Access copy of my talk below.
Teaching Tattoos: A Body(mod)-Focused Approach to the Composition Classroom
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Menomenie, WI
May 21, 2015
I want to begin this series of provocations with a story, with last September, when I found myself in the ER with a ruptured appendix I’d lived with so long my pelvis “looked like a bomb had gone off.”
The head nurse gasped when she saw the scarifications on my thighs. Did you do that, she asked. I had it done, I said. She asked about my motivations, the artist’s credentials, how much it hurt; she wanted to code me E-980, for intended self-harm. My abdominal pain suddenly became suspect. She insisted on checking me over. What’s your tattoo, she asked when I turned around, and I launched into my standard lecture about panopticism, disciplinary power, and opportunities for rhetorical resistance located in the body. When I turned back around, there were multiple nurses behind me, nodding in understanding. The nurse erased the E-980, and we co-wrote the rest of my intake. Regarding my pain and my body symbols, nothing more was said.
It seems to me I avoided an institutional miscoding by using body symbols to challenge a reading of the body as static text, un-“sticking” a fetishized affect and dismantling a normative model of embodiment in the process. My body mods created a moment of “critical wonder,” which Sara Ahmed describes as embodied, extralinguistic, and involving “a reorientation of one’s relation to the world.” As Laura Micciche suggests, cultivating this sense of wonder—which insists on openness and a suspension of disbelief—is productive, generative work that can reinvigorate the practice of writing and of teaching writing. Asking students to “do emotion”—to employ and thereby grapple with extralinguistic body scripts, as seen in these images from a “hushed” class that relied on making and thinking through selfies—may be particularly useful in courses that attend to questions of identity politics and social justice, both of which concern how different embodiments shape social reality.
They may be near and dear to first-year writing, but these are not “safe” or “easy” subjects. I suggest that a body-mod-focused approach, additionally mediated by technology, can pave the way for the body-mindfulness necessary for difficult discussions of Otherness. This facilitates accessing physicality in the classroom; analyzing emotioned perspectives pertaining to a stigmatized embodied experience; and transforming emotional responses into critical insights. It also legitimates the messy, embodied nature of writing. Furthermore, technological interventions into and interactions with these body modifications permit us to view and manipulate these embodied experiences in ways that generate wonder, critique body norms, and shatter the notion of the contained, “perfect” text.
This presentation will unpack this by combining anecdotal evidence with scholarship, first examining body modifications and their classroom import, followed by affective economies and “doing emotion” through deep embodiment, and concluding with sample exercises and resulting student work.
Mainstream body mods include tattoos and most visible piercings. Nonmainstream mods include cutting, branding, or implanting shapes or devices to alter the body’s contours or interfacing capabilities. Mods may also include other inscriptions and transformations of the body surface, as with prosthetic limbs, sensory augmentation, body art, or other external changes. For the most part, contemporary mods are considered aesthetic, typically not presumed “technological,” “prosthetic,” or “functional” in nature.
According to Brian Turner, in traditional societies, the body is a space to think about and constitute the body politic. In these societies, tattoos were fixed in social meaning, linking human embodiment to social processes, particularly of reproduction. According to Brian Turner, postmodern society has resituated body mods within a cultural framework where “cool readings”—ironic and simulated interpretations of consumerist cultural capital on a bodily surface—are the only interpretations possible.
Despite this lack of fixity, or because of it, body mods speak beyond simply depicting a concept for discussion, as with the panopticon and the glider from the Game of Life. James Myers observes that body symbols “establish a channel of communication within the individual between the social and biological aspects of his [or her] personality” and, where visible, with society through the revelation of information indicating alignment with a system of beliefs and values. Although they no longer denote social processes or reproductive cycles, body symbols retain an association with oppositional culture, as body mods during periods of nation formation were often utilized by the marginalized to express class or occupational solidarity, and were accordingly interpreted as part of the criminal, underclass, or otherwise “deviant” by state strategies of governmentality—as happened to me in the ER.
Writing and reading body marks may have become uncertain forms of textual practice without necessary linkages between marks and roles, but audiences frequently expect them to have a purpose or narrative and frequently stigmatize them as “wrong” bodily practice as well. Thus, meaning may be imposed or presumed based on the design itself, its placement, or the values inherent to body modification as a mainstay of oppositional culture. As visual texts, they open the door to larger discussions about race, class, gender, and cultural appropriation. So what do we get when body mods are brought into the classroom as live, dynamic, “deviant” texts that insert play, physical movement, multiplicity, and becoming-cyborg into acts of interpretation, authorship, and revision?
Non-normative bodily models of writing, and the generation of wonder.
