Inked Bodies: Putting the Corporeal Back Into Cultural Discourse

“There are, however, several difficulties with characterizing practices such as tattooing and piercing as fashionable per se, in part because of their status as permanent, or ‘semi-permanent’, modifications to the body (Curry, 1993: 79).” 

“At the bank I touched the place where she had struck a match.  There-on my fingertips.  Wonderful.  A small black streak.  Oh streak, your name is Claudia.  Oh Claudia, I love you.  I shall kiss you to prove my devotion.  I looked about.  No one was in sight for two blocks.  I reached over and kissed the black streak… 

…Then I was horrified to notice that the whole of the bank front was covered with the stripes and streaks of thousands and thousands of matches.  I spat in disgust.” (Fante – Road to Los Angeles 127).  

To put the body back into cultural and social discourse is to realize, at once, what is often denied it.  As Brian Rotman suggests, the body is denigrated in a long tradition of discourse concerning the mind and body.  More specifically, he argues, that the mind is often disembodied, as it is portrayed as something entirely separable from the body.  But, like God, a mind without a body, without the prosodic, is denied a certain physicality.   

Such is the move of most discourse on the cultural phenomena that have arisen and continue to arise.  “Revolutions” and demonstrations are often considered by means of the “ideology” of the revolution.  The people of a particular movement are always spoken of in a means which continues to perpetuate the separation of body and mind.  The body is absent in much of this discourse, and debased, in that it is only ever attributed a sexuality, or mortality.  The body is only briefly realized in the death of a famous musician (Hendrix, Joplin, Presley, etc.).  Even here, despite the image, which Rotman might laud, the body is over coded by a certain separation.  The mind is always, and inevitably, reasserted.  But, what of the body?  What of the mind as part of the body?  What of the body as a point of visualization?  What of restoring the body to the discourse on revolutions on cultural movements?  For, isn’t it the body and the mind that are inflicted in conjunction by opiates and liquor?  Isn’t it the body which moves in begotten dance steps across the crowded Bohemian National House floor?  Isn’t it the body which slips onto the dance floor, and into “revolutionary” women?  And, more in the vein of this particular segment, what of the bodies that we write upon?