In responding to the BBC News article on the subject, rather than directly approaching the question “Why would anyone want to tattoo their eyeball?” a reading of Miller (2011) last and again this week prompts me first to ask “What does it mean for someone to tattoo their eyeball, in terms of a possible expression or embodiment of their trans- humanity?” To answer from a perspective Miller presents (2011) this is a ‘trans- form’ (an action) of the ‘human machine relationship’ (Gray et al., 1995; cited in Miller (2011), p212) and is an example of what Miller (2011) calls ‘reconfiguring’.

In response to my tutor’s advice I turned to chapter 1 of Grosz ‘Volatile Bodies’ (1995) and immediately fell upon her words relating to the idea of the mind being an inscribed tableau (embodied perhaps therefore by way) of ‘historical, social, cultural particularity’ (1995, p27). At this point, as we are in the midst of a film festival on EDC, my memory turned to Funeral Parade of Roses  (1969) (The film is also interesting in that it is loosely based on the plot of Oedipus Rex and I should warn comes to a similar shocking and bloody climax) a Japanese film directed by Toshio Matsumoto, set in a trans-gender (gay) counter culture community in Tokyo in the late 1960’s (the Transawareness Project breaks down the binary between biology and ‘cultural performance’ nicely, in same way that we might want to dissolve the mind body binary, or that of human and machine, and although the earlier Wiki link describes the film’s protagonists as transvestites, this seems inaccurate).

Here within Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) is another type of ‘refiguring’ (2011) of a human embodiment in a ‘trans human sense’ (2011) , which is that of trans gender alterations to the body. The real focus in terms of this reconfiguring (2011) is then what Grosz (1995) describes above as its ‘historical, social and cultural particularity’, and hence in the film gender roles (and identities it seems) are revealed as inscriptions of ‘artifice’, creations or constructions, possibly in a ‘human machine’ sense (2011), within a broader particular cultural, social and historical context.

It seems therefore that to tattoo one’s eyeball, is really just another similar constitutive or performative expression of ‘refiguring’ (2011) as an ‘inscription’ (1995).  As to why a person might want to do this, well I suppose as humans we do all kinds of things in this type of way, because we can. This includes the example Miller (2011) gives of Dennis Avner who has attempted as far as possible, through body modification, to transform himself into a cat. I do not wish to sound glib in making the statement above, however my word count has been far exceeded for the moment, and  as such this is just a ‘first pass’ and so I obviously need to return in order to answer the question posed, in a more complete way at a later date.

For the moment I leave you with the complete  film ‘Funeral Parade of Roses’ (1969):