Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

by Dorothy Allison

A fantastic collection of essays, autobiographical narratives, and performance pieces, including updated versions of earlier groundbreaking material with provocative new work by the lifelong feminist activist, controversial sex radical, and Southern expatriate writer with an attitude who brought us Bastard Out of Carolina, Trash, and The Women Who Hate Me. Funny, passionate, and compelling prose on what it means to be queer and happy about it in a world that is still arguing about what it means to be queer.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Queer, LGBT, Memoir, Class

261 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Dorothy Earlene Allison was an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focused on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She was a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Reviews

[Lea Saurusrex · Rating 5 out of 5]

J’ai pris tout mon temps mais c’est parce qu’il le fallait.

Chacun des textes m’a parlé d’une façon ou d’une autre et m’a pressé le cœur comme une éponge. Je finissais chaque essai avec l’impression de sortir d’un bain : à la fois la même qu’avant mais différente, mes soucis toujours présents mais mes pensées orientées ailleurs.

Je suis contente de l’avoir découvert à mon âge, j’aurais aimé le découvrir plus tôt, je pense que j’y trouverai encore d’autres choses plus tard. En tout cas, celui-ci il entre dans ma bibliothèque et il y reste.

[Caitlin Constantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, don't do as I did and read this all at once. I did, and after a while, I was like, Okay, I get it, you went to a lot of meetings and built bookshelves at the women's center and like butch women who will dominate you. That kind of exasperation isn't really fair, because this is a collection of autobiographical essays written over Allison's career, and as anyone who has ever engaged in autobiographical writing knows, you are kind of limited in your material.

Aside from that I was struck by how emotional and powerful her writing is. I particularly liked her writing about her background as a poor Southern white lesbian, and how all of those aspects of her identity often clashed with each other and with the world around her. That she has finally been able to come to some sort of peace with herself and the world around her is so inspiring to me.

I also really enjoyed her writing on writing and literature. I am a sucker for that kind of writing, because as someone who is passionate about both things and has been her entire life, I really find myself having strong opinions and the ability to relate to others with strong opinions.

All in all, essential reading for anyone with any kind of passion for social justice and a love for humanity.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

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Sorti en 1994 chez Firebrand Books, une maison d'édition lesbienne féministe, traduit en français par Nicolas Milon chez Balland en 1999, c'est par sa réédition chez Cambourakis en 2015 que je l'ai personnellement découvert. Sans connaître Dorothy Allison, je l'ai acheté pour sa couverture, et surtout pour son sous-titre : "À propos de sexe, de classe et de littérature". Il y a tout ça et bien plus dans ce recueil de 24 essais, où l'autrice nous raconte la pauvreté blanche du Sud des États-Unis, les sex wars du féminisme américain, la culture butch/fem, et l'écriture pour survivre. L'écriture de Dorothy Allison est percutante, elle est belle sans rien enjoliver, c'est une écriture de la vérité.

À chaque relecture, j'y trouve quelque chose de différent. Je dois beaucoup à Dorothy Allison.

[Deschardons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je pense que c’est littéralement un des livres les plus importants de ma vie, alors que nos vies sont si éloignées. Tout est si humain dans ces essais, vibrant, épatant, cruel, fort. Elle émet le souhait que ses écrits changent le monde de ceux qui les lisent et c’est absolument ce qu’il se passe pour moi, chaque fois que j’ai refermé ce livre après en avoir lu quelques pages, le monde prenait une texture plus brillante et plus forte.
Je l’ai terminé aujourd’hui et je crois que je suis bizarrement plus belle après l’avoir lu, et ce n’est pas seulement parce que je suis allée chez le coiffeur hier et que j’ai mis du rouge à lèvres.

[Sésame · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'ai du mal à noter un livre aussi personnel, ma note reflète donc vraiment mon expérience de lecture plus que la qualité du livre, qui est vraiment très bon. C'était une lecture très stimulante mais marquée par des longueurs et des moments où je n'arrivais plus à m'intéresser aux textes.

