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Body Billboards And Brand Colonization: Embodied Corporate Advertising In Postmodern Branding Culture, Brandon Hensley

Brandon O. Hensley

Body billboard advertising is a phenomenon that has emerged over the past decade. It involves tattooing corporate logos/messages on the flesh in ways that are visible to other people. These ads are "branded" on the bodies of individuals willing to rent out "spaces" to companies that pay to affix a corporate image/message on them. This paper seeks to examine this practice as it relates to a postmodern landscape where culture is mass produced, identity is unstable and subject to corporate domination, and living bodies are commodified in the reification of corporate presence in all facets of society. Body advertising is …