The Story *on* the Body: Textual Tattoos and the Corporeal Canvas

Whereas Melville's Queequeg is one of America's earliest fictional tattooed characters, it is Hawthorne's Hester Prynne who upends the conventions of the body in literature. Although her scarlet "A" draws attention to the role of her body in the story, it is instead the story told on her body that re-creates Hester as the text to be read.

Much like The Scarlet Letter, this panel focuses not on the human form in literature, but instead the literature on the human form. We hope to address questions such as: How does the body--a sexed and gendered object--in turn "gender" its words? How does text rewrite the body? For whom do we write when we write on and with our bodies?