Making Skin Visible

How Consumer Culture Imagery Commodifies Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID3809224
AuthorsJanet Borgerson (0009-0004-7892-5123, City, University of London), Janet L Borgerson (City, University of London), Jonathan E Schroeder (0000-0003-3337-1310, Rochester Institute of Technology, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume24
Issue1-2
Pages103-136
Publication date2018-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBody & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1357-034X • E-ISSN: 1460-3632
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1357034x18760987
OpenAlexW2789714492
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited59

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but 'blank' backgrounds or 'neutral' meaning spaces. We analyse how skin 'appears' to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices

Aesthetics · Art · Commodification · Epistemology · Ideology · Political science · Semiotics · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Media, Gender, and Advertising

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