CHAPTER 4
THE MARKED
"The difference between tattooed and non-tattooed people is that we don't care if you're not tattooed." Anonymous
As tattooing has moved from the margins to the mainstream of US middle-class culture (Blanchard 1991, Hardy 1982, Tucker 1981), it has become less linked with "deviancy" and has become a more culturally important form of visual communication. Earlier literature on tattooing has not focused on its cultural meaning. However, resistance to control forms and operates at this site of cultural meaning. It is in this context that I will examine the cultural meanings that tattooing has for women in the US, and investigate how it may function in opposition to the dominant female beauty ideal/standard. The majority of research on the cultural significance of tattooing in the West has focused on the psychological aspects of tattooing, especially in terms of deviance (gangs, prisoners, etc.), without much exploration of the range of its communicative aspects. A notable exception is Sanders' ethnography (1989), but his emphasis is on the exchange aspects of the practice and the development of tattooing as an art world (Becker 1982).
Tattooing is at least a 5,000-year-old form of visual communication -- an ancient practice with multiple origins. As a socially significant practice, it has long been the object of anthropological inquiry, most specifically in non-Western contexts. In these contexts, tattooing practices mainly have public ritual and economic significance (Faris 1972, Strathern and Strathern 1971). Historically, tattooing in the West did not have such meaning.
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Whatever the actual practice, tattooing is a type of social communication, as well as being a personal form of body art or decoration, and these two different types of meaning cannot be separated. It is as a form of visual communication that tattooing acquires its meaning "by transforming the natural body into a cultural body" (Brain 1979:15). Tattoos serve to write the cultural order on the body and in this way take on value. In his research in Russian prisons, Bronnikov notes that "tattoos are another kind of secret language, understandable only to the initiated" (1993:53).
Tattooing carries cultural meanings in the United States. It is communication "given off;" that is, it is nonverbal and relates to the presentation of self and to the impression one desires to make (Goffman 1959). Tattooing is permanent and thus takes on great significance in a culture dominated by impermanent images. Tattooing is not fashion; it differs from clothing and other adornment in its permanence. It is unavoidably of the person -- like a signature on the skin, it is a mark taken to affect and reflect the presentation of self in everyday life (Blanchard 1991).
The context of a tattoo is the body -- a tattoo cannot be viewed separately from the living being. It is a form of social communication and provides symbolic information about the bearer. Tattooing must be understood in its cultural context because "...irreversible modes of body amount to a quintessential imposition of a conceptual -- cultural -- order on nature" (Rubin 1988:16). This cultural mark also must function within the greater cultural order of body codes. "These conventions say cogent things about the values of any given society -- urban, as well as tribal" (Vlahos 1979:5) and form a map of body meanings. Among other forms of dress and body decoration, tattooing stands out in its permanence. Its enduring nature sets it apart.
Tattooing is a body modification practice which involves putting ink under the skin with some form of sharp object. Types of ink and needles vary as much as images and meaning. Woad, the material used by the Picts of northern Scotland, had a characteristic blue color. The Inuit pull thread with charcoal under the skin which also gives a distinctive raised effect. In Japan,
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bamboo sticks remain the preferred "needles" to push ink, reflecting their respect for tradition. In the West, an electric tattoo gun that can hold many needles at once is a standard tool, while homemade tattoos are often done with a sewing needle and India ink. Whichever method is employed, a tattoo results.
The earliest evidence of tattooing comes from the recent find of a preserved body, the so-called "ice man," in the Alps. It has been dated to around 5,000 BP. This particular example also shakes up conventional wisdom of tattooing in other cultures as being solely ritual-related and/or affiliative markings. In addition to cross (x) marks on his knees, there are stripes on his back which would not have been viewed by the community and seem to serve more of a private function. The next earliest example, the mummified body of a tattooed priestess of Hathor (IXth Dynasty), comes from Egypt in 4200 BP (Rubin 1988:15).
Tattooing has never been a widespread practice in areas with dark-skinned peoples. In most of Africa, for example, body modification generally involves scarification, a process of creating keloid scars which stand out on skin (Rubin 1988:15, Sanders 1989:8). Margo DeMello, in her research on prison tattoos in the US, also notes that black prisoners are not often tattooed (1993:10). On dark skin, tattooing is not as effective as distinctive marking.
