 72)

To complicate matters even more, Kane adds: ‘Indeed, some persons who exercise no care whatever to keep syringe or solution clean, are free from this troublesome complaint’ (1881: 72). These passages underscore the unreliability of wounds and scars resulting from the use of a hypodermic syringe as visual evidence of addiction. They also reveal a discursive contradiction: 19th-century medical authorities set out to prove that the skin could be ‘read’ for addiction, but even as they pointed to images that ostensibly supported this argument, they were often forced to admit that the skin was in fact an unreliable surface.

Compared to the illustration in Kane’s text, Swiss artist Eugène Samuel Grasset’s 1897 lithograph Morphinomaniac is remarkable because of the brilliant whiteness and smoothness of the female drug user’s skin.7 The title of Grasset’s lithograph frames the female drug user as an addict, or ‘morphinomaniac’, a popular term of the period (Zieger, 2005). Grasset shows the drug user about to inject herself with morphine into her left thigh. The lithograph, which was likely influenced by Japanese prints, had a very different purpose than the image in Kane’s text. It represents a beautiful white woman in a scintillating pose engaging in a taboo activity. The title and the syringe frame her as a drug user, but representing abscesses or scars on her porcelain skin would have undercut the aesthetic pleasure that was intended with the image. In other words, these two representations of morphine users/addicts produced around the same time approached skin very differently because of the different intentions of their producers. In the medical image, the skin is used as a canvas for physical stigmata signifying addiction, whereas in Grasset’s lithograph, the woman’s white blemish-free skin is a sign of her physical beauty and, perhaps, her threatened purity.

The Invisiblity of Skin in Addiction Scholarship

Timothy Hickman has critically examined a number of images that are part of the visual culture of addiction in order to demonstrate the unreliability of visual images to ‘show’ an individual’s identity as an addict. For my purposes I will summarize two of Hickman’s case studies. The first case study is a pair of photographs of a young boy. The photographs ostensibly showed the boy before and after being ‘cured’ of drug addiction, and they appeared in Leslie Keeley’s 1897 drug cure pamphlet. As Hickman observes:

In the first image, the little boy’s narcotic habit is made visible by his ragged and dirty clothing – but, we might ask, why do drug addicts necessarily dress badly. What this picture shows, rather, is that Jasper is poor – we rely on the context and captions to make clear that he had a drug habit. His clothing, thus, operates to mark his condition in terms of class. (Hickman, 2002: 127)

In underscoring the fallibility of visual evidence, Hickman makes the crucial point that the visual culture of addiction often relies on text to concretize the legibility of addiction from the body. What Hickman does not mention is that very little of the boy’s skin is visible in either photograph; in the first image only his face, neck, hands, feet and ankles are visible (he wears no shoes or socks). In the ‘after’ image, only his face and hands are visible. The way the photographs are lit, the boy’s feet and face appear particularly dirty in the first image, while in the second photograph his face and hands are brilliantly white. This case study demonstrates that the photographer could not rely on the boy’s skin to ‘show’ his addicted and non-addicted status, although the suggestion of dirt due to shadow links these images with works of graphic art representing ‘excessive’ drinkers in the 18th century (see Figure 1). The photographer relies on clothing and captions to identify the boy as both addict and non-addict.

The second relevant case study in Hickman’s article is a series of six mug shot-like photographs of a woman with the caption ‘a 1940s addict’. Three sets of profile and full-frontal photographs of the woman’s head and shoulders are arranged vertically. The text over the photographs reads ‘Effects of Addiction over a Ten Year Period’. The top set of images is dated 1937 with the accompanying text reading ‘A start of addiction’. The second set of photographs is dated 1942, and the text reads: ‘Drugs have left their mark’. The only so-called ‘mark’ evident in the photographs seems to be a blurring of the right side of the woman’s mouth and a darkening of the skin next to her right eye. The third set of photographs is dated 1947 and the accompanying text refers to the subject’s ‘complete mental and physical breakdown’. The images were produced by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which became responsible for narcotic enforcement (read: prohibition) in the United States in 1930. Hickman (2002: 128) states that the FBN ‘manipulated images’ in order to fulfil its agenda to demonize narcotics, narcotic use and narcotic users. In one of the photographs of the ‘1940s addict’, the skin under the woman’s eyes has been made darker through human intervention. According to Hickman:

