“The Desire of the Rose”: Tattooing, Ekphrasis, and Queer Desire in Texts by Samuel Steward and Sylvia Plath

Authors

  • Louisa Söllner Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

Keywords:

tattoos, ekphrasis, queer desire, Samuel Steward, Sylvia Path

Abstract

This paper explores texts by Samuel Steward and Sylvia Plath that engage with the cultural space of the tattoo studio. It focuses on Plath’s story “The Fifteen Dollar Eagle” and on Steward’s various narratives about his transformation from a university professor into a tattoo artist. My readings trace how a conflict with the literary heritages of modernism, emerging through the marginalization of queer desire in modernist traditions, leads both authors to turn to alternative cultural spaces. Tattooing, in their texts, not only produces epidermal inscriptions, but also promises a subversion of social and aesthetic hierarchies and permits imagining relationships that defy heteronormativity.

Author Biography

Louisa Söllner, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

Louisa Söllner (PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 2012) works at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. She has published articles on Cuban-American literature and art and on the relationship between writing and visual art. Her book Photographic Ekphrasis in Cuban-American Fiction: Missing Pictures and Imagining Loss and Nostalgia</em> will be published by Brill (Leiden, NL) in August 2018.

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Published

2020-06-26

How to Cite

Söllner, L. “‘The Desire of the Rose’: Tattooing, Ekphrasis, and Queer Desire in Texts by Samuel Steward and Sylvia Plath”. DISCOURSE STUDIES, vol. 5, no. 1, June 2020, pp. 79-97, https://esdi.uaem.mx/index.php/esdi/article/view/30.