Bodies, Masks and Biopolitics: Clothing as “Second Skin” and Skin as “First Clothing” in “The Tiger’s Bride”
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Chiara Battisti is researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Literatures of the University of Verona. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, food and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Among her most recent publications: “Mental Illness and Human Rights in Patrick McGrath’s
Asylum ” inLiterature and Human Rights , ed. Ian Ward (Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2015); “Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’sThe Hours ,”Polemos , 9.1 (2015): 157–174; “Western and Post-Western Mythologies of Law,”Polemos , 8.2 (2014): 359–378; “True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society ,”Polemos , 8.1 (2014): 115–136; “Iconology of Law and Dis-order in the Television SeriesLaw and Order Special Victims Unit ” inVisualizing Law and Authority. Essays on Legal Aesthetic , ed. Leif Dahlberg (Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2012): 126–138. She is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
Abstract
This essay aims at analysing the contemporary revision of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast re-told by Angela Carter in “The Tiger’s Bride.” In my critical approach I will intertwine two distinct theoretical strands: one focused on the concept of ‘skin’ and its role as idiom of personhood and identity and the other focused on the notion of the dressed/undressed body, its political power and the manner in which clothing acts as a form of embodiment. I will be focusing on the idea of both body/skin and the dressed body as telling traces of the cultural negotiations of identity and difference by analysing the transformation of Beauty into an animal and the figure of The Beast, as a strange being in a dimension between human and animal. It is precisely the movement of these bodies- naked, clothed and masked- in a liminal zone, an area of exclusion, that makes them the powerful destroyers of the rules of normalcy and allows them to deconstruct the normative perspectives of biopolitics, defined by Michel Foucault as the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population.
About the author
Chiara Battisti is researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Literatures of the University of Verona. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, food and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Among her most recent publications: “Mental Illness and Human Rights in Patrick McGrath’s Asylum” in Literature and Human Rights, ed. Ian Ward (Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2015); “Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours,” Polemos, 9.1 (2015): 157–174; “Western and Post-Western Mythologies of Law,” Polemos, 8.2 (2014): 359–378; “True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society,” Polemos, 8.1 (2014): 115–136; “Iconology of Law and Dis-order in the Television Series Law and Order Special Victims Unit” in Visualizing Law and Authority. Essays on Legal Aesthetic, ed. Leif Dahlberg (Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2012): 126–138. She is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Fashion and Identities
- Theory: Dressing and Law
- Fashion as an Institutional System
- Clothing, Law and the Institution of the Subject’s Internal Normativity
- Fashion & Performance
- Playing it Fashionably Queer: Mae West’s Performing Sexuality
- Fashion in India: Coercion or a Flag for Freedom?
- Bodies, Masks and Biopolitics: Clothing as “Second Skin” and Skin as “First Clothing” in “The Tiger’s Bride”
- Augmented Bodies: Functional and Rhetorical Uses of Augmented Reality in Fashion
- Clothing, Art, Literature and Popular Culture
- The Language of Clothing and the Law
- The Law of Dress in Lord of the Flies
- All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!
- Research
- Post-Mabo White Settler Fables and the Negotiation of Native Title Legislation in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004)
- Ian Mc Ewan’s The Children Act: Minors’ Rights and Family Justice Perspectives in Italy and the UK
- Desire for Justice and Desire as Justice: Theatre and Drama in Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover
- Book Reviews
- Ian Ward ed: Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse
- Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher, and Nicola Smith: Queer Sex Work
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Fashion and Identities
- Theory: Dressing and Law
- Fashion as an Institutional System
- Clothing, Law and the Institution of the Subject’s Internal Normativity
- Fashion & Performance
- Playing it Fashionably Queer: Mae West’s Performing Sexuality
- Fashion in India: Coercion or a Flag for Freedom?
- Bodies, Masks and Biopolitics: Clothing as “Second Skin” and Skin as “First Clothing” in “The Tiger’s Bride”
- Augmented Bodies: Functional and Rhetorical Uses of Augmented Reality in Fashion
- Clothing, Art, Literature and Popular Culture
- The Language of Clothing and the Law
- The Law of Dress in Lord of the Flies
- All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!
- Research
- Post-Mabo White Settler Fables and the Negotiation of Native Title Legislation in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004)
- Ian Mc Ewan’s The Children Act: Minors’ Rights and Family Justice Perspectives in Italy and the UK
- Desire for Justice and Desire as Justice: Theatre and Drama in Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover
- Book Reviews
- Ian Ward ed: Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse
- Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher, and Nicola Smith: Queer Sex Work
