The Body as (Another) Place: Producing Embodied Heterotopias Through Tattooing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract While previous research has mobilized sociological and psychological readings of the body, this study considers it ontologically as the ultimate place we must live in, with no escape possible. A phenomenological framework and a four-year, multimethod, qualitative study of tattoo recipients and tattooists substantiates the conceptualization of the body as a threefold articulation: an inescapable place (topia), the source of utopias arising from fleeting trajectories between here and elsewhere, and the “embodied heterotopia” that it becomes when people rework their bodies as a better place to inhabit. We show how tattooed bodies are spatially conceived as a topia through their topographies, territories, landscapes, and limits. We then highlight how this creates a dynamic interplay between past, present, and future, resulting in utopian dreams of beautification, escape, conjuration, and immutability. Finally, we show how tattooees produce embodied heterotopias, namely other places that both mirror and compensate for their ontological entrapment. In considering the body as a place, our framework enriches phenomenological and existential approaches to self-transformation in contemporary consumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".