Tattooing was fairly widespread in other areas of the world, however. It was common in Europe until it was banned and driven underground (where it survived) by the rising Judeo-Christian empire. Denounced as a pagan practice which desecrated the human body, tattooing became a symbol of unbelievers. Long before this, Judaism forbade permanent marks on the body. Here we see the Judeo-Christian roots of later puritanical ideas about the need to control bodies and of the sacredness of the unblemished body.
In the West, the zeal to wipe out indigenous "pagan" tattooing practices in Europe was transferred to the "Other" during colonialism. Brought to the West by sailors and others engaged
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in colonial enterprise, tattooing earned the reputation of being "primitive" or "savage," thus deviant. Missionaries and colonial governments banned tattooing and other body art practices, thereby acknowledging their powerful symbolic significance. The colonizers saw any continued tattooing as an act of rebellion against their power. Ideas about tattooing in the West are historically linked with notions of deviance and "savagery." Tattoos on the "Other," whether they are Picts in Scotland or Maori in New Zealand, become proof of these peoples' inferiority.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, entrepreneurs kidnapped many indigenous people to the West to be exhibited as freaks in circus side shows. "However...the net affect of all this new information was largely to widen rather than narrow the cultural gulf, and to reinforce the European/Euro-American sense of cultural superiority." (Rubin 1988:14). Tattoos served to create the boundaries of civilization and reinforce the "savage slot" of the primitive. Other than sailors, few Westerners were tattooed until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Westerners did not get tattooed en masse until the invention of the electric tattoo gun in the 1880s. A US invention, this tool aided in the speed and ease of the designs' application as well as quality.
D.W. Hambly's The History of Tattooing and its Significance (1927), published in the early days of institutional anthropology, stands alone in many respects: it is still one of the most complete histories of world tattoo practices and it is a positive account of tattooing in non-Western cultures. He goes into great detail describing social reasons for these tattoos. However, when he discusses "modern tattooing" in the West, he allies tattooing mainly with criminals, soldiers, sailors, deviants and anti-socials. For Hambly, the "savage" is acceptable when it fulfills specific functions in the social order, but when he discusses Europe, he demeans the practices as "pre-Christian" and abnormal.
Historically, tattoos on women were rare in the West. Although more prevalent and diverse in the non-Western context, women's tattooing is most often discussed in terms of how their tattooing relates to men -- for marriage and fertility (Hambly 1927). In the US "...because of the
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persistent stigma attached to the practice, no one knows exactly how many women are tattooed" (Tucker 1976:29). In the 19th century, only cosmetic tattooing was common for women. At the turn of the century, some heavily-tattooed women worked in circus sideshows. Tattooing became a kind of economic freedom for them (Scutt 1974:156-60). After W.W.II, "...tattooing became a personal, eccentric, and comparatively rare mark of identification for women" (Tucker 1976:29).
Later in the 20th century, tattooing in the West became the public province of bikers, outlaws, soldiers and prostitutes -- groups seen as deviants and rebels against social control -- or it remained private and thus no challenge to power. By 1962 tattooing was restricted to people age 21 and over or illegal in 32 states. By 1968, over 47 major cities, including New York, had passed ordinances against tattooing.
Much of the tattooing in the West, which came to be known as the International Folk Style, was characterized by standardized, uninventive "flash," or designs, for whom the primary clientele was young and male. The development of a "new" or avant-garde style has its roots in the 1960s, when more artists and women got tattooed. During this era of hippies and the gay/lesbian movement, more people were concerned with taking back control of their own bodies. Arnold Rubin describes this period as a "tattoo renaissance" sparked by an interest in non-Western cultures and a loosening of attitudes toward the body. More men and women became both tattooed and tattoo artists (Rubin 1983). The rise in tattooing is even stronger and more evident today, as the practice has spread to mainstream middle-class culture (Blanchard 1991, Hardy 1982, Tucker 1981). For women, "...this rise in popularity [is attributed] in part to the new sense of freedom and rebellion against traditional gender identification which has been one result of the women's movement" (Tucker 1976:29).