This is my magnetic implant. When I type, my nerves vibrate in time with my machine, every time I hit “save,” every time a hidden process makes it heat up. When I have students simulate this with a neodymium magnet—and feel free to try it—their response is awe as they are abruptly, bodily made aware of new material dimensions of existence and of writing. The magnet extends embodied experience and makes it a dimension of composition. Drafting like that is a constant reminder of the tactility of writing, that our bodies are not contained by physical boundaries. It’s a short step to then ask: should our writing be normatively bounded?
At least in drafting, perhaps: no.
I’m not suggesting that everyone run out and get a magnetic implant. I am suggesting that the transhuman aesthetics of such nonmainstream mods deny the fixity of bodily norms, and of the dominant normative writing body, and that the effects of these mods can be simulated in the classroom as part of a deep embodiment pedagogy that focuses on critical wonder, “doing emotion,” accessing physicality, and restoring to composition traces of the non-normative body, of the struggle and labor it takes to produce the written word.
In considering how to “do emotion” in the composition classroom, Micciche considers how we can use strong, potentially stymying feelings as sites for meaning-making and invention from which words can emerge. Deep embodiment pedagogy lets us experiment with inhabiting embodied emotions through “an intimate relation to words as well as through a bodily based performance of those words.” From this we can teach wonder as an embodied capacity and skill linked to our orientation in the world, already circulating in an affective economy.
To use Eric Shouse’s definitions, affect consists of a pre-personal, non-conscious experience, the physiological shift that precedes feeling, which is the affect interpreted and labeled against biographical experience, which is in turn projected as an emotion. Teresa Brennan has noted how affects are not contained, and bodies are surfaces for the transmission of affect, which is social in origin but biochemical and neurological in effect. From this, Sara Ahmed suggests that, through the circulation of affects, emotions move between and “stick” to bodies and signs, thereby “surfacing” individual and collective bodies. So the emotional readings of others—that is, the mobilization of certain affects—serve to bind imagined subjects and communities. As affects are continually moving, they do not reside in a single subject or object, instead outlining different objects and aligning them under the same emotional reading. Hate, for instance, is economic in this way, distributed across various figures—such as foreigners, the disabled, mixed and queer populations, essentially the specters of Otherness—that embody the threat of loss or violation to the normative unmarked subject, itself imagined into being through this mobilization of hate. This process of differentiation is never over, as it awaits “threats” that have yet to arrive.
This is the boogeyman, accumulating affective value because it has no fixed referent and can be seen to reside nowhere and everywhere that is not the ordinary subject. It is at the center of so many recent narratives about racial profiling, justifiable force, and reckless endangerment; rape culture; domestic surveillance and governmental and corporate abuses. It’s this boogeyman that I investigate across its varied incarnations. It’s this investigation that encounters the most resistance, as student responses tend to be overdetermined by emotion.
Especially with regards to identity politics, the circulation of emotions in this affective economy—the tension between the pure, normative subject and its constitution through the fantasy of violation—can saturate student writing and preclude analytical thinking. While I became more mindful of my own body as I recovered, I kept wondering: Could body-mods—with all their stigmas and significations—make deep embodiment pedagogy “safe” in particularly resistant or larger classes? After all, plunging into immersive role-play without a safe foundation can stymy internal transformation, yielding caution and political correctness instead of empathy and critical insight. Graspable across race and gender, but in varied emotional, raced, and gendered ways, body rhetoric in the most literal sense might offer an easy way in.
This was a large lecture class of 90. I lay limp across the desks like a corpse as they walked in, while a pre-recorded video of my dying statement played behind me, referencing the open-source horror series “The Holders.” I had red-ink writing on my arms. I had cryptic Post-It notes stuck around the room. I instructed them to use their surroundings to “do” the open-source fiction we’d been reading about or be “killed” by the corpse before them. The energy in the room changed; there was physical movement, vibrant unmediated debate about the texts, communal negotiation of writing. A student lifted my dead-weight arm and read the clues I’d written there. By modeling the performance of emotion and the somatic quality of writing on my own body, I hoped to begin paving the way for embodied composition with regards to identity politics, social justice, and the specter of the Other.
Ultimately, transferring the site of composition to the body itself confirms what all writers know in their flesh: that writing is a material, felt, and deeply messy process. And yet, as Jay Dolmage observes, the institution encourages writing that translates the body onto the page as ordered, precise, and controlled, a progression towards perfection. Body norms—white, male, straight, upper middle-class, able-bodied, profoundly unmarked—dictate composition on the page as free of error and evidence of struggle. The same is true of “surface features” like a clean, orderly format, despite the chaotic nature of critical thinking.
