Cristina is author of Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory, which adopts an abolitionist approach to the study of medical science and the emergence of modern bioethics in the context of mass incarceration. Her research and teaching sits at the intersections of health, the life sciences, and state violence, and her new work examines affect and the Anthropocene.
BAR Book Forum: Cristina M. Visperas’s Book, “Skin Theory”
Racial Ecologies: From Captivity to the Family
Skin color holds both cultural and scientific significance, demonstrating the primacy of vision (as well as touch) in the sensing and making sense of the largest organ of the human body. In a nation founded on racial capitalism like the US, for example, skin color has historically been used to classify and organize human beings into hierarchies of value. Sometimes, these hierarchies found legitimacy in biological theories of racial differences, theories positioning those with darker skin and hair as anatomically and physiologically inferior – not simply different, but lesser, and where meanings projected onto bodily surfaces, too, came to shape those about deeper recesses of the body (and psyche). But sometimes, these hierarchies found legitimacy in less explicit or direct ways of talking about difference: the disposability or usability of racialized bodies for certain ends. Medical science experiments in US prisons during the postwar period exemplify both kinds of logic, perpetuating the medical exploitation of captive populations since chattel slavery. More recently, genetic ancestry technologies have been lauded as definitively debunking these racial myths even as, and this is key, they reproduce racial categories to do so. Mapping prehistoric human migration patterns that reveal evolutionary pressures for skin color changes, such technologies have been critiqued as postracial, recuperating the universal, singular human family ostensibly belied by skin color. Or, whereas skin color once indexed biological difference, it now signifies the diversity of our species.