Les textes de Dorothy Allison ont beaucoup de grandes qualités. D'abord une écriture fine et imagée, qui lui donne une force conceptuelle sans jamais tomber dans le trop de complexité. Ensuite, cette capacité à tenir une ligne de crête ou je n'étais jamais complètement d'accord, et jamais complètement en désaccord avec rlle. Ça à rendu cette lecture très réflexive pour moi et c'est ce que je crois que j'ai le plus apprécié. J'ai l'habitude de me fondre dans les arguments des auteurices que je lis, pour comprendre pleinement leur logique, et faire le travail critique de ce que j'ai lu après. Ici j'étais en permanence en questionnement et en réflexion au fil des lignes, grâce à ce petit décalage. Je pense particulièrement au texte "les lesbiennes conceptuelles" qui a nourri ces derniers jours beaucoup de réflexions et de discussions avec les lesbiennes de ma vie.

Les longueurs que j'ai pu ressentir à la lecture ne sont pas du tout imputables à la qualité du livre, mais plutôt à ses thèmes de prédilection, un peu décalé des miens (c'était attendu évidemment comme c'est littéralement dans le titre mdr). Les textes sur la sexualité m'ont parfois touché, mais je crois que son parcours, et la place de la sexualité dans sa vie, sont trop différent du mien. C'est à peu près la même chose pour les textes sur la littérature. Je me suis construite dans un rapport trop critique aux prétentions révolutionnaires des pratiques artistiques pour réussir à être touchée par le rapport très intense qu'elle entretient avec l'écriture. Au final j'ai donc surtout apprécié les textes qui parlaient des tensions dans les mouvements féministes de l'époque, autour des sex wars, du lesbianisme politique, et les textes sur son rapport à sa famille.

Pour conclure, je crois que comme beaucoup ici le suggèrent, c'est effectivement un livre qui se grignote mieux qu'il ne se dévore. Cela m'aurait certainement aidée de lire les textes séparément les uns des autres dans le temps. Malheureusement ce n'est pas du tout une manière de lire qui me convient, j'ai besoin de terminer un livre quand je l'ai commencé pour pouvoir passer à une autre lecture.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reexperiencing a book more than a decade later in the audible format, seems to be an increasingly common habit of mine. This is a book that I wish could be experienced by many people straight and gay. It puts us straight people into the life and experience of a lesbian world better than any other book that I have ever read. Not that I have very much experience with those type of books.
_______________
This is Ms. Allison’s fourth book. She has been a five star writer for me so far having read two of her books. But, considering her other autobiographical writing, I am interested to see what the Non-fiction label means with Skin. There are 24 “essays, autobiographical narratives and performance pieces” in this book. That’s what they are called on the back cover.

Skin was published in 1994. She was 45 at that time.

The author probes her experience of being a lifelong feminist activist, a controversial sex radical, and a Southern expatriate.

So, let’s see what is in this book. I would like to think that Dorothy felt pretty good about her writing as this book came out. Bastard Out of Carolina had been published a couple of years earlier and was an immediate critical success. Just for starters, I can’t help but like a woman who calls herself queer. So she knows she is a poor queer and that isn’t part of the entitled mainstream. She had spent her entire life being the “they” rather than the “we”.

When I was a young teenager, reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair made me want to try to change the world. It seems quite possible that Dorothy Allison would be my Upton Sinclair of the 21st century. She can get me going and ready to face all foes.

Everything that Dorothy Allison writes tells us about her.

I had believed everything Bertha Harris had said about the process and importance of writing. But if everything was connected, and writing well required the kind of self-knowledge and naked revelation she implied, then writing was too dangerous for me. I could not go that naked in the world. I stopped writing for six months. When I started again, I did it knowing what was necessary. Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page. If writing was dangerous, lying was deadly, and only through writing things out would I discover where my real fears were, my layered network of careful lies and secrets. Whether I published or not was unimportant. What mattered was the act of self-discovery, self-revelation. Who was I and what had happened to me? In the most curious way, I have only learned what I know through writing fiction. What I have been able to imagine has shaped what I know and revealed to me what I truly fear and desire.