While there have always been those flirting on the edge of acceptability, this is really the first time in the Western context that there is more than marginal interest in tattooing. "In fact, Marcia Tucker (1981) insists that the growing vogue of tattoo as a basic art form is actually a byproduct of
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the development of photography: people could look at pictures of tattoos without being confronted by the physicality of the body beneath the tattoo" (Blanchard 1991:16). Reproduction flaunts the deviance, invites us to look in without really changing the basic assumptions. We can now view the tattoo artistry detached from the person. The Tattootime publication upholds this view of tattooing as an art in titles of issues such as, "New Tribalism" and "Art from the Heart." The tattooists inside see themselves as artists working out their personal visions or working with others to create a special one-of-a-kind tattoo.
The popularity of the pop-sociology book, Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Art and Ritual (1989), attests to the level of current interest in tattoos. The book takes the underground interest and the fetish and makes it public. It focuses on tattooing, piercing, scarification and the boundaries of body art. The book is an essentially postmodern document comprised of twenty-four interviews (only six are women) with people who are actively involved in this world. Editors V. Vale's and Andrea Juno's premise is that "amidst an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to 'change the world' individuals are changing what they do have power over: their own bodies" (Vale and Juno 1989:4). They characterize the growing revival as the dream of and desire for a more ideal society. "In this Postmodern Epoch in which all the art of the past has been assimilated, consumerized, advertised and replicated, the last artistic territory resisting co-optation and commodification by museum and gallery remains the Human Body" (Vale and Juno 1989:5).
Tattoos can be a form of resistance to capitalist commodity culture. They cannot be easily discarded or changed at the whim of the marketplace. The practice remains artisanal, as tattoos are not mass-reproducible, and each body and experience of the tattoo differs. The tattoo remains an individual decision, not subject to the laws of the market, and is thus removed from the realm of fashion and commodification of appearance.
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These body modifications involve pain and cannot be simulated. In a world of mass-produced images, the body is the last realm of first-hand experiences. Tattoos bear personal meaning and they are a permanent, almost irreversible mark. Tattoos are beyond fashion, which is about impermanence, although there may be elements of fashion in terms of what images people choose. In some respects, class and social group affect these choices.
Although not a fashion itself, tattoos have become widely commented on as the new "cool" thing. They still retain enough of a deviant reputation to be "sexy" for the media in their search for new and exotic topics. With the increased visibility of tattoos comes the booming business of temporary tattoos, which turns tattoos into fashion and commodification.
Jean-Paul Gaultier, the fashion designer who gave the world Madonna in bullet bras, presented lots of body piercing (most of it fake) and sheer shirts with tattoo patterns printed on them in his fall collection of 1993. Suzy Menkes, New York Times fashion writer, and other designers dubbed this move an "antifashion" period, pointing out that right now it seems the body is actually more important than the clothes. Menkes also noted that "those signs of subservience find their opposite in the women who flaunt body decoration today" (Menkes 1993:9).
In her "Style" column in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Patricia McLaughlin's "Forever or a Day" regards the current interest in tattooing in a negative light. She says these are "not the same people who buy Chanel" (1993:31). McLaughlin sees tattooing's drawback as its permanence and devotes the majority of her article to discussing methods for removing tattoos with laser and plastic surgery and to temporary tattoos. She asks, "so people who get tattoos are looking for an abnormal one [image]? 'Well, that's what they're getting,' he [Dr. Dzubow, University of Pennsylvania dermatologic surgeon] says. 'I'm not saying they're looking for it.'" (McLaughlin 1993:31). This statement, ironically, comes from someone who earns his living
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mutilating bodies to make them fit a societally-constructed ideal. A color photograph of two women accompanies McLaughlin's article, one with real tattoos and the other with temporary tattoos, designed to present temporary and real tattoos as interchangeable.
Interest in both permanent and temporary tattoos is at unprecedented levels. Fashion magazines portray women with real tattoos as rebellious and independent, but because society doesn't want women to be overly so, they push temporary tattoos as a more acceptable alternative. Ad copy promises women that temporary tattoos will let them be "wild" and "add instant attitude," encouraging women to be bold -- but not permanently so.
