Mindful Skin: Disability and the Ethics of Touch in Life Writing

ABSTRACT

This essay theorises skin as a potential meeting point of Buddhist mindfulness, disability activism, and an ethics of care. The phenomenological turn in disability studies has redirected attention from social conditions to the materiality of the body, restoring discussions of pain, sexuality, and caregiving to disability praxis. Yet metaphors of health continue to suffuse philosophical work on moral agency and touch, and explanations of mindfulness tend similarly to assume a non-disabled physicality in their discussions of mind-body interaction. At the same time, little of the work on touch in the context of disability and pain focuses on the precise moment of contact between subjects. How, then, do we think and write about the symbolic import, and the psychotherapeutic value, of skin touching skin? Mindfulness practice begins with the belief that skin mediates between bodily and emotional states. If we take seriously the kind of skin-to-skin connection that might occur in instances where someone is in pain or has a disability, we might arrive at a more nuanced and sustainable notion of embodiment as the site of emotion, intelligence, and change. This in turn might foster ways of understanding ourselves as interdependent and corporeal beings, introducing the intensities and transformative potential of physical touch to the ways in which we conceptualise subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability studies
• skin
• Buddhism
• mindfulness
• touch
• phenomenological theories of disability
• embodiment
• relationality
• moral agency
• mind-body theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Disability phenomenologists, scholars of embodiment, and ethicists of touch might pick up where Price and Shildrick leave off, with the question of what happens when the sensation of touch—which they refer to as ‘our most basic’ (71)—is damaged or absent altogether and one person actually can't feel the touch of another, wanted or otherwise. Some attention has been paid in the pain literature to congenital analgesia (see, for example, Wall), but when the ability to sense pain is linked to bodily integrity and by extension to a certain sense of self (see my brief discussion of this tendency in Hurt and Pain [66, 88 n. 11]), the absence of a certain type of feeling becomes dangerously associated with a diminishment of just the sort of viable subjectivity Price and Shildrick seek to ensure in the dynamics of touch. Though they invoke, for example, ‘a hand that has temporarily lost sensation’ (72; my italics), they do not investigate one for whom that loss is permanent. This would seem a provocative and important next phase of theorising and research.

2. The literature is voluminous. A simple search at ScienceDirect.com of scientific articles covering ‘the effect of touch on pain’ produced over 40,000 results.

3. For a heavily Freudian interpretation of the mind-skin connection, see Ulnik. His final chapter concerns psoriasis specifically.

4. For a fuller discussion of this text, see Mintz, Hurt and Pain, chapter 2, ‘Our Stories, Our Pain: Autobiographical Utterances.’