Bold, white letters emblazoned across the breast of a glaringly fuchsia shirt declare: “This is what a FEMINIST looks like.” Endorsed by Ms. Magazine, and sold through the Feminist Majority Foundation, these shirts have been worn by actress Ashley Judd at a Glamour magazine photo shoot, and young feminists all over North America. At a recent feminist conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, all delegates were offered a button adorned with this slogan.

As detailed by Susan Bordo in Unbearable Weight, some feminists argue for the right to “ignore fashion.” Keeping this in mind, how does this slogan re-inscribe notions of femininity? What is suggested by the fact that looks are the centralizing crux of the message? Feminism has been criticized for omitting considerations such as class, disability, race and sexuality, making it most important to identify who is disavowed by such a statement: who does not look like a feminist, as defined by this slogan? Is this slogan what feminism should look like?

This paper considers the above questions through a lens that considers sizing of shirts (most only to XL); various styles (T-shirt, fitted, spaghetti-strap); cost (US$20-$30); colors (black, white, fuchsia); and the origins and meaning behind the slogan. I put these ideas in conversation with diverse theorists (Baudrillard, Bordo, Haraway, and Butler, among others).

Concluding, I consider looks – whose gaze, whose looks, the potential in “feminist looking.” Finally, I theorize means for feminists to represent themselves ethically and proudly in a time when feminism does look increasingly indispensable.

Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), presents a fictionalized account of Melville’s experiences in the Marquesas Islands, chronicling the narrator’s stay with the reputedly cannibalistic Typee tribe. The narrator, named “Tommo” by the Typee, acculturates in many ways, but there is one custom from which he violently recoils. Surprisingly, this is not cannibalism, but being tattooed. As Samuel Otter explains, “the profound danger…is not that the Typee literally will eat Tommo but that they figuratively will consume his identity by writing upon his skin.” Tommo fears that allowing the Typee to write upon the canvas of his body, and his face in particular, would change how Europeans read him, catapulting him across the chasms that separate civilized from savage and white from black.

Tommo understands that tattooing will turn his face into a text, a silent narrative proclaiming him as a savage forever severed from civilization and from his own identity. In a novel very much about narrative, Tommo is, like his creator Melville, a teller of tales whose first book is Typee. Since the Typee have no print culture, any narrative he might construct could be neither written nor read. And there is, Tommo observes, no Typee Homer, no Typee Shakespeare or Milton. To become Typee therefore imperils not just Tommo’s individual identity, but what K. Anthony Appiah calls his “collective identity”—in this case, his role as inheritor of the Western literary tradition.

When the Typee tattoo artist Karky threatens to compose pictograms on the paper of Tommo’s face, Tommo can no longer straddle two cultures. Speaking far louder than oral narrative, facial markings, which the Typee can read but which Tommo cannot, would deliver the mute message that this man has no language in which to become a writer, and therefore has no narrative at all. With no narrative, there would be no narrator, and Tommo would vanish. He can only preserve his narrative, and the integrity of his identity, by choosing one collective over the other. Thus he runs in terror from Karky to preserve the blank canvas of his face so that it still reads, in all senses, “white.”

Shelley Jackson's short story "Skin" has been in constant production since September 8, 2003, when its title and first word was inscribed on human skin. Since then, the 2,095-word text has slowly come into existence, one word at a time, with the assistance of more than 1,500 volunteers who have "published" a word on their bodies.

As part traditional literary text and part performance art, "Skin" uses the human body as its canvas. Whereas the use of animal skin as medium was common among early scribes, and indeed human skin was used to bind books in the 17th and 18th centuries, "Skin" is more than a text on vellum. It relies not just on the dermal surface for its formal properties, but also on the live embodiment--the incorporation of the text--for both its form and context. Whereas a text printed on skin can, and usually is, an object separate and apart from the body of a person, "Skin" is a text that may never be read without the physical and metaphorical context of its wearer's body.