A Newsweek blurb underscores this message: "Removable tattoos: just stick 'em on, then scrape 'em off. The look for today's models, who don't really want grinning panthers on their arms forever" (1992:8). The promotional language in a flyer for "Gaytoos," temporary tattoos for a gay clientele, sums it up: "fun, safe, easy...the way life should be." Because this ersatz tattooing lacks permanence and meaning it is, really, the antithesis of tattooing.
The increased media interest in tattooing is fueled in part by celebrity and model tattooing. This interest and move into mainstream culture brings up the issue of appropriation. Foucault discusses this issue in relation to communities of resistance, where the language of resistance is often recuperated by the dominant culture. This engulfment results in the appropriation of the symbols of resistance which are then sold back to society. Much of the visual and verbal dissent of the 1960s provided excellent fodder for advertising agencies. But not all appropriation has to negate the impact of a practice. Although tattooing may be appropriated in more circles now, this is not necessarily a sign that its power as resistance is gone, that it no longer shocks so completely, but a sign that it has had an affective power. If a goal is to dismantle rigid standards of conformity, then given the individual nature of tattooing in the US today, its increase helps destroy those standards.
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Even though it may now be regarded as art, tattooing is not necessarily more accepted by the mainstream; but because of the media hype tattoos are more exposed. Society's new found interest in tattooing has more to do with voyeuristic curiosity than anything else. Tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy states, "tattooing is still not socially acceptable and probably never will be, unless it happens way down the line -- which is kinda nice. If everybody had 'em, who'd want 'em....Ultimately it's a really statement of freedom and I think that's what flips people out. Tattoos throw people a curve in this society because there isn't really an acceptable context, especially for all those weird tattoos now" (Vale and Juno 1989:51). People often accept tattoos more readily if the tattooed person got them at a young age or says they were a mistake. Henry Rollins, a former member of the early 1980s hardcore band "Black Flag," who has been heavily tattooed since that time, says that although tattoos are more common, he believes "they still alienate, intimidate, and cause enough interest to make them a vehicle of personal expression" (Rollins 1991:38).
In the book Customizing the Body (1989), Clinton Sanders looks at the development of tattooing as an art world, but he also examines the tattoo within the realm of visual communication, as giving information and shaping social situations. He discusses the tattoo within its greater cultural setting. "How closely one meets the cultural criteria for beauty is of key social and personal import" (Sanders 1989:1). People who meet these criteria have more success in areas including economics, so to be physically deviant is risky business. The tattoo is still socially deviant and demonstrates a disregard for norms:
While the pattern shows considerable historical variability, in Western societies purposive body alteration has been, and continues to be, primarily a mechanism for demonstrating one's disaffection from the mainstream. Tattooing, body piercing and, to a lesser degree, body sculpting are employed to proclaim publicly one's special attachment to deviant groups, certain activities, self-concepts, or primary associates (Sanders 1989:2).
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It is this connection to deviance that gives tattooing power. "The power of tattoo, like that of street graffiti is primarily derived from its ability to outrage members of conventional society" (Sanders 1989:162).
Marcia Tucker acknowledges the place of tattooing as an art form. "The exoticism of the art lies in the idea that tattooing involves the forbidden or taboo. It is most often associated with fringe or criminal elements of society" (Tucker 1981:42). She stresses that the tattoo still has negative connotations in the minds of most people. "To many they indicate irresponsibility, atavism, rootlessness, sexual licentiousness and the more overt and objectionable forms of stereotypical masculinity" (Tucker 1989:42). But she contends that there is a new group of tattooists and tattooed emerging with new ideas and imagery, and implies that they might be able to counteract this negative view.
While there are more tattooists today than ever creating works of great skill and artistry, they remain connected to the history of the practice. "These other creative practices [non-tattooing art] were never saddled with the intense public distaste and on-going association with social deviance that has surrounded, and continues to impede the legitimation of, tattooing" (Sanders 1989:35). People with tattoos still often need to hide them because of the response they provoke. Even though the tattoo may be more of an art form, it remains controversial. "The idea of permanently altering one's body is a difficult one for many to accept" (Tucker 1981:47).
