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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?
List of contents
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".
About the author
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.
