CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
"The transgression does not deny the taboo, but transcends it and completes it." Georges Bataille
I come to the topic of politics of appearance as anything but a disinterested observer. Tattoos trigger a reaction in almost everyone: stories of their own tattoos, or their desire for or revulsion by tattoos. The phenomenon of tattooed women in the United States combines many threads of my interests -- feminism, politics of appearance, visual communication, tattooing and social change. I am, in a sense, working where I find myself.
My earliest memories of tattoos are from my father and are of their power and significance. My father, from the sticks of Oklahoma, got a tattoo of an American eagle as a 19-year-old while serving in the Army during the war in Vietnam. Whether because of his memories of the war, or the social stigma of tattoos (my mother and his family did not approve), he kept the tattoo hidden and still does not discuss it. His attitude made the mark all the more fascinating to me.
My personal involvement with tattooing and tattooed people began when I was a teen in the punk subculture during the late 70s/early 80s. I waited to get my first tattoo until 1990, when I finally found a design I wanted. The majority of my friends and acquaintances are also tattooed, and many are tattoo artists.
Tattooing still has the power to shock. It invites the gaze, says 'look at me.' The "new" tattooing of the last 10 or so years, says 'look at me and take me on my own terms.' For women
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this means look at me not as traditionally "femininely" tattooed or as deviant, but as something entirely other, not within existing categories.
My interest in this tattooing as a phenomenon stems from feminist thinking about gender and its social construction. Appearance norms ensure that there are two separate, distinct genders, each fitting into specific societal power dynamics. This control plays out on an economic level, also bolstering the status quo. Using anthropology as a theoretical paradigm, this phenomenon can be examined not only in terms of "why," or the psychology of it, but in terms of its broader cultural import. Anthropology provides a way to examine the personal, individual and social roles of tattooing.
This is a visual topic about images, tattoos, bodies. Therefore it is important to have a visual component as a central piece of the text, not simply as illustration. Photographic representations are important in this society. People want to "see" what is being written about. The visual element satisfies the demand for another level of information that verbal description does not provide.
No working models exist currently for doing anthropology and photography as a single project. Visual images are used to counter efforts to shift power, therefore it is important to include a visual element in research that attempts to challenge this. My photographs are still representations, but from an insider position where the subject is blurred and the boundaries collapse. My "insider" status does not mean I have access to the "truth," but it becomes important in my role of mediator. My insider status is useful in my discussion of the ways that visual and verbal representations control bodies.
Writing about the power of photographic representation, Jo Spence (1988) notes that certain ideas can be found in books or dug out of articles, but she chooses to deal with them photographically to make them more accessible to a wider audience. She calls for using photos not to "help others," but to examine where we find ourselves, those particular power relations we operate in.
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In my work examining resistance to idealized gender images, resistance is ultimately about change, the destruction or subversion of norms and about making choices for ourselves. I have not included the photographs to lobby for broad social acceptance of tattooing or as advertisements to be absorbed by consumer culture, but to change the idea that bodies that do not fit idealized appearance standards are worthy of being viewed.
This thesis is an experimental work. It is an attempt to bridge the gap between a narrowly-focused theoretical academic work and an undertheorized photo essay, and an attempt to create work that pragmatically employs a variety of media.
I will begin by discussing the connections between anthropology and photography and attempt to set my work within the historical context. This is important because both anthropology and photography have the institutional power to deploy visual and verbal images to shape and control people. Since I will be using both visual and verbal images, I wish to do so in a manner informed by both current practice and critique.
After this methodological and theoretical section, I will trace a theory of the body and social control, focusing on women's bodies. I am choosing gender as a site of contention for this particular topic. Although other factors such as "race," ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and disability impact on social control of the body, gender cuts across all of them.
Tattooing as a permanent body modification practice will be used to examine social control. Despite its long historical link to deviance in the West, tattooing is clearly a phenomenon on the rise in certain populations. I will present a brief history of tattooing and then place tattooing into its present-day context vis-a-vis women. The majority of written and photographic work on the subject fetishizes the tattoo and treats the tattooed person as sexual object or pathological. Even more current writing on tattooing as art or an "art world" (Becker 1982) obfuscates that this art is on a living, breathing person and cannot be separated from the individual and his/her relation to a particular set of cultural norms.
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The study of the cultural representation of women's bodies must take into account the day-to-day, or practical, lives of those bodies. Therefore, the next section will be a photo essay of women who have chosen to be tattooed within the last 10 to 15 years. My portraits of the women are accompanied by their own writings about their tattoos.
Finally, I will close by bringing together this information to show how in the US, women getting tattooed can be a form of personal resistance against gendered appearance standards and a way to subvert the social control of women's bodies.