Review of "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" by Cristina Visperas (New York University Press)

Abstract

In "Skin Theory," Cristina Visperas identifies how the captive body in the postwar era is positioned as the ideal test subject. She does so through a thorough interrogation of Albert Kligman’s primarily dermatological human experiments at Holmesburg Prison to argue that racial capture enables the research enterprise. Suturing conversations in Black studies, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, each chapter reads objects in relation to these experiments to argue that grounding its brutal procedures was a visual culture enabled by the figurative uses of the skin.

Keywords

• anti-blackness
• race
• prison
• visual culture
• carcerality
• technoscience