It is commonly assumed that the permanent nature of tattoos makes them inherently antithetical to fashion, which is premised on the idea of constant change. Unlike other items of body adornment, such as clothing or jewelry, which can be easily adopted or removed without permanently altering the body in accordance with the whims of fashion, tattoos mark the body in an indelible and largely irreversible way. As a number of commentators have argued, such as Lentini, Benson and Salecl, it is this feature that accounts for their growing popularity in contemporary culture, where individuals are increasingly uncertain about their sense of who they are. In an era where the logic of fashion has permeated most aspects of social life, individuals are confronted by a constantly transforming world where "everything solid melts into air." In response to this experience of constantly shifting parameters, individuals seek to stabilize their sense of identity through fixing it permanently on their skin. The physical body is taken as the ground on which individuals can anchor their identity in an otherwise completely mutable world where nothing remains the same. In contrast to the evanescence of fashion, the material physicality of the body seems to provide a more solid grounding for identity.
It appears to be more "real" and substantial than the ephemeral world of advertising images. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker suggest that this desire to ground one's identity in the apparent certainty of the physical body is heightened by the growing sense of its obsolescence as more and more of the body's functions are replaced by technological devices. This sense of the obsolescence of the body has become particularly acute in recent times with the growing ubiquity of the virtual world of cyberspace. In such a context, invocations of the corporeality of the body represent a last ditch attempt to rescue the "real" from its absorption into the realm of simulation, where the original referents have fallen out of sight. Baudrillard, in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, writes of the body in postmodern culture as having been assimilated to the general condition of "hyperreality," which represents a panic attempt to simulate a sense of the "real" in the wake of its disappearance. However, this desperate assertion of the real is but a hollow façade, masking the decorporealization of the body in contemporary cyberculture. Baudrillard describes the body in cyberspace as a "pure screen." Plugged into an infinitely expanding network of communications, the body loses a sense of itself as bounded and separate. No longer a site for the interiority of the individual, the body becomes "a switching centre for all the networks of influence".
This "culture of telecontact" is based on a contradiction, for at the same time as it places everyone in instant contact with everyone else, it alienates people from themselves and from each other, since this contact is achieved not through direct physical interaction but by remote control through digitized information networks. As a consequence of this disembodied form of communication, or "skinless propinquity," as Steven Connor refers to it, we lose a sense of our presence in the here and now, and our capacity for direct sensory experience is undermined. In a similar manner to the Krokers and Baudrillard, Connor interprets our contemporary obsession with the corporeality of the body as a desperate bid to recapture the "real" and reactivate the senses. He sees the current-day practices of body marking, such as tattooing, branding, and piercing, as attempts to reassert the "reality" of the body as a living presence. Whereas in the Christian tradition, the mortification of the body was intended as a means of transcending the physical body in order to attain spiritual redemption, contemporary forms of mortification, on the contrary, aim to "transfix the body in its presence."
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1. A particular type of masculine identity
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