The photographic style is forensic, to say the least…. Problems arise, however, when we note that the meaning of the alleged ‘mark’ left by the drugs was, first, not obvious – thus we are given aggressively didactic captions to make sure that we interpret the marks ‘correctly’. More problematically, some of the marks themselves proved to be invisible. Put another way, this woman did not look bad enough to suit the FBN’s purposes. Because her addiction thus proved to be invisible, the agents decided to mark the photos themselves in order to meet the bureau’s needs. (Hickman, 2002: 128–9)

Interestingly, while Hickman refers to ‘marks’ and the FBN darkening ‘the subject’s eyes’ (2002: 129), he does not explicitly use the word ‘skin’, although that is the canvas upon which the bureau was anxiously putting its mark. As an addendum to this discussion, Hickman notes that in Stephen Soderburgh’s film Traffic (2000), we know the daughter in the film has become an addict ‘by the dark rings that have suddenly appeared beneath her eyes’ (2002: 130 n23). The skin under the eyes, then, is another ‘site’ of addiction if we consider the skin a topographical map to be interpreted. Hickman’s analysis, though he never explicitly uses the word ‘skin’, effectively underscores what the FBN discovered: skin cannot be depended upon to tell us who the addicts are.

Conclusion

In the visual culture of addiction, as in everyday life, for those looking for signs of addiction, they will sometimes, though not always, find them on the skin of others; sometimes they will anxiously look at their own skin for signs that will give them away, and they are relieved when they realize that skin conceals as much as, if not more than, it reveals. In looking at a range of visual material – prints, photographs and film, not to mention paintings (see, for example, Pablo Picasso’s The Absinthe Drinker, 1901, a representation of a woman whose skin has literally turned green from her beverage of choice) – we see how in any given medium skin functions as a means to communicate a subject’s state of being addicted. Mechthild Fend articulates the significance of skin for art historians:

The skin’s capacity to be the human body’s surface and to also form its outer appearance makes it comparable to images, whether photographs or film, or the media considered in this book: paintings, prints and drawings. It is a surface to be looked at [and interpreted], and a ground on to which images can be painted, drawn, incised or projected. This makes skin a very specific object, a privileged surface to be represented in film or other visual media. Skin variously blends with the ground of the image, its surface, or its crafted texture. It is the shared quality of skin and the visual image that gives imitations or reproductions of skin a self-referential quality…(Fend, 2017: 9)

In the visual culture of addiction, skin might be made out of paper or canvas or pixels, depending on the medium, but it continues to be a seductive surface upon which to anxiously seek visible signs of addiction.

Notes

Concern with the body and the simultaneous erasure of the skin proper (by not explicitly naming it) is also evident in texts such as Richard Huggins’s chapter ‘The Addict’s Body: Embodiment, Drug Use, and Representation’, when he writes: I offer here a hermeneutic analysis of images and discourses of drug use and drug addicted bodies contextualized in terms of historical, socio-cultural and political perspectives. The idea of addiction and the social practices and behaviours that accompany it are heavily reliant on particular themes that recur through and in the representation of drug use and the ‘addict.’ In this sense I am working from a tradition that regards the idea and meaning of addiction as socially constructed. Furthermore, as I will emphasize, the body of the addict plays a significant role in these representations and discourses and to some degree, this focus on the body and body parts accounts for the power of many representations of drug use. (Huggins, 2006: 166) Significantly, he adds: ‘the addict’s body acts as a kind of map for the (perceived) social significance of drug use and addiction’ (2006: 166). I would amend this slightly to suggest that in the visual culture of addiction, the (ostensible) addict’s skin functions as a map with specific sites that are of particular cartographic (that is, symbolic) significance for reading the individual as addicted. My title has obvious parallels with the title of a recent edited volume, Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone (Rosenthal and Vanderbeke, 2015).