So what happens if we deemphasize the normative imperative towards a rational, idealized text and insist instead that the struggle is real?
If body mods include any new contouring of bodily surfaces, then I give you CV dazzle, a fashion statement and counter-surveillance measure, by which the wearer “confuses” facial recognition algorithms, effectively becoming invisible to the digital eye. At the same time, the wearer stands out starkly in public life and must experience scrutiny as some sort of deviant Other—a “wrong” body with the “wrong” face, marked outside of Halloween or Carnivale. Students wore this makeup for hours—and you can too—and, in informal blog writing, reflected on the tension between digital invisibility and physical visibility, between normative bodies and deviant markings, and critiqued the gendered fashionista nature of the project itself. Their compositions organically leaned towards the fractured, the multimodal. In their reflections, they wrote with a sense of wonder.
We change the energy in the room for discussion and reflective writing when we start each day with graffiti on environmental or bodily surfaces. When we design a tattoo for ourselves and—surprise—apply it to someone else in the place we chose for ourselves, compelling us to evaluate rhetorical choices ranging from design elements to handwriting to use of the composition space, in this case the canvas of the body. When we transfer pre-assigned words or short phrases onto our skin in a place of our choosing, when we mill around the room to make meaning out of those words, when—in the style of Mark Strand’s blackouts—we strike out words, we physically reorganize ourselves, we comment on the rhetorical choices we’ve made.
Such composing, remixing, and commenting practices are in keeping with Dolmage’s “corporeal turn” in composition pedagogy. Dolmage states, “If we see the body more peculiarly, we may in fact develop the tools to critically body the world, to embody discourse, and to develop embodied rhetorics and modes of composition.” Body mods in the classroom augment deep embodiment pedagogy by tying a kind of mainstream Otherness to an existing body. In rendering the body strange and the self a stranger in it, these modifications generate the experience of “what it is like to move around the world in a different body” without imagining that that body is anything other than your own. It also renders visible the problem of “passing,” of being able to opt in and out of difference, and thus opens the door to bigger questions pertaining to identity politics.
Writing has corporeal entailments, and we are constantly “writing” our bodies in space. Admitting bodies into the classroom, and admitting that these bodies write and are written within this affective economy, is essential to the performance of emotion and to discussing varied emotioned perspectives, affectively, through multimodality, fragmentation, and informality in drafts. Body-mod work set the stage for the role-plays of deep embodiment pedagogy. In this co-created lesson, students relocated to different “regions” of the classroom and were given evidence of human rights violations they then tweeted to the rest of their dispersed nation, imagining themselves as the oppressed Other or the oppressors themselves. In keeping with Ahmed, Micciche, and Dolmage, my thinking was that the active, embodied performance of emotion and the circulation of various affects could open the possibility of critical insight and varied perspectives on an issue. By shifting the medium from static text to dynamic body, it could also encourage and enhance adventurous thinking.
The body has never been a safe beginning, but it is always a site of learning. To understand embodiment is to understand “the body, the body image, the thinking of the body—not only as implied, normative inversions of a range of Other, wrong bodies, and not as a default ideal.” A body-mod-focused approach requires looking at our bodies with a sense of simultaneous estrangement and ownership. It promotes wonder. It supports Micciche’s goal of getting rhetoric—language as a material act with consequences shaped by material factors—and Dolmage’s push to avoid invoking normative models of embodiment.
Ultimately, multimodality that includes body modification—the body as it is and configured differently—challenges the normative mobilization of affects in the classroom, allowing us to look at composition less as the production of order than a capacity for meaning-making as unpredictable, messy, and mutable as the composing body itself. What happens when students are presented with a “teaching tattoo” and given the technology to create new meaning through augmented reality? When they do so for the temporary tattoos they apply to each other? How unfixed can the body and text become? The more we open the body to greater affect and indeterminacy, the closer we come to an intuitive understanding of non-normative bodies and writing models, and the kind of critical wonder that demands a return to the body, as it is, and as it could be.
Works Cited
Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Cornell University Press.
Dolmage, J. (2012). Writing against normal: Navigating a corporeal turn. In K. Arola & A. Wysocki (Eds.), composing (media) = composing (embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing (pp. 115-131). Utah State University Press.
Micciche, L. (2007). Doing emotion: Rhetoric, teaching, writing. Heinemann.
Myers, J. (1992). Non-mainstream body modification: Genital piercing, branding, burning, and cutting. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 21(3), 267-306.
Shouse, E. (2005). Feeling, emotion, affect. M/C Journal, 8(6).
Turner, B. (1999). The possibility of primitiveness: Towards a sociology of body marks in cool societies. Body & Society, 5(2-3).
