Tattooing the abject body

This paper answers calls in Linguistic Landscape analysis to foreground corporeal landscapes ( Kitis & Milani, 2015 ; Peck & Stroud, 2015 ) by exploring the ways in which breast cancer survivors reappropriate their embodied selves with artistic tattoos, re-defining themselves as artified spatial agents. We report on a corpus of photography and audio/video interviews following the social networks of the second author, a tattoo artist providing pro bono work for people bearing breast cancer surgery scars. This complex dataset allows us to explore the corporeal and spatial implications of artistic post-surgery tattoos, with a focus on how scarred corporeal experiencers shape spatial practices. Resolving an apparent paradox — the embodied expressions of agency amongst individuals who lost control over their corporeality through illness and regimes of medicalisation — brings to light the processes via which breast cancer survivors assert their right to visibility and access to hegemonic bodyscapes.