In Modern Primitives, tattoo artist Vyvyn Lazonga puts the problem into focus: "I always felt strong and powerful about it, and I still do. But I try to keep my arms covered if I'm taking care of business -- I sorta wear a uniform according to what I'm doing. I want to get my business done quickly and easily, and I don't like having any hindrance or prejudice against me" (Vale and Juno 1989:125).
Experts still often analyze the practice of tattooing from a psychological or criminal perspective; seeing it as pathological, something that happens in prisons:
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The tattooing of gangs and groups is considered anti-social, since it symbolizes individual allegiances to ideals outside the ideals of mass democratic society. Tattooing and scarification on the skin of a drug addict, a Punk, or an ex-convict are permanent reminders that these individuals have refused to conform, and authorities struggle ceaselessly to suppress the marks just as they struggle to suppress the anti-social groups (Brain 1979:162).
Implicit in this idea of physical deviance, of the "flawed body" that does not conform to standards, is that it indicates a flawed mind. On an "AM Philadelphia" (1990) show on tattooed women, host Wally Kennedy repeatedly asked his three heavily-tattooed women guests why they are tattooed -- they are beautiful and articulate he says, so what would make them choose to disfigure themselves? While repeatedly making faces at the audience to show his distaste, Kennedy suggests that there must be something wrong with the women. However, the women on the show and those who call in talk about getting tattoos as an act of freedom: after divorce or breaking up with husbands and boyfriends who forbade it. The talk about doing for themselves, and about loving their bodies.
Generally held in a convention center or hotel (in 1992 at the Meadowlands Hilton in New Jersey), the National Tattoo Convention juxtaposes loving one's own body and taking pride in tattoos with negative public reaction. At the conference, there is a room open to the "public" where they can see tattoos being done, check out new flash, buy videos, books, photos and jewelry, meet famous tattoo artists and just generally be around tattooed people. A large number of the people on display are women. Heavily tattooed bikers sit in the hall of a posh and ritzy hotel without fear of being thrown out, but the distaste is clear on the faces of the staff working and other hotel guests. Arnold Rubin notes that:
[g]iven their heavy loading of cultural values, the media of irreversible body art are taken for granted by insiders and arouse strong (predominately negative) feelings among outsiders--usually fascination blended with distaste or even repugnance. Institutionalized repression is one frequent reaction. For present day Europeans and Euro-Americans such reactions may be seen as a response to the sense of potency associated with body art which has been largely neutralized (by familiarity and facility) in other areas of art-making (1988:16).
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Besides being linked with deviancy, tattoos remain outside the cultural standard of female appearance, signifying alienation from and resistance to the social control of idealized images. Tattoos negate those standard images. While motivations for tattooing are multiple, controlling one's own body and creating unique, personal cultural meaning are central themes in the "new" tattooing. Resistance to traditional appearance standards can constitute part of a new social order. While a "self" can be fashioned through images (Finkelstein 1991), the permanence of tattoos and the realness of the associated pain ensure against impermanence and irreality.
In her article "Girls About Town," Jan Seeger (1993) interviews three extensively-tattooed women who talk about others' assumptions of what it means to be tattooed. The women, all young, stressed the idea that tattooing transcends fashion and that it is not a trend. They say that what has changed over the past decade or so is that it's now easier for people who want tattoos. "...[P]eople are afraid. I work as a nanny, and I was lucky to find a family that was willing to look beyond my tattoos. But that's very rare -- very, very rare actually" (Seeger 1993:3).
Tattooing absolutely has different meanings for men and women. "It is, of course, significant that in Western culture men choose to have their bodies marked more frequently than women" (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 1992:152). Mascia-Lees and Sharpe in Tattoo, Torture and Mutilation and Adornment (1992) discuss the story "The Tattooer," by Tanizaki Junishiro, and the film "Tattoo." In both texts, a man forcibly tattoos a woman to exert his control. This marking underlies the status of women as male-constructed and male-controlled. To ensure that women will conform to male cultural values and to control women's bodies, each man inscribes what amounts to a stigma on the woman. With these tattoos, her mobility in society, socially and economically, is limited, therefore only he will love her and she must remain with him. That
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tattooing is used as a metaphor of control in literature is not surprising, given its actual historical use. The Nazis and other fascist and authoritarian states have used or proposed using tattooing as a means of controlling populations by marking certain people as deviant.
