‘You’re certainly Edward Sexton with that needle and thread’: Fantasies of sharing, tearing and wearing the ‘Common Skin’ in American Horror Story

Abstract

Abstract American Horror Story (AHS) (2011–present) revels in the production and presentation of ‘expanding and shrinking [skin] cut open and stitched together, oozing and contained’. Research has considered wounded skin(s), skin as the site of historical or psychical trauma, and skin as the signifier of changing status; however, Didier Anzieu’s theory of The Skin Ego ([1985] 2016) has yet to be applied. Skin is ‘figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary that divides the inside from the outside’, and thus ‘self’ from ‘other’, but in AHS this boundary is blurred in the recurrent image of the shared skin (the ‘Bloody Face’ mask in AHS: Asylum, conjoined twins in AHS: Freak Show, Queenie as human voodoo doll in AHS: Coven and Sally stitching herself into skin(s) in AHS: Hotel). Anzieu’s concept of the ‘common skin’ describes the infant’s fantasy of a shared skin with the (m)other. The rending of this imagined skin (a painful psychical experience) influences individuation and the formation of a skin-ego (on the mental plane). I suggest how this skin-based dynamic manifests on the physical plane (as inversion) predominantly in AHS: Asylum, but with recourse to AHS: Hotel and AHS: Coven. I argue that the characters who skin others, sew skins, stitch themselves into, wear, or deep-fat fry other people’s skins, represent reformulations and reconstitutions of the ‘common skin’, alluding to the assaulting/destroying function of the skin-ego, and attachment issues.