I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.
A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.
For me, the story has a few important intersections for the student/scholar of visual rhetoric. The need for the tattoo demonstrates the importance the visual representation of the body to even the most intimate of its observers. Without the nipple, the breast could seem incomplete, or even still sick. Even though it is just a "drawing," the tattoo brings presence back to the breast, or wholeness back to the subject. The nipple, similar to the increasingly popular inside-of-lip tattoo, therefore constructs an intimate or private language, an idea that is not frequently attached with the hyper-visibility of a lot of body modifications.
I also think that this is interesting in terms of the rhetoric of body modification itself, that is often thought to be reclaim the body for the subject. If cancer can make the patient feel that the body is not her own, taken over, invaded by the cancer itself, then this act of modification could serve as a ritual "taking-back" or assertion of ownership and control.
Last, I just want to point out the strange relationship between health and sickness for body modification. As Victoria Pitts points out in her book In the Flesh, body modification is often surrounded by the discourse of mutilation, perversion, self-harm and other ways of designating the body modifier as "sick" - with this new form of tattoo it is the body modification that tries to approximate "healthy" according to normative standards. In this way does the nipple reconstruction actually undermine the destabilization project that many body modifiers understand themselves to participate in?
Comments
Power over the Body
I think this new tattoo whose purpose is to depict health is just another form of exerting control over a body that we really don't have that much control over. This is the same purpose behind the self-mutilating tattoo that you refer to. I think many people tattoo themselves to exert control over a body that they had no role in choosing--this nipple tattoo is just another form of control over a disease, or over decision to get a mastectomy which isn't really a decision but a requirement.
There's not really any such
There's not really any such thing as private language, is there? Privacy and language are mutually exclusive: it's not only that language is public; it's that (in order to be) language must be public. (I'm not sure how this comment has anything to do with visual rhetoric, but I think it does...)
I think your post points to something that is very difficult (for me anyway) to grasp. Whereas a common sense understanding of the body is that it can easily be "read" (perhaps thanks to medical-scientific discourse: the kind of epistemic elision from symptom to disease that assumes a link between inside and outside), it might be more accurate to say that the body is always being-written. So the kind of tattoo you are describing, it seems to me, is significant not because of what is written on the body per se (with apologies to Jeanette Winterson) but rather the ways in which the body is taken by the subject to "write" the self for the benefit of the self (as if it takes writing on the body to confirm for the subject her very subjectivity). It's almost as if (in your example) the subject has to posit herself as the object of her own gaze in order to feel herself as a subject (in this case, the possessor of a "whole" body)--and it is in this sense that her language isn't exactly private: it's public because in this case, there are two "speakers": "herself" and "her body."
This comes up for me in my classes because of discussions we have about essentialist and constructivist descriptions of sexuality. It's very hard for students (both queer and straight) to acquiesce to purely constructivist descriptions of sexuality because of the "truths" their bodies tell them (and in fact, those "truths" are hard to argue with). While it's not hard to imagine acculturation when it comes to ideas, it's harder to accept a constructivist position that posits the body itself as a site of acculturation--that what "feels natural" (i.e., gender identity) is in fact a product of external forces of subjectivization.
Or, I guess another way of getting at these issues is to ask about something your post alludes to: do people really "own" their bodies? Why is that a useful metaphor for explaining the subject's relationship to her (own!) body?
privacy
I think that we are conflating privacy with the solitary. I would argue that there definitely is a "private" language, the language that gives rise the the rhetoric of secrecy, etc. This is the language that is not meant for all, but for those that are given access and it is therefore not closed off, which is I think where you were going, but rather privileged (someone has to be given access; it's the champagne room of language). In this way intimacy means the permission to read, hear, or speak (the flip side of which is the violent taking away of this body and exposure that speaks to the fragile position of this "ownership"). I think this is important for visual rhetoric because of how we represent the public/private divide in visibility (what can, should be seen).
I take your point regarding
I take your point regarding a language that is potentially "secret"--I realize these things exist (twin-language, schmoopy talk, etc.). But I think what I'm trying to do is draw out the difference between private and secret. What I'm also trying to draw out is a claim that we need not posit this particular subject as getting this tattoo for the benefit of "intimate others" (sexual partners, doctors, and so on). In this case, couldn't we say that she is her own other (in fact, I wonder if there's some ethical sense in which we ought to see it this way, as something she does for herself, for her own benefit). And so, at the same time, it's as if the very positing of herself as a spectacle for her own gaze (in the mirror, as it were) dissolves the supposed distinction between public and private, because even when she's "alone," she is still "with herself"? Isn't there a sense in which even the "solitary" individual constitutes a public? (And hooray! for scare quotes!)