Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera

5. The Value of a Second Skin

« 125 »« 5 » The Value of a Second Skin If there is a relationship between socialism and homosexual liberation, perhaps this is it: an irritation of the skin. . . . Socialism, as an alternative to individualism politically and capitalism economically, must surely have as its ultimate objective the restitution of the joy of living we may have lost when we first picked up a tool. Toward what other objective is it worthy to strive? Perhaps the far horizon of lesbian and gay politics is a socialism of the skin. Tony Kushner, “A Socialism of the Skin” The principal marker of the untrainable subject is femininity. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism Thinking Identity as a Second Skin This chapter discusses the problem of value or, more specifically, the ways surplus value depends upon cultural value. I consider what it means to think of the cultural value adhering to social identities as a second skin that gets folded into the labor power workers exchange for a wage and is reproduced at home. Throughout this analysis the narratives of homosexual maquiladora workers who were leaders in campaigns for better wages and working conditions offer insights that flesh out an understanding of the process of abjection that identity formation entails. They shed light on the lived and contested value of gender and sexual identity as affect-laden culture that enhances the fundamental logic of capitalism, a logic that requires taking on and giving over a second skin. « 126 » The Value of a Second Skin In chapter 2, I explain that embodied sensations are made meaningful and come to have value through affect-culture. The ideological articulation of these values is a powerful component of the cultural material I call a subject’s “second skin,” a lucrative site where culture and economy meet. As a bodily organ, skin feels not only neurologically but also in the sense of feeling as thought that conveys the mind’s perceptions of the body. As the material surface of the body, skin mediates the interface between the corporeal and the psychic, the self and others.1 Skin is a sense organ that registers how we see and know the world affectively—for example, in shivers and sweat, goose bumps, tingles, blushes, or rashy outbreaks. Skin is also a vehicle for metaphors that connote well-being or distress, as in the expressions “feeling comfortable in your own skin” or “feeling like you want to jump out of your skin.” What the skin feels may also hover on the edge of intelligibility, as the meaning of a sensation registered in the skin can be unspeakable, an irritation for which you do not have a name. As I use the phrase “second skin,” it is a metonymy for identity understood as inseparable from the mattering maps of this body wrap of affect-culture. Neither the same as one’s physical skin nor ever lived entirely outside it, the second skin is a tissue of values that organizes sensations and affective intensities and integrates them into the representations and lived experience of who we are. These values circulate in signs that plot normative body maps along a differential grid of negative and positive categories that often conform to ideological norms. They are the fabric of meaning making and experience and are laden with affect, conveyed through discourse, image, gesture, tone, and touch. Second skins are also open to history, which means they are sites of struggle. The values inscribed in them are contested and therefore can change and be adjusted, even though they may be represented in the common sense as natural and universal. I borrow the phrase “second skin” from Second Skins, the title of a book by Jay Prosser on the body narratives of transsexuals. Prosser critiques the social constructionist paradigm that overtook theories of gender more than twenty years ago, a paradigm spurred on by the 1990 publication and reception of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. He contends that what is lost in this account of gender as a discursive The Value of a Second Skin « 127 » practice is the relation between psyche and body in shaping gender identity.2 I agree with Prosser’s contention that identity formation is always embodied and that a crucial component of the corporeal dimension of identity is the felt experience of who one is. This feeling is the effect of corporeal sensations and affective intensities, which are themselves the...