Tattooed Bodies: Theorizing Body Inscription Across Disciplines and Cultures

ISBN-13: 9783030865689 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 358 str.

James Martell; Erik Larsen

Opis

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?

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction: “Totem and Tattoo”

Part I: TATTOOING (AS) ART

Chapter 2: “A Medium, Not a Phenomenon: An Argument for An Art Historical Approach to Western Tattooing”

Chapter 3: “Contemporary Western Tattooing as an Inherently Collaborative Practice: The Contingent Authorial Input and Operational Mode of the Tattooist”

Chapter 4: “Branch out, Perform, Interlink: Reading Tattoos as Soma-Hypertexts in Shelley Jackson's SKIN and Skin Motion's Soundwave Tattoos”

Part II: TRANSCULTURAL TATTOOING

Chapter 5: “Hüh tu pu/ To Mark with Tattoo: Chen Naga Tiger-Spirit Tattoos and Indigenous Ontologies in Northeast India”

Chapter 6: “The last generation of tattooed Bedouin women in southern Jordan: When tradition and climate change collided in Wadi Rum”

Chapter 7: “Tattoos, ‘Tattoos,’ Vikings, ‘Vikings,’ and Vikings”

Part III: TATTOOING THE POLITICAL BODY

Chapter 8: “Herman Melville’s (Un)Readables: Tattoos”

Chapter 9: “The Life of the Tattoo: Subcutaneous Surveillances and the Economy of the Stigmatization”

Chapter 10: “Democratic Hieroglyphs: On the People’s Indecipherable Flesh in Moby-Dick”

Part IV: TATTOOING LITERATURES

Chapter 11: “Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy: Writing Out the Body Between Grammatology and Exscription”

Chapter 12: “Tattooing Terminable Interminable: Psychoanalysis, Corporeal Marking and Literature”

Chapter 13: “Effluvial Exhalations: Genet’s ontological quandary”

Chapter 14: “Limited Ink: Of Repressence, Inkorporation, and Marineation”

Chapter 15: “Derrida & Deleuze as Tattooed Savages”

O autorze

James Martell is Associate Professor of French at Lyon College, USA. He specializes in French literary theory, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Erik Larsen is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester, USA. He writes and teaches about biopolitics, medicine and literature, and American culture.

Blurb

“Tattooed Bodies—apart from often being an exemplary model of Continental philosophy—is a groundbreaking contribution to tattoo studies that shows us how tattooing, when taken seriously, can open up the meanings of works of art, literature, film, and theory itself in unexpected ways. For those who have already been thinking about the meaning of “the tattoo,” this collection of essays will greatly expand possibilities of inquiry. For those who are new to the field, several essays act simply as excellent primers on how to undertake deconstructive, anthropological, aesthetic analysis in general offering up scholarly, nuanced investigations of texts without indulging in exclusionary jargon.”

-Danielle Meijer, DePaul University

"What is a tattoo? Associated in the past with criminals and degenerates, tattoos have become high fashion in the 21^st century.  In this collection, leading scholars speculate about the nature and implications of these bodily inscriptions. Are they social or antisocial? Conformist or rebellious? Decorative or disfiguring?  Atavistic or futuristic? How do they relate to other scars, such as the navel as the mark of our maternal origin?  By opening up these questions and many more, the essays in this volume show how the tattoo challenges the distinction between word and flesh, self and society, life and death.”

-Maud Ellmann, University of Chicago

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 perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos across cultures. Essays explore tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while interpreting tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.

James Martell is Associate Professor of French at Lyon College, USA.

Erik Larsen is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester, USA.