“The Desire of the Rose”: Tattooing, Ekphrasis, and Queer Desire in Texts by Samuel Steward and Sylvia Plath
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tattoos, ekphrasis, queer desire, Samuel Steward, Sylvia PathResumo
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.
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