Memories in Ink: Affect, Disease, and Marked Bodies

• In Event: 3255 - Section on the Sociology of Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 1. Emotion, Affect, and Bodily Practice

Abstract

Drawing from interview data collected in the summer of 2015, this paper explores the prevalence of group-oriented tattoos among a group of charity distance runners. I suggest that motivations for acquiring tattoos that demarcate in-group belonging goes beyond the simple, mutual acknowledgement of like iconography among community members. Rather, this acquisition is deeply rooted in an affective elicitation to group membership, an elicitation all the more salient among run community members brought together through the shared experience and personal connection to childhood cancer and its treatments. I additionally argue that run-related tattoos allow a small sub-set of runners, those who were themselves former patients, to resignify their bodies as sites of victory. Finally, I propose the four day run event constitutes a site of affective transference between runner-patients and the run group, more generally, informed by precarity in the absent-presence of cancer-in-remission, through which an uncertain orientation towards the future informs individual and group identity, as well as broader relationships to current patients, past survivors, and those who died.

Author

• Doug Valentine, University of Missouri