Reviews: 12

[...]Skin avoids direct engagement with Baker's performances so as not to repeat the critical readings that it seeks to challenge, which polarize the dancer either as a fetish or as a feminist icon. [...]Skin also raises questions that remain largely unexplored, such as the ways in which Baker's relatively light skin tone and American identity further complicated simplistic definitions of racial otherness. Baker claimed on at least one occasion that her father was Spanish, and surrealist Michel Leiris suggested that Parisian audiences might not have embraced her so readily had her skin tone been darker.3Baker was a muse to leading Parisian designers, and another fascinating line of enquiry that could enhance Cheng's argument would be Baker's relationship with figures such as Paul Poiret, whose draping techniques and "exotic" themes were intended to both liberate and show off the previously corseted female body. [...]should not European middle-class women's imitation of Baker's image through clothing, hairstyles and tanning be recognized as "self-fetishizing" acts on a par with the artistic imaginings of their predominantly male contemporaries?