Welcome to our podcast “Minute Papillon!
"And our Friday meeting" Tout Sexiquer ".
In this episode, we evoke tattooed bodies, bodies of desires.
An ancestral practice in so-called traditional societies, in the East, Africa and Oceania, tattooing has long been the mark of the margins in the West before becoming a shared body ornament.
By displaying signs of identity on your body, you strengthen your sense of yourself and you strengthen the way others look at yourself.
How is this tattooed body, a place of self-assertion, an eroticized body?
How do you look at these indelible, hidden or unveiled traces?
What desire on this male or female tattooed body?
Why wear an erotic, even pornographic drawing in your flesh?
Virilization of bodies
To answer in this episode, David Le Breton *, anthropologist, professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, author of several books on tattooing, including
Signs of Identity.
Tattoos
,
piercings and other body marks
(Métailié editions, 2002).
David Le Breton looks back on the immemorial origins of tattooing, with multiple meanings, before evoking tattooing in the West at the end of the 18th century and then in the 19th century.
“From the outset, there is an eroticization of bodies in a popular dimension, because it is the sailors who spread [the phenomenon] in the cabarets”, “followed by marginal populations at first”, recalls the anthropologist.
"The tattoo will very quickly be associated with virilization of the body because at the time, the tattoo was very painful," he adds.
In the twentieth century, the popularization of these body ornaments took place in the 1970s. “Tattooing became a cultural phenomenon” first in the United States before reaching Europe, recalls David Le Breton.
Eroticized area of the body
Regarding this body made desirable by the motif, the anthropologist emphasizes that "the tattooed body crystallizes an erotic zone in the body, a place where one likes to be caressed, kissed".
"There is a kind of narcissization of this part which is detached from the whole body and which is eminently eroticized, first for the person himself, but also for the partners", he adds.
"There is a game of the hidden and the shown", an introduction to the game of seduction, remarks the professor.
Since when the eroticization of tattooed bodies?
When, in the West, the tattooed body became the body of desire?
What look on the male and female tattooed body?
What do erotic or pornographic tattoo mean?
Can the gaze on the tattooed body, object of desire, change in the coming years and decades?
These are the questions for this interview to listen to in the audio player above.
* Author, also, of
The tattoo or the signature of oneself
(Casimiro, 2014), and on the scarifications:
The skin and the trace.
On self-injury (Métailié editions, 2003)
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