She has given you – for free – a summary of how she approaches writing. Through her imagination she finds the truths of her life. Take the time to read the entire book; she has overcome her fear to write it. The greatest compliment that you can give this writer is to read her book.

Sex is a central issue of feminism for Ms. Allison. And silence is the best ally of those who want to keep the lesbian feminist community powerless. Sex is one of the arenas where she is most controversial even within the lesbian world. She believes that pornography is not the enemy and monogamy is not the ideal.

…the preachers, psychologists, and politicians who want us to be silent, frightened women they can control are not avoiding the issue of sex, the naming of deviants, the attacks on us as queers and perverts and immoral individuals. And it is as individuals that we are most vulnerable to them: individual lesbian mothers fighting for their children, individual lesbian teachers demanding their right to do the work they love, and individual lesbian citizens who want to live as freely and happily as their neighbors, whether they wear leather or all-cotton clothes, keep compost heaps or drive motorcycles, live with one woman for thirty years or treat sex as a sport and are always in pursuit of their personal best. All of us are vulnerable to individual attack. Sex is still the favorite subject of demagogues – they know how vulnerable we are.

She says it is her right to be obscene, to be irreverent, to be a loud dyke, to love and be loved as she wants, as she desires. Her goal is not to be politically correct but to be what she is. You do not need to read “The Theory and Practice of the Strap-on Dildo” but you should be able to if you want. The sex in this book is a little too graphic for me. But enlightening to someone who knows hardly anything about sex between consenting women.

Dorothy Allison is a working class lesbian who is determinedly not the same as a political or theoretical lesbian.

The theoretical lesbian was everywhere all through the eighties, and a lot of times I could have sworn she was straight. Speaking on college campuses, identifying myself as a feminist and a lesbian but not an anti-pornography activist, I kept running into young women who knew who the lesbian was. The lesbian was the advanced feminist, the rare and special being endowed with social insight and political grace. I argued that there was a gap between their theory and my reality – that there were lots of lesbians who fucked around, read pornography, voted Republican (a few anyway), and didn’t give a damn about the National Organization for Women. The lesbian you’re talking about, I would try to explain, is the rage of all women, perhaps, but the lust of few. Real lesbians are not theoretical constructs. We have our own history, our own issues and agendas, and complicated sex lives, completely separate from heterosexuality, and just as embattled and difficult for straight society to accept as they ever were.

Allison devotes some fascinating words to her involvement and evolvement with the publishing industry including mainstream publishers and her struggle to finish writing Bastard Out of Carolina.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying : her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. The telling the truth – your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own – was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts. Like Kate Millett, I knew that what I wanted to do as a lesbian and a feminist writer was to remake the world into a place where the truth would be hallowed, not held in contempt, where silence would be impossible.

You might think that I might as well just quote the entire book! And, it is true, there is so much of it that deserves to be quoted. I guess that is one way I am making the recommendation that you read Skin. It says so much.

Allison finally comes through with the answer to ‘fact or fiction?’ It is probably the answer you have been expecting all along.

The fiction I write … is never wholly fictive. I change things. I lie. I embroider, make over, and reuse the truth of my life, my family, lovers, and friends. Acknowledging this, I make no apologies, knowing that what I create is as crafted and deliberate as the work of any other poet, novelist, or short story writer. I choose what to tell and what to conceal. I design and calculate the impact I want to have. When I sit down to make my stories I know very well that I want to take the reader by the throat, break her heart, and heal it again. With that intention I cannot sort out myself, say this part is for the theorist, this for the poet, this for the editor, and this for the wayward ethnographer who only wants to document my experience.

Sometimes when I am reading a book I wonder about the politics of the author. Usually I don’t know much other than what you can extract directly from the book. That is why I like to occasionally read a biography or autobiography. (I have read a lot about the lives of J.D. Salinger and Joyce Carol Oates and Eudora Welty and Michael Harrington.) With Allison you don’t have to wonder. She tells you a lot about her background and beliefs in this book as well as in Trash. And it is not hard to figure out that Bastard is semiautobiographical. Eventually I expect to read all her books and she will easily be the author I know the most about through self-disclosure.