Lynn Proctor in "My Tattoo! My Body!" discusses this problem. "When it was first done, I used to cover it up because I was worried about what people might say or think, but then I thought 'Why should I?' Now I buy t-shirts and dresses without backs. It's a big boost to my confidence -- people come up and talk to me about the tattoo and wouldn't otherwise. But I don't like the snide comments of women at the swimming pool 'Look at the girl with the tattoo!' -- they wouldn't do that if I was a man" (Proctor 1988:41).
That tattooing is gendered is made clear by Sam Steward, Ph.D., an English professor who left academia to be a tattoo artist in Chicago and who kept notes for Alfred Kinsey on the sexual motivations for tattooing. He asserts (in the few instances that he mentions them) that "ladies" don't go into tattoo shops and that "nice girls don't get tattooed" (Steward 1991:128). He characterizes women who get tattoos as ugly, "lank-haired skags, with ruined landscapes of faces and sagging hose and run-over heels" (Steward 1991:127) and as lesbians who scare men away. Steward lauds tattoos as transgressive for men, but he did not accept women's desire to rebel:
When I finally discovered the trouble that always surrounded the tattooing of women, I established a policy of refusing to tattoo a woman unless she were twenty-one, married and accompanied by her husband, with documentary proof to show their marriage. The only exception to this was the lesbians, and they had to be over 21 and prove it. In those tight and unpermissive 1950s, too many scenes with irate husbands, furious parents, indignant boyfriends and savage lovers made it necessary to accept female customers only with great care (Steward 1991:127).
R.W.B. Scutt's Art, Sex and Symbol: The Mystery of Tattooing, an informative but non-theoretical history of world tattooing, includes a chapter on tattooed women entitled "Sex Appeal." He echoes Steward and exposes the sexist attitude within the tattoo world: "the fair sex,
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in general, is not prone to acquiring tattoos.... For other than those who have been institutionalized, few women approve of tattooing, let alone indulge in it. It would be fair to state that most women who possess tattoos gained them under or through the influence of their menfolk" (Scutt 1974:143). Although Scutt mentions that tattooed women face a greater stigma women than tattooed men, rather than relate this to women's secondary status in the society he reinforces the view of women as sexual objects:
Most of these prefer to remain anonymous, because of the peculiar world in which we live, where a tattoo makes a woman not quite nice to know. Certainly most girls today regard the practice with utter horror, and would never be seen anywhere near a tattoo shop. This in spite of the fact that small tattoos in the right site can be quite decorative and sexually attractive (Scutt 1974:144).
He concludes the chapter with a discussion of the cosmetic uses of tattooing for women.
Sanders also discusses women's choice of tattoos as something to enhance and beautify the body. This is curious since in his discussion of tattooing as a mark to separate one's self from others' control, three of his main examples are women and divorce is a main issue. Sanders remains trapped in the paradigm of femininity that views women's appearance choices as acts to satisfy the male gaze. He notes that in terms of placement men choose the arm, while women choose breast, hip, lower abdomen, back, shoulder (the bicep is an unconventional choice for women); men's tattoos are larger and generally identity symbols; and women choose girlish "feminine" designs.
The sex-based conventions regarding body site are largely determined by the different symbolic function of the tattoo for men and women. Women tend to regard the tattoo (commonly a small, delicate design) as a permanent body decoration intended for personal pleasure and the enjoyment of those with whom they are most intimate. The chosen tattoos are, therefore, placed on parts of the body most commonly seen by those with whom women have primary relationships. Since tattoos on women are especially stigmatizing, placement on private parts of the body allows women to retain unsullied identities when in contact with casual strangers (Sanders 1989:48-9).
