The Skinned Body

   After the last two weeks of research, I've decided to incorporate the theme of "skinned body'' into my 3D animation project, which I am currently working on.

                  A sketch for the project

    Misogyny was the primary focus of this project, a topic that has intrigued me since my bachelor's. It has some symbolism from my research on the roots of misogyny in Greek culture. The 'mother pig' represents the woman, seen only as a domestic animal, a reproduction machine. I've decided to add a skinned body texture to this character. Flaying here represents identity that is taken away, an idea I used in my previous work with 'headless bodies' for example,

My work from 2021

   With the pig character, a skinned body will also represent the pleasure that is taken away along with the skin. Sexuality is stripped of pleasure, transforming the female body into a purely reproductive machine. The 'ultimate circumcision'. The skinned body also relates to my research on abjection. By taking away the skin, the body is turned into something disgusting and 'untouchable'.

 

''But skin is not the body. I have even come to think, and aim to bring you also to think, that the skin is not even a part of the body. Skin is not a part of the body not because it is separate from it but, surprisingly, because it cannot come apart from it. Unlike a member, or an organ, or a nail-clipping, the skin is not detachable in such a way that the detached part would remain recognisable or that the body left behind would remain recognisably a body. The skinned body is less a body even than a skeleton, which we find it easier to reclothe in flesh (there are plenty of dancing skeletons in story and ritual, but very few skinned bodies). The skin always takes the body with it. The skin is, so to speak, the body’s face, the face of its bodiliness. The skinned body is formless, faceless, its face having been taken off with its skin. Where a leg, or a liver or a heart remain what they are once removed from the body and may be imagined as continuing to function apart from the body which has formed them, the skin itself is no longer a skin once it is detached. By being peeled away from the body, it has ceased to be itself. The skin cannot easily be thought of as a part of the body because, despite the fact that it has its obvious, specialised functions, its principal function is to manifest the complex, cooperative, partitioned wholeness of the body.''

Steven Connor, A Skin That Walks