In "Skin," the wearer of the tattoo--who, as I will argue in my presentation, is both author and reader of the text, as well--removes a given word from its "traditional" context and (re)places it within a set of bodily contexts. This embodiment of the word, I will argue, transfers meanings to the word which are not normally associated with the word as it resides on the page. Likewise, the new placement of the word on the body gives new meanings to the body-as-text. These new relationships that take place between word and body--in effect, a pastiche of existing texts--forms a new text in which the word is gendered and the body is re-written.

In my presentation, I will use photographs of "Skin" tattoos (and even one in the flesh) to examine examples of these newly formed texts of word-on-body.

Books have been bound in human skin since the development of printing in the fourteenth century. On the surface, the motivations seem straightforward, if macabre, forcing a continued presence after death. Anthropodermic bindings fall into three categories: punitive (trial transcripts bound in the hide of a hanged felon as part of his punishment), commemorative (a memorial to oneself or an admired author, usually by choice), and what I call “literal translations” (in which a medical treatise is bound in cadaver skin, an obscene novel in female skin, or the poems of a slave in African-American skin). A look at themes surrounding the book and theories of the body reveal why this practice that merges book and body can be such an effective method of achieving secular immortality. In practical terms, tanning the skin has removed the possibility of decay; in theoretical terms, human leather bypasses Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, so that anthropodermic binding can participate in the tradition of bodily keepsakes. At the same time, a book is an appropriate vehicle to continue a physical presence. Books have always been seen as embodiments of knowledge, and writing a story down gives it physicality. There is also a literary tradition of personal representation through autobiography, and the goal of achieving unity between the cover and the content of a book. The attachment of identity to an anthropodermically-bound book, particularly if the text concerns that individual, continues a posthumous social presence. So when the book contains the life of a person—anthropodermic on the outside, autobiographical on the inside—immortality in the physical sense is almost assured.

Scarify: “. . . recorded in the senses ‘to scratch an outline, sketch lightly, ... pencil, stilus.... 1. trans. (chiefly Surg.) To make a number of scratches or slight incisions in (a portion of the body, a wound). Hence gen. To cover with scratches. b. fig. To make sore, wound. Also, in mod. use, to subject to merciless criticism. O. transf. (? Associated with Scar sb.) To cover with scars, to scar. d. App. Misused for: To anoint a wound. 2. To make incisions in the bark of a tree. 3. a. Agric. To break up or loosen (ground) with a scarifier. b. road making.

My paper “Scarlet Letters: Scarification and Open Wounds in American Literary History” is a part of a larger project on scarification and aesthetics in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature. My paper explores Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House, The Scarlet Letter and “Main Street” as texts that investigate the act of entering and expressing a wound in the act of writing. In form and content, these texts consider what it means to scarify or be scarified. Through a cross-disciplinary analysis of literature, literary and medical history, aesthetics, feminist theory and philosophy, I examine how the concept of scarification functions self-reflexively in these texts, both to comment on the writing of America and to act as a link to the larger conceptual framework of nation building. In this way, my analysis fleshes out the metonymic union of scarification and spilling blood—in the making of America—and inscription and spilling ink—in the writing of America. Such a union is at the same time an expression of national progress and aesthetic imperative. These texts enter the wound, so to speak, to explore what it means to write (or be inscribed) with and against the grain of a linear, patrilineal, proscribed and teleological narrative of Nation. Hester’s “A,” both written on the page and sewed to her chest, is a metonymic scarification of this concern. Her “A” is a metonymy for her person. It is metonymy for the act of writing and for the inscription of meaning. It is a metonymy for the symbolic force of the authority of writing over the body (as person, citizen and subject) and the body politic. Chillingworth’s scalpel-like extension of his scrutinizing gaze—his finger—expresses as much: “As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast.” Chillingworth’s scarification of Hester with his suggestive instrument implies the association of marking flesh with marking territory. In the context of the wilderness surrounding her (with which she is repeatedly associated in the novel), the Puritan errand into the wilderness and the attempt to define a nation by cutting through and colonizing Indian land, Hester’s “A” and the associated “A” that is figuratively carved into the landscape of the new world, seem to bloom as keen, open and kindred wounds. This paper explores the meeting of such concepts and the ways these texts trace the inroads made in the attempt to define a nation, marking wounds where none were marked before.