"Visible bodies: power, subordination and identity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world".

Gwenda Morgan, Peter Rushton, "Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"

In eighteenth-century Britain and North America, newspaper advertisements were the primary means of publishing accounts of troublesome people and requesting further information about them. Army deserters and runaway convicts, slaves, servants, apprentices or husbands, are all described in great detail through this culture of advertisement. Knowledge of the bodies of social subordinates therefore was an essential means of controlling them, and through print culture, this private knowledge became public. Bodies of ordinary people were revealed to a wider audience by those who knew them, and were made available for public consumption. These descriptions also demonstrate different cultures of self-presentation, the ways men and women decorated their bodies, and, through marks and clothing, sustained their identities. This study compares American and English newspapers, the contrasting languages of description, particularly of color, and the different ways that intimate knowledge of the body was made public. The advertisements show that while eighteenth-century bodies were often marked by hardship, accident and corporal punishment, they were also decorated by words and symbols expressing pride and defiance. Only at the end of the eighteenth century was this culture of advertisement replaced by official processes of inspection and description of bodies of the poor and the deviant.