In the 19th century, graphic artists continued to use etched lines and cross-hatching to signify dirty skin in representations of ‘excessive’ drinkers. For more on this, see Julia Skelly, ‘The Politics of Drunkenness’ (2015).

In her book on addiction and late 19th-century British and American literature, Susan Zieger observes: When I began this project, I followed the conventional historicist assumption that U.S. and British cultures of addiction were too distinctive to be discussed together without distortion. I realized, however, that those differences are best explained in relation to each other, because the overarching connections between their two histories of addiction are so similar: the British antislavery movement of the 1790s influenced the temperance movement in both nations; in both places, the temperance movement had close ties to abolition; the medical establishment shared disciplinary knowledge through strong professional connections; and the novels that engaged and developed representations of addicted subjectivity were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. (Zieger, 2008: 9)

In both Britain and the United States the criminalization of drugs has been a twentieth-century phenomenon. No laws regulated opium, marijuana, heroin, or other drug use until campaigns orchestrated by diverse groups spurred the passage of the earliest state laws to curb morphine use in the 1890s. (Farrell Brodie and Redfield, 2002: 3) Nonetheless, there were laws in place in Britain in the 19th century that put individuals identified as ‘habitual drunkards’ in prisons, asylums or so-called ‘inebriate homes’ (see Skelly, 2014: ch. 4).

She adds later in her book: The eighteenth-century association of skin and canvas builds on a long material history of skin as a medium. A different area where skin was seen as a surface on which signs become visible was the exercise of medical diagnosis. In particular the eighteenth-century medical practices explicitly labeled ‘semiotic medicine’ regarded skin as a privileged site for medical deciphering. (Fend, 2017: 82)

Grasset’s lithograph (Philadelphia Museum of Art) is discussed further and reproduced in Skelly (2014: 139).

References

Ahmed S and Stacey J (2001) Introduction: Dermographies. In: Ahmed S and Stacey J (eds) Thinking Through the Skin. London: Routledge, 1–17.

Blackman L (2008) The Body: The Key Concepts. London: Berg.

Boyd SC (2008) Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Farrell Brodie J and Redfield M (2002) Introduction. In: Farrell Brodie J and Redfield M (eds) High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1–15.

Fend M (2017) Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hickman TA (2002) Heroin chic: The visual culture of narcotic addiction. Third Text 16: 119–136.

Hickman TA (2013) Target America: Visual culture, neuroimaging, and the ‘hijacked brain’ theory of addiction. Past and Present suppl. 9: 1–20.

Huggins R (2006) The addict’s body: Embodiment, drug use, and representation. In: Waskul D and Vannini P (eds) Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 165–180.

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Kohn M (2001) Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Under- ground. London: Granta.

Kristeva J (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez LS. New York: Columbia University Press.

McClintock A (1995) Soft-soaping empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising. In: Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge, 207–231.

Rantala V (2013) Techniques of the invisible: Cinematic images of being addicted. Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 30: 105–122.

Reeves JL and Campbell R (1994) Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rosenthal C and Vanderbeke D (eds) (2015) Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Skelly J (2014) Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Skelly J (2015) The politics of drunkenness: John Henry Walker, John A. Macdonald, and graphic satire. Revue d’art canadienne/ Canadian Art Review 40(1): 71–84.

Slevin T (2008) The wound and the First World War: ‘Cartesian’ surgeries to embodied being in psychoanalysis, electrification and skin grafting. Body & Society 14(2): 39–61.

Terry CE and Pellens M (1928) The Opium Problem. New York: The Committee on Drug Addictions in Collaboration with the Bureau of Social Hygiene.

Zieger S (2005) ‘How far am I responsible?’: Women and morphinomania in late nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian Studies 48(1): 59–81.

Zieger S (2008) Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

#addiction #human experience #embodiment #skin #skin studies #visual culture #perfect body

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