Benedict Patrick Archybald.
Q: I want my wife to remove her ex husbands name off her body. is this a reasonable request?
A: The body is a symbolically fraught territory. Following the concept of biopower from Foucault’s later work, domination and oppression begin with the control of the body, either through physical, social, religious, or psychological restrictions imposed by a ruling class. Western heteronormativity has long been interested in the domination of the female subject’s body through marriage, chastity, bikinis, make up, &ct. Indeed, it could be said that femininity can only exist when a woman’s body is elsewhere.
However, I have no idea who you are. If you are a woman, perhaps you are attempting to remove your wife from the matrix of heterosexual bondage. The alternative (that you are a man attempting to regulate your wife’s body) is too disgusting for me to consider at the moment. Therefore, I will proceed that you are a woman, albeit one who has jumped on the bandwagon of normalizing gay marriage.
Remember that one cannot escape from prior socialization or the dominant hegemony of social power. We are all inscribed in the fabric of society for better or worse (ie, worse). As such, a tattoo is a great example! It cannot simply be removed; instead, awkwardly scrawl over it with a sharpie each morning, creating an evocative palimpsest. Or, you can eliminate letters to create a new word or phrase, revealing the revolutionary contradiction at the heart of masculinity! Remember: you can’t spell Benedict Patrick Archybald without “end patriarchy”!