Dorothy Allison looks back nostalgically to the places she grew up. It must be something in people to be able to look back wistfully on a past that they have described so horrifically.

I become again eight years old, running with my cousins, canvas shoes squeaking in the muck, and the sounds of the shoes pulling free echoing the frogs and crickets and fast-moving night birds. The sky above us filters pink and purple. …It is a dream full of safety, love, sheer physical pleasure, and the scent of a ripe and beautiful landscape, a landscape that has all but disappeared.

These words appeared in a benefit collection of writing for the Last Great Places Project of the Nature Conservancy. Maybe this is the place where the phrase “indomitable spirit” is apt.

At the point where the book seemed fixed on descriptions of lesbian sex, I considered giving it 4.75 stars. But Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature gets better and better as you read on. Dorothy Allison has the ability to immerse you in a story and to understand her experience. She is a marvelous storyteller, but the fact is that many her stories are painful. Her life has sometimes been brutal and you experience that through her writing.

I discovered Dorothy Allison through the GR book group On the Southern Literary Trail http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6.... Thanks to the people who started that group. It has introduced me to more than several Southern authors and has wonderfully broadened my outlook as a transplant to the South.

This is the third five star book I have read by Dorothy Allison. I am immediately moving on to the short work Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.

[Floflyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

j'avais adoré la fiction écrite par Dorothy Allison, j'ai tout autant aimé ses essais. (review peu utile mais j'ai la flemme)

[Fei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super collection de textes!
(J'ai encore plus envie de lire l'histoire de Bone et ses autres livres maintenant)

[Eva Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

beaucoup de temps pour oser emprunter ce livre à la bibliothèque, beaucoup de temps pour oser le lire dans ma pile, puis le continuer et le finir. Incroyablement puissant. Une personne ici dit qu’elle se sent plus belle après avoir fini ce livre, c’est un peu ça aussi pour moi: je me sens à fleur de peau (bravo les lesbiennes)

[prisca💋 · Rating 4 out of 5]

je ne suis tellement pas d’accord avec ce qui est dit à propos du sexe, mais le reste pour mieux est tellement puissant et révélateur. Ce qu’elle raconte sur sa famille, l’inceste et la littérature est juste magnifique.

[a.novel.femme · Rating 5 out of 5]

having gone to an undergrad institution that prized itself on the humanities and majored in american literature and womens studies (much to the horror of my parents, who couldnt understand how those degrees would lead to an optometry career), i spent an insane amount of time between the ages of 18 - 21 talking about all the -isms and -obias that plague both this nation and the world. and yet there was a disquieting silence surrounding class, and to this i am not sure if this is because of the classes i chose to take, or because i just tuned out.

in any case, reading skin: talking about sex, class and literature was a monumental experience for me; when allison speaks of the mythical poor and of being an academic, i almost bristled with the tension that she was speaking of, since that tension is something that i have felt all of my life. to grow up working class, to aspire for academic satisfaction, and to be human, and not some kind of angel living in the streets, paired with the idea of literature as both salvation and damnation, no one id read to that point had articulated that existence so amazingly as allison has in this collection of essays.

her novels are not as strong as her non-fiction, sadly, but allison is someone i find deeply moving in her unaffected style and presentation.

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Au début je me suis dit... cette traduction française ne rend probablement pas justice aux mots de l'autrice. Au début je me suis dit... ces histoires ne me ressemblent pas. Et puis... Ces mots comme des éclairs qui foudroient et illuminent. Et puis... Ces sensations et vécus qui prennent forme sur la page. Un livre merveilleux, pour les meufs qui aiment le cul avec les meufs, pour les personnes qui sont pauvres, pour les personnes qui ont été abusées, pour les personnes qui ne savent pas comment elles ont fait mais qui sont encore là, à rire aux étoiles, à aimer férocement. Ce bouquin brise le coeur et le soulage, selon le souhait de l'autrice. Merci, pour ces mots jamais prononcés, pour ces sentiments jamais reconnus, pour ces envies toujours invisibilisées.

