Tattoo Cultures

Catalog description

Images of tattooed, inscribed, and marked bodies abound in popular media, from television series to blogs, from performance art to popular literature. When the body becomes a canvas or text, this raises crucial questions about the definition and the reading of individual bodies and their ties to different categories, such as gender, race, culture, and society. This course we will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of body modification in different cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Course material will include texts, films, and artwork by Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lalla Essaydi, Peter Greenaway, Zhang Huan, Franz Kafka, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mirta Kupferminc, Christopher Nolan, Renata Salecl, Hortense Spillers, Qiu Zhijie, and others, as well as television series, internet forums, and other popular culture formats.