The essays collected in Tattooed Bodies draw on a range of theoretical paradigms and empirical knowledge to investigate tattoos, tattooing, and our complex relations with marks on skin. Engaging with diverse disciplinary perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the sheer diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos throughout history and across cultures. Essays explore conceptualizations of tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while utilizing theoretical perspectives to interpret tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others. Tattooed Bodies prompts readers to explore a few significant questions: Are tattoos unique phenomena or an art medium in need of special theoretical exploration? If so, what conceptual paradigms and theories might best shape our understanding of tattoos and their complex ubiquity in world cultures and histories?
Author(s): James Martell, Erik Larsen
Series: Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 376
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Totem and Tattoo
Bibliography
Part I: Tattooing (as) Art
Chapter 2: A Medium, Not a Phenomenon: An Argument for an Art-Historical Approach to Western Tattooing
Prologue
Introduction
Inserting Modes
Tattooing as a Verb
Tattooing in the Historiography of Art History
Methods
Tattooing in Its Visual Culture Contexts
Tattoo Artists as Authors
The Archival Lens Problem
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Contemporary Western Tattooing as an Inherently Collaborative Practice: The Contingent Authorial Input and Operational Mode of the Tattooist
The (In)visibility of Tattooing Practice and Practitioners in Academic Literature
The Processes of Tattoo Production
Consultation Process
Design Process
Preparation Process
Tattooing Process
The Contingent Operational Mode/Authorial Input of the Contemporary Western Tattooist
The Authorial Input of the Tattooist Operating as a Craftsperson
The Authorial Input of the Tattooist Operating as a Visual Artist
The Authorial Input of the Tattooist Operating as a Designer
Toward an Informed Understanding of the Collaborative Nature of Contemporary Western Tattooing
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Branch Out, Perform, Interlink: Reading Tattoos as Soma-hypertexts in Shelley Jackson’s SKIN and Skin Motion’s Soundwave Tattoos
The Body as a Medium: Soma-hypertexts and Tattoo Narratives
The Semiotic Body in Shelley Jackson’s SKIN
Soundwave Tattoos and the Experiences of Permanence and Transience Through Tattooing
Bibliography
Part II: Transcultural Tattooing
Chapter 5: Hüh tu pu/To Mark with Tattoo: Chen Naga Tiger-Spirit Tattoos and Indigenous Ontologies in Northeast India
The Chen Tattoo
The Tiger-Spirit Tattoo
In Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: The Last Generation of Tattooed Bedouin Women in Southern Jordan: When Tradition and Climate Change Collided in Wadi Rum
From Traditional to Taboo
Wadi Rum and Its Bedouin
Bedouin Female Tattooing: Tarfa and Bakheeta
Bakheeta and Tarfa34
Climate Change and the Unraveling of Washam
Deconstructing the Aftermath
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Tattoos, “Tattoos,” Vikings, “Vikings,” and Vikings
Enigma and Simulacrum
Metatexts and Fictionality
Bibliography
Part III: Tattooing the Political Body
Chapter 8: Herman Melville’s (Un)Readables: Tattoos
Introduction
Disrupting Conventional Readings of the Body
A Primal Scene of Reading
Ishmael’s Unconscious Chirography
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 9: The Life of the Tattoo: Subcutaneous Surveillances and the Economy of the Stigmatization
Biopolitical Tattooing
Discipline and Control
Dis-grace
Tattooing and Being Tattooed
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Democratic Hieroglyphs: On the People’s Indecipherable Flesh in Moby-Dick
Bibliography
Part IV: Tattooing Literatures
Chapter 11: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy: Writing Out the Body Between Grammatology and Exscription
Jacques Derrida and (Bio)grammatology
Jean-Luc Nancy and Exscription
To the Southern Reach
The Crawler
Making Sense of It All
In Conclusion (Beyond Allegory)
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Tattooing Terminable Interminable: Psychoanalysis, Corporeal Marking and Literature
Lacanian Tattoos: Writing on the Body
Tattooing as Marked Body in Literature: Toward Kafka and Beckett
Tattooing Punishment
Tattoo for the Species
Endless Ending
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Effluvial Exhalations: Genet’s Ontological Quandary
Bibliography
Chapter 14: Limited Ink: Of Repressence, Inkorporation, and Marineation
Where Film Grows Cryptcurrently
Cinematic Writing/Righting: Of Interpellation or Inkorporation?
Siedlung/Setzung: Of Housing Schemes and UnSettlements
Tattoo as Immuno-Suppressence and Cryptcurrency
Cryptcurrency and the Mise-En-Abyme of Tattoo and of the “DEM” Contained Therein
Bibliography
Chapter 15: Derrida and Deleuze as Tattooed Savages
Derrida’s Idiom: Scarified Dream of a Tattoo
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Eye for Tattoos
Immanent and Transcendent Beauty
Bibliography
Index
