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Body & Society
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`Flagging' the Skin: Corporeal Nationalism and the Properties of Belonging

Emily Grabham

AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality ('CentreLGS') in Kent Law School, e.grabham{at}kent.ac.uk

Just as the nation is imagined and produced through everyday rhetoric and maps and flags, it is also constructed on the skin, and through bodies, by different types of corporeal `flagging'. In this article, I use two examples of contemporary surgical procedures to explore these dynamics. Aesthetic surgeries on `white' subjects are not often interrogated for their racializing effects, but I use the concept of `flagging' to explore how these surgeries work in the UK to align `white' bodies with a white nation. US media coverage of Iraq invasion veterans with prosthetic limbs circulates narratives of heroism and patriotism, and I explore how the apparent `visibility' of these limbs works to re-embed notions of the US as a transcendent Christian nation. In these two examples of corporeal modification, the nation is `flagged' on the skin, reiterating relationships of belonging that echo practical and conceptual links with property. Propertied belonging — possessive and constitutive — unfolds through bodies, producing whiteness not only as property itself, but also as unmarked, habitual terrain.

Key Words: aesthetic surgeries • belonging • `flagging' • nationalism • property • prosthesis • whiteness

Body & Society, Vol. 15, No. 1, 63-82 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X08100147
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