Skin Acts is an ambitious and well-researched study that anyone interested in the intersections of psychoanalysis and critical race theory should read. Michelle Ann Stephens analyzes the performances of four black male celebrities as metaphors for mass subject formation and race war in twenieth-century American culture. The bibliography of Skin Acts puts together a history of skin that Stephens unfolds in the introduction of the book, serving as a fascinating overview of the emerging field of Skin Studies. The book stages a conversation between Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Joan Copjec, and Brian Massumi, among others. This necessary work speaks back to the unexamined whiteness of mainstream psychoanalysis, while proposing a psychoanalytical interpretation of race as a discourse. The conceptual gem of the book is Stephens' appropriation of the Lacanian notion of invagination, which she opposes to the phallic as an emancipated form of social touch.