Second Skin : Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire

In 21st century commodity culture, we are all, in a sense, fetishists. We think of fetish as existing ‘behind closed doors’, yet it plays out in clubs rammed with hundreds of bodies, on live streams for tens of thousands of subscribers, and in the pages of Vogue and on high fashion runways.

In Second Skin, Anastasiia Fedorova takes us on a tour through different fetishes – leather, latex, cars, medical gloves, and the dominatrix, to name a few.

She draws on interviews with her fellow fetishists and kinksters, giving us a peak behind the curtain into a community that is both misrepresented and relentlessly  appropriated in the mainstream. Brave and searching, Second Skin reveals how what we deem ‘taboo’ is never static, while asking: do we have the courage to look at these desires directly, and express them unapologetically?

Both a personal story of coming to terms with her own sexuality, and a searching work of social history and reportage, Second Skin brings subversive desire out of the dungeon and into the light.

About our speaker: ANASTASIIA FEDOROVA is a writer and curator. She has written for DAZED, i-D, Freize, Vogue and the Guardian, among other publications, and has collaborated with kink and fetish institutions, including the UK Leather and Fetish Archive and Klub Verboten. She is also one third of the team behind HÄN, a contemporary queer archive dedicated to lesbian, dyke, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming creative expression. Second Skin is her first book.

Part of Independent Bookshop Week celebrations at Lighthouse, a pairing with indie press Granta!