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The typical tattoo client has changed over the past 15 years. While this change may not represent a clear "trend," class and gender lines are blurring. As growing numbers of women get tattoos, more women are becoming tattooists. In 1991, Outlaw Biker Magazine began a special series, "Tattooing By Women," with an open call for women tattooists to submit a short biography and photographs of their work and themselves. Issue two is subtitled "The Feminine Touch" and the cover depicts a "sexy" woman in revealing clothing holding a tattoo machine. The premise of the magazine is that women tattooists are somehow different, more feminine, creating softer, finer-lined designs. Most of the women in the magazine, encouraged by their husbands and boyfriends to begin tattooing, are more traditional tattooists and say they entered the business because men were not doing enough "feminine" work. However, there are other women, a couple are featured in the magazine, who do not fit the demographics of women traditionally involved in the tattoo world. These "new" tattooists are strikingly different in their appearance, reasons for tattooing and in the type of work that they do. It is these women who are degendering tattooing.
Change and resistance upsets order. Tattooing is one way for women to alter their appearance which in turn can break cultural codes and call roles into question. Women have been in the forefront of the tattoo renaissance of the past 25 years (Nadler 1983, Rubin 1988, Tucker 1976, Vale and Juno 1989, Webb 1979). And the in past 10 or so years, more women have gotten publicly visible tattoos.
There is a parallel between prison tattooing and women with public tattoos. Tattoos, "... particularly those on the face, neck and hands, make the body especially obvious and more importantly, express to the convict, other prisoners, and the outside world the social position which that body occupies" (DeMello 1993:10). In Beauty Secrets, Joolz, a punk woman with a radically nonstandard appearance, puts this more concretely: "The tattoos are the thing actually.
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The scarlet hair you can just cut it off if you get tired of it. But when you take the step of having big tattoos so close to the hands, you really make a permanent statement" (Chapkis 1986:116).
Again, the tattoo is about the power of rebellion. Tattoos are illegal in prison and are not accepted on women. "The prison tattoo is a 'subversive bodily act' in that it re-establishes the convict's authority over his own body and challenges the system which attempts to control it" (DeMello 1993:13). It represents permanent willful defiance. After everything else is taken away, the rebellious body remains.
In Russian prisons, about 70-98 percent of inmates are tattooed although there is a prohibition against tattooing (Bronnikov 1993:50). Again, the power of tattoos is their opposition to authority. The eight-pointed star on an inmate's knee means "I do not bow to other powers. No one can make me fall to my knees" (Bronnikov 1993:53). In "Tattoos: Individual Art," Anne A. Nadel quotes a young woman from eastern Maryland who echoes this sentiment: "In today's world, what we can and can't do with our bodies is being regulated by the powers that be. The mark I wear says I am the only one who controls me..." (1992:B1).
The tattooing (and piercing) phenomenon and its defiant attitude was a cover story in the Village Voice in an article titled "Primitive Culture." Guy Trebay sensationalizes the practices and treats the practitioners of body art like a freak show because they do not conform and refuse to be quiet about it. One of the queer interviewees, Ron, states "It's about this is my body, period. It's spiritual and it's erotic, but it's also saying to society 'Fuck You.' You don't have control over me" (1991:38). One of the women he interviewed discusses smashing beauty standards for women and creating personal standards of beauty which say "fuck the system" -- and which are permanent. Although his informants are direct about resisting control, Trebay glosses over the issues they bring up.
In the zine subculture, tattoos for women are popular. Zines are self-produced, low-budget vehicles for expression not commonly carried by the mainstream media. In an article entitled
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"Tattooing for Women" in the zine Sweet Tart, out of Decatur, Georgia, a self-described working-class Francophone woman relates an encounter:
Two years later, when I got a tattoo on my wrist, the same man told me once again that I would regret it, when I would be required (how? by whom?) to wear 'a slinky bracelet.' Still, it's part of our culture that dictates that women don't get tattoos, or, if they do, small, cute, and discrete ones. It's a fact that most women get tattooed on the shoulder-blade, on the ankle, or near their pubic areas (1993:25-6).
The article focuses on dealing with "crap" about tattooing, "claiming" your body and expressing individuality. The anonymous author writes, "When I see other women with cool and visible tattoos, I feel proud of them, proud for what they have done, and for the bravado that it takes to wear a badge, the stigma of tattooing, so openly" (Sweet Tart 1993:26).
Tattooing for women has potential for resistance to control through the power of deviancy, especially when women are publicly and non-traditionally tattooed. Who are these women who are resisting both greater societal standards of "femininity" and those within the tattoo world? What do their tattoos look like?