[math · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je pensais me lancer dans une lecture laborieuse et finalement il m’a fallu à peine 24h pour parcourir ces 400 pages, c’était passionnant. Tout dans ses mots est si vibrant, puissant et profondément humain, qu’il s’agisse de sa relation aux femmes de sa famille, de ses réflexions sur la sexualité, le lesbianisme, ou sur le pouvoir transformateur de l’écriture. Bref on comprend rapidement pourquoi c’est une référence de la littérature féministe et lesbienne.

[Catherine Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un coup de coeur comme il s'en fait peu, le genre de livre qu'on a envie de posséder en plusieurs exemplaires pour le prêter à tout le monde. Dorothy Allison met un baume extra-puissant sur mes plaies, mes réflexions politiques, mes désirs. À lire, relire, tout le temps, sans arrêt.

[Shan · Rating 5 out of 5]

read in my feminist theory class in college and 5 stars ALONE for creating a situation where a girl had to read her essay on butch lesbians and dildos out loud in class

[roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

pas pour être dramatique ou quoi mais je pense que ça a changé ma vie

[Zélicoptère · Rating 5 out of 5]

C'est très souvent que quand je termine une lecture je suis automatiquement beaucoup trop enthousiaste, et que j'en parle comme si c'était la meilleure chose que j'avais jamais lu. Avec le temps, mes souvenirs s'affaissent et c'est comme ça que je réalise si des textes ont été vraiment marquants ou pas au-delà de la sensation initiale qu'ils m'ont procuré. Je ne suis pas devin, mais je pense que je vais garder Peau en tête pendant très longtemps. Je regrette pas de pas l'avoir lu avant parce que je pense que j'étais clairement pas prête.
+ je suis d'accord avec toutes les reviews qui disent que c'est un texte qui doit se digérer, j'ai mis un mois pour le lire et c'était parfait de le garder dans mon sac et dans mes pensées tout ce temps.

[Gaïa · Rating 4 out of 5]

certains essais m'ont plus marqué que d'autres, mais ce fut une lecture instructive

[Veronica Sirotic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Allison is one bad b***!! I want to be her and write like her. Love big bad lesbian lit.

[Andrew Bishop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have to say that this is one of the best essay collections I've read. Certainly it stands out in this way among essay collections of lesbian non-fiction writing and radical, class-critical feminism. Allison accomplishes her usual muscular-femme honesty and bullshit-cutting style with a graceful method not unlike her famed novels and short fiction. Here, she addresses arenas of the political-through-the-personal in stories of her life experiences. Perhaps it is the autobiographical nature of her fiction style that makes it so powerful but, here, it is the stylistic nature of the essay format that captures me.

She addresses topics as varied as the gender dynamics of a child's sexuality raised on shooting guns; mitigating moments of pain and the impossibility of understanding between intimate partners; or the challenges of being an upwardly-bound lesbian artist with a rural working-class background moving into an urban working-class neighborhood with neighbors that enjoy 'traditional' sexuality.

Unlike the dry, if at times essential, tone and frame of much radical essay writing, Allison is unique in her contribution to a transgressive (post)feminist politics that easily welcomes and accesses an unforgiving battle cry for sexual freedom and transhuman diversity. The potential that she offers up to the palette of human complexity of emotion and intimate interpersonal communication was, for me, breathtaking at times. This collection is highly recommended for the reader who revels in works that challenge them to consider the diversity of conceptions of what it can mean to have relationships with other humans.

