Tattooed Bodies

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?
"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. The necessarily interdisciplinary field of cultural studies reveals the depth and breadth of all forms of human art and experience. At its finest—as is the case with this book—it shows us that the meaning of a text, like the best ink, is not just skin deep."
- Danielle Meijer, DePaul University
"What is a tattoo? Associated in the past with criminals and degenerates, tattoos have become high fashion in the 21st 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