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Chapter 1 opens the terms of exploration for the study—defining the “hero” as one who acts at the intersection of warrior, royal, and founding roles. Biblical authors paid significant attention to the bodies of their heroes and saw the heroic body as a primal source of meaning. Moreover, these authors saw bodily features as communicating a message about that character’s story and fate. These heroic bodies eventually tell a story—narrating Israel’s composition as a corporate and national body, then the flourishing of that body in royal exemplars, and then the dissolution of that body. The chapter gives a genealogy of how various scholars have explored the body as a site of interpretation, highlighting the different ways biblical interpreters have engaged with body themes. Other key problems are explored, such as the reticence of ancient authors to describe bodies and problems associated with comparing ancient texts with one another.

The American history of heavily tattooed women began in the circus sideshow, a place where women quickly outshone men with their double allure of tattoos and revealing flesh. Tattooing has always been considered culturally deviant, and when women cross the line into heavy tattooing, they face intense social sanctions. However, many women are drawn to heavy tattooing as part of their self-expression. Tattooing provides a potential resistance to gender norms and an oppressive beauty culture. However, once women start collecting publicly visible tattoos, they often encounter resistance from their families, employers, and strangers. Employment discrimination is a prevalent issue for the participants, and they devise strategies to reconcille their love of body art with institutional norms. Heavily tattooed women are increasingly represented in mainstream television, and with the increased representation comes misinformation. How do these images affect the participants? Heavily tattooed women provide a different perspective on feminism, theories of the body, and the postmodern condition. While tattooing culture has long been androcentric in focus, Covered in Ink provided a much needed balance with women’s perspectives on the practice.

In this chapter the author analyzes the ritualistic inner experience in female sacred places. The author shows the centrality of the body and the “ritual of the body in motion.” As mentioned in the book’s introduction, in the Holy Land, places of veneration and rituals are based on canonical texts or mythologies of particular saints. As such, the assumption was that rituals are a product of texts and their translation into action. However, this chapter shows different dynamics of these rituals. Although the canon and its physical manifestations are robust, it is mostly “the body in motion” that shapes the experience.