[Toni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Allison's essays are passionate and bold, if not a bit earnest. Much of what has been compiled
In this essay collection feels a bit dated, particularly in regard to issues of sex positivity and lesbian identity (I confess to cringing at the first of many mentions of her "lesbian feminist collective" because it all seemed so heavy handed and old school). Allison is probably thrilled that one would feel that because it means progress has been made in the revolution she has so passionately fought for all of her adult life. Sadly, some of the issues that she deals with, namely those of class, are less changed and more poignant than ever. One wonders if a young woman in the position she was in would even be able to move forward in this age where class divisions are more deeply entrenched and upward mobility is more of a populist talking point than a reality.

The essays are indeed about sex, class and literature. In general, I loved the essays about sex and class. They were bold and biting with honesty. I was less taken by the essays on writing and literature. This has much to do with personal preference. I am not a fan of writers describing their craft particularly when, like Allison, it becomes all too mired in self aggrandizement and diatribes on the power of honest writing to save the world. I get...I get...you bravely wield your pen in the name of revolution.

When not too navel gazing, Allison's essays are fantastic.

[Ingrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je suis légèrement déçue de ce recueil, je pense que j'avais des attentes trop grandes après en avoir entendu un extrait il y a quelques mois dans le podcast "Un podcast à soi".
L'écriture de D. Allison est belle et fluide, souvent abrupte dans sa manière de dire les choses, mais mon intérêt pour les différents textes variait énormément selon les thématiques abordées.

Les textes que j'ai préféré sont tous ceux qui abordent la classe et son histoire familiale : ce sont les plus intenses, ceux qui ont le plus résonnés en moi. Ca concerne surtout les essais "Contexte", "Une question de classe" et "La peau, là où elle me touche", qui ont fait le plus écho en moi et font vraiment monter les larmes aux yeux par moment. Ceux sur sa vision de l'écriture et la littérature sont également intéressants.

Les nombreux textes où elle aborde le sexe m'ont un peu agacée (même si c'était un peu le sous-titre du livre!), leur aspect souvent très cru et sans fard m'ont déplu, mais c'est plutôt une question de goût personnel.

[Trux · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a challenge to find books that are relevant to me as a self-publishing internet sex worker and feminist with white trash roots so this book was a huge find for me. While much of it's written from the rawness of Dorothy Allison's personal experiences, she goes way beyond herself to explore sexual, political and artistic issues in ways that are credible and hook you with intimacy while being rational, complex, and critical.

I have a hard time describing how important this book is to me on a personal level without accidentally belittling the scope and value of this collection of essays. It's not some soft "I'm every woman" bundle of affirmations, it's harder (more critical) than that (while also proving that well-written critical thought can also be entertaining and personal) and comes from the perspective of being a social, sexual, political and economic outcast (exactly how I feel).

[Mag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Les textes de Dorothy sont toujours prenant et saisissant

[leslecturesdesophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incroyable ! Touchant aussi. Il m’emmène. Ce n’est pas de la fiction, pas tout à fait, mais c’est au sujet de la fiction même. De comment elle se tisse aussi, s’écrit.
Pas tout à fait non plus autobiographique, vraiment percutant. J’ai trouvé des passages qui semblaient donner des mots et une forme à des sensations, pensées qui me traversent et puis j’ai également été amenée à penser autrement, à remettre mon mode de pensée ou mes pensées à zéro, nourries d’un regard neuf et éclairant. Le tout avec beaucoup de douceur.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow ! j’ai adoré, c’est une sorte de très longue biographie en plusieurs essais différents et pourtant jamais redondants. C’est vraiment plusieurs reflexions super intéressantes autour du sexe, du genre et de la classe sociale. Le blemol serait pour moi la traduction qui as volontairement choisi d’enlever le fait que tout l’ouvrage était écrit en neutre….

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certaines nouvelles plus parlantes que d'autres mais dans l'ensemble très éclairantes

[Léo · Rating 4 out of 5]

J’ai pris du temps à le lire, mais c’est vraiment super intéressant, ça parle de tellement choses c’est fou, et les derniers chapitres m’ont vraiment touchéx et donnéx les larmes aux yeux

[Ludyvine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ma révélation de l’année.

[Milouch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ma boué de sauvetage de cette fin d'année