Navigating Tattooed Women S Bodies

This book explores how we understand tattooed women’s bodies in the UK – through the lens of gender and class. Unpacking themes which focus on how femininity is embodied, and how unwritten rules are broken or followed, Charlotte Dann demonstrates how meaning is key to our understanding of female body art.

This book explores how we understand tattooed women’s bodies in the UK – through the lens of gender and class. Unpacking themes which focus on how femininity is embodied, and how unwritten rules are broken or followed, Charlotte Dann demonstrates how meaning is key to our understanding of female body art.

This book provides insight into the subculture of women with tattoos. Thompson visits tattoos parlors, talking to female tattoo artists and the women they ink, and she attends tattoo conventions and Miss Tattoo pageants where heavily tattooed women congregate to share their mutual love for the art form. Thompson finds that, despite the stigma and social opposition heavily tattooed women face, many feel empowered by their tattoos and strongly believe they are creating a space for self-expression that also presents a positive body image.

"In this provocative work full of intriguing female characters from tattoo history, Margot Mifflin makes a persuasive case for the tattooed woman as an emblem of female self-expression." —Susan Faludi Bodies of Subversion is the first history of women’s tattoo art, providing a fascinating excursion to a subculture that dates back into the nineteenth-century and includes many never-before-seen photos of tattooed women from the last century. Author Margot Mifflin notes that women’s interest in tattoos surged in the suffragist 20s and the feminist 70s. She chronicles: * Breast cancer survivors of the 90s who tattoo their mastectomy scars as an alternative to reconstructive surgery or prosthetics. * The parallel rise of tattooing and cosmetic surgery during the 80s when women tattooists became soul doctors to a nation afflicted with body anxieties. * Maud Wagner, the first known woman tattooist, who in 1904 traded a date with her tattooist husband-to-be for an apprenticeship. * Victorian society women who wore tattoos as custom couture, including Winston Churchill’s mother, who wore a serpent on her wrist. * Nineteeth-century sideshow attractions who created fantastic abduction tales in which they claimed to have been forcibly tattooed. “In Bodies of Subversion, Margot Mifflin insightfully chronicles the saga of skin as signage. Through compelling anecdotes and cleverly astute analysis, she shows and tells us new histories about women, tattoos, public pictures, and private parts. It’s an indelible account of an indelible piece of cultural history.” —Barbara Kruger, artist

In this provocative work, full of intriguing female characters from tattoo history, Margot Mifflin makes a persausive case for the tattooed women as an emblem of female self expression. Illustrated with over 200 photographs, this is the seminal and first book of its type to discuss and portray women and tattoos, which have traditionally been a male preserve.

Drawing on interviews with women and queer tattoo artists from across the US, UK and Australia, this book explores their experiences in what has historically been a male-dominated industry to reveal how tattooing has undergone a ‘gender turn’ and a subsequent shift in gender relations.

Providing a radical rethink that integrates tattoos and other body modifications within health, wellbeing, and positive psychology, this book disrupts the narrative of stigmatisation that so often surrounds these practices to welcome a broader discussion of the benefits they can offer.

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality, and Culture is an intersectional, diverse, and comprehensive collection essential for students and researchers examining the intersection of sexuality and culture. The book seeks to reflect established theories while anticipating future developments within gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. A range of international contributors, including leaders in their field, provide insights into dominant and marginalised subjects. Comprising over 30 chapters, the volume is comprised into five thematic parts: Identifying, Embodying, Making, Doing, and Resisting. Topics explored include homonormativity, poetry, video games, menstruation, fatness, disability, sex toys, sex work, BDSM, dating apps, body modifications, and politics and activism. This is an important and unique collection aimed at scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners across cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.