Skin Acts

On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego: Antiblackness, Desire and Identification in Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset

“…[20] [7] Interracial meetings of invaginated flesh and phallic skin stimulate a sexuality of the surfaces in which human recognition and value, epidermalized because "we are used to thinking of the skin, the surface of the body, as the baseline for what it means to be human," are bartered. [21] [ 8] In Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Sage Publications, 1996),Philip…”

“…This work elaborates what Stephens describes as "the tension between the skin as an object of the distancing, racialized gaze" and the flesh as a haptic "site for registering relational and reversible aspects of [...] touch." [30] Irrespective of chronopolitical ideologies hailed by the Enlightenment, the skin's invagination as fleshy materiality makes it possible for bodies "[to] touch each other, [to] be touched by the other, and [to] make themselves feel touched or [to] touch themselves;" [31] which is why "skin-based or skin-linked knowledges have the capacity to bring the gaze back into relation with other psychic objects." [32] What I describe as surface exchanges thus respond to an intercorporeal drive in which "smells, sights, [and] impressions of the body's volume and size are not just scopic; they are tactile and multisensorial."…”

“…He is, or Bravo TV suggests, has a potential to be the homonormative stuff of wet American dreams. [21] In an interview with The Daily Beast just two weeks after the show premiered on March 11, 2012, Reza describes receiving fan mail from other gay Iranians by the dozens: "They say they love me, they are proud of, Thank God for me. [71] In another interview with the Los Angeles Times, suggestively titled, "'It's Not National Geographic'," Reza explains that he joined the cast for one reason and one reason only: about a year or two ago, I just started...I don't know if it was happening more because I was living in a bubble and didn't have enough awareness, but I'm a very strong person, so it never was in my realm of possibility, but I was watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines and the Internet, and it seemed like there was one suicide a day of a young, gay teen killing themself because they were being bullied in school.…”

“…[20] [7] Interracial meetings of invaginated flesh and phallic skin stimulate a sexuality of the surfaces in which human recognition and value, epidermalized because "we are used to thinking of the skin, the surface of the body, as the baseline for what it means to be human," are bartered. [21] [8] In Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Sage Publications, 1996),PhilipGoodchild elaborates the distinction between high, low and surface experiences of sexual pleasure.Deleuze and Guattari characterize a "sexuality of the depths" as lustful, carnal and fetishistic; "deep" sexualities contrast with "high" sexualities because the latter "aims to re-create the moral ideals of the Oedipal family or the subjectified couple, [22] founded on promises, principles, and mutual expectation." [23] Notably, both are heteronormative fantasies and tautologically fail to generate jouissance: a petitmort that shatters and radically disorganizes the self, making the parts of one's being (in the black instance, always already atomized) available to re-organization but not (in Fanon's formulation) to resedimentation.…”

“…[33] [10] Stephens cites Merleau-Ponty in her study of black performance cultures to position "the touch and the gaze as interacting in a reversible, reflecting relationship to each other...a 'double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible;'" but she leans on Fanon, whose epidermal and historical-racial schemas counter Merleau-Ponty's corporeal schema, to clarify that "the intercorporeal drive seeks to touch (upon) the sensational body," or the 'I' that feels, "rather than the body constructed by the signifier," or the 'I' that is. [34] Which is to say, her study intervenes in the chronopolitical if arbitrary distinction between sensational flesh and signifying skin; she begins from a black new materialist perspective that "the outline of the skin is not felt as a smooth and straight surface" confining matter in place, because "there are no sharp borderlines between the outside world and the body." [35] I shift the ground of Stephens' intervention slightly to argue that interracial sex acts function as masochistic exchanges in which participants of color martyr the black or brown 'I' that is to clear surface room for the sentient and white 'I' that feels.…”