Making Bodies: A Discussion of Papers by Maureen Murphy and Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein

These papers were originally presented at a panel of Division 39, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2012. The title of that panel, “The Body as Outlaw: From Tattoos to Organ-legging,” conjures a renegade, a body outside the established order of the symbolic: fugitive, a provocateur, off the map. The outlaw body, then, is the intimate backdrop of these two fascinating and thought-provoking papers, but it is not their terminus. A body outside the law necessarily points to the law it would evade or from which it has been exiled. Both papers ask us to situate the body in the much wider field of the social, and to consider the uses to which it is put — as signifying canvas, as property, as public memorial, as exchange commodity. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking is doing hard work to articulate this juncture between psychic and larger socioeconomic forces, to find the imbrications of market economies with psychic ones, and to theorize the social dimensions of our subjectivities along with the more bread-and-butter fare of our individual object relations. Both Maureen and Jeanne creatively mine this complex intersection.

Maureen's lovely paper is squarely located in the Winnicottian field of play and paradox. In addition to providing intellectual tinder for our thinking, it is a plea for our humanity. Do not facilely write off the tattoo as a mark of Cain, as a sign of abnegation or destructive aggression, she seems to say, but consider the possibility of creation, of commemoration and repair. The key, Maureen tells us, is not to try to resolve the tensions between subject and object, or to try to fix a definitive meaning for a given tattoo, but rather to live and play in the manifest tensions. I was reminded here of Queequeg, Ishmael's taciturn and noble companion in Moby Dick, whose whole body is covered in tattoos: “And this tattooing,” Melville writes,

… had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his