AustLit

'This article examines the complex and shifting appetites for meat and sex in Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin and the 2013 Jonathan Glazer film adaptation of the book. Although almost unrecognizable at the level of plot, this article argues that considering these texts together highlights their deep and unsettling rendering of misogyny in relation to the pleasures and perils of consumption. In engaging with the confronting and, at times, politically ambiguous treatment of consumption in these texts, this article offers a reading of the intersectional relationship between the oppression of women in a patriarchal society and the exploitation of nonhuman animals as a resource for human endeavors.' (Publication abstract)

'Sf might seem an odd genre in which to place documentary values, even though it has historically utilised principles of realism to enhance its verisimilitude.1 It characteristically prizes the fantastical, and Under the Skin is exemplary of the genre insofar as the unnamed alien protagonist scours the streets of Glasgow for male civilians to capture and process.The setting is portrayed with strategic familiarity - plainly dressed shoppers, indiscernible chatter, harsh fluorescent lighting and the recognisable signage of chain stores distinguish the space.Eight bespoke cameras were fitted into the front of the actress/ heroine's van - behind mirrors, headrests and vents - to document the pickups.Under the Skins marketing campaign participates in this destabilisation of Johansson's image by drawing the audience's attention to the presence of the real within the cruising scenes.'  (Publication abstract)

'An adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel about alien invasion that updates the scifi horror tradition of the 1970s in an art-cinema mode, Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013) offers a stellar example of the ‘monstrous’ as both figure and form. Generally speaking, the interstitiality of the ‘monstrous’ demands strategies grounded in the disconnection between categories (image and sound, diegetic and nondiegetic), some of which have become horror movie clichés. Under the Skin is no exception. Its aesthetics of instability, correlated to a ‘monstrous’ figure that casts a defamiliarizing gaze on our world before attempting to ‘become human’, produces a complex subtext on contemporary alienation and identity politics, that puts the viewer in a position where he or she must both take moral responsibility for the categories he or she constructs (such as the ’monstrous’), and experience the mysterious physicality at the core of life itself.' (Publication summary)

'In this essay, I argue that literature has been profoundly misunderstood by scholars of bioethics.

'Bioethicists in analyzing moral problems have often drawn upon literary texts as sources for “rich cases,” for they have long recognized that the traditional genre of the ethics case was limited in its portrayal of the complexity of the moral landscape of actual medical practice. This traditional utilization of literature in bioethics is critically examined by James Terry and Peter Williams in an essay published in Literature and Medicine: “Short stories and poems that are evocative, complex, and imaginatively challenging have been used to supplement or supplant the traditional case study as instruments for raising ethical issues. At best, these literary works more vividly present moral questions and even raise some kinds of issues that case studies leave out.” The real purpose of Terry and Williams’s essay is to sound an alarm on this casual, unreflective use of literature: while literary works may at first appear to furnish desirable descriptions of moral problems, they caution, these texts and bioethics cases have distinct, and at times divergent, goals.' (Publication abstract)