“The Desire of the Rose”: Tattooing, Ekphrasis, and Queer Desire in Texts by Samuel Steward and Sylvia Plath
Keywords:
tattoos, ekphrasis, queer desire, Samuel Steward, Sylvia PathAbstract
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.
References
Andros, Phil. “Note,” Below the Belt & Other Stories by Phil Andros. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Perineum Press, 1983, pp. ix-x.
Andros, Phil. “Love me little, love me long,” Below the Belt & Other Stories by Phil Andros. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Perineum Press, 1983, pp. 36-47.
Arburg, Hans-Georg von. “Archäodermatologie der Moderne. Zur Theoriegeschichte der Tätowierung in der Architektur und Literatur zwischen 1830 und 1930,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. 77.3 (2003): 407–445.
Beeler, Karin. Tattoos, Desire and Violence: Marks of Resistance in Literature, Film and Television. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 2005.
Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
DeMello, Margo. Bodies of Inscription. A cultural history of the modern tattoo community. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 2000.
Glavey, Brian. The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Gordon-Bramer, Julia. Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath. Volume I: The Major Arcana and first 22 Poems of Plath’s Ariel. Nacogdoches, Texas: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2014.
Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011.
Heffernan, James A.W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Krafft, Andrea. “‘Funny and Tender and Not a Desperate Woman:’ Sylvia Plath’s The
Bell Jar, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Therapeutic Laughter,” Plath Profiles. An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies 6 (2013): 287-306.
Krieger, Murray. “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time and the Literary Work,” Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, edited by Valerie Robillardand Els Jongeneel, Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998, pp. 3-20.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar. 2nd edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1966.
Plath, Sylvia. “The Courage of Shutting-Up,” Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1981, pp. 209-210.
Plath, Sylvia: “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings. 2nd edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1979, pp. 47-62.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Spring, Justin. Secret Historian. The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Steward, Samuel. Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965. New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 1990.
Steward, Samuel: “The Memoir,” Dear Sammy. Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 1-117.
Werner, Ricky. “Queer Adolescence: (Homo)sexuality in The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar,” eSharp issue on Identity and Marginality 6.2 (Spring 2006).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
La revista Estudios del Discurso está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional, de tipo CC BY-NC, de modo que es posible compartir y adaptar el material, pero debe darse crédito a la obra de manera adecuada e indicar si se han realizado cambios; no puede hacerse uso del material con fines comerciales. Estudios del Discurso proporciona un acceso abierto inmediato a su contenido e investigaciones; se autoriza copiar, distribuir y comunicar públicamente cualquiera de los textos publicados, siempre que se cite de manera adecuada la fuente y se remita a la publicación original. Los autores tienen libertad de diseminar su trabajo y hacerlo disponible en otros lugares, siempre y cuando den crédito a la publicación original y, de ser posible, proporcione una liga directa a la misma. Esta revista no solicita cobro de tarifas hacia los autores para la evaluación o procesamiento de los artículos.
