The importance of what cannot be seen

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:14:21 +0000

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?

viz. - reconstructive surgery

The importance of what cannot be seen