Tattooed Bodies

The essays collected in Tattooed Bodies draw on a range of theoretical paradigms and empirical knowledge to investigate tattoos, tattooing, and our complex relations with marks on skin. Engaging with diverse disciplinary perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the sheer diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos throughout history and across cultures. Essays explore conceptualizations of tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while utilizing theoretical perspectives to interpret tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others. Tattooed Bodies prompts readers to explore a few significant questions: Are tattoos unique phenomena or an art medium in need of special theoretical exploration? If so, what conceptual paradigms and theories might best shape our understanding of tattoos and their complex ubiquity in world cultures and histories?

"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

Cultural sensibilities about tattooing are discussed within historical context and in relation to broader trends in body modification, such as cosmetic surgery, dieting, and piercing.

Whether fully adorning a biker’s arms or nestled cutely, and discretely, above one’s ankle, tattoos are a commonplace part of modern fashion and expression. But as modern as this permanent accessory can seem, the tattoo, in fact, has ancient and distant roots in Oceana, where it had been practiced for centuries before being taught to Western seafarers. This collection offers both a fascinating look at the early exchanges between European and Pacific cultures surrounding the tattoo and the tattoo’s rising popularity in the West up to the modern day. It is also the first book to thoroughly document the history of tattoos in Oceana itself. The essays here first document the complex cultural interactions between Oceana and Europe that had sailors, whalers, and explorers bringing tattoos home from their voyages. They then move on to issues surrounding encounter, representation, and exchange, exploring the ways missionaries and the colonial state influenced local tattoo practices, and the ways tattoo culture has since developed, both in the West and the Pacific. Stunningly illustrated, this unique and fascinating history will appeal to anyone interested in the history of tattoos, the culture of Oceania, or native arts.

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.

Drawing on the works of a number of postmodern theorists, this study suggests that the tattooed body is symptomatic of a general process of marking and being marked and is a social production of identity and difference. Shifting the focus away from what the tattooed body means to what it does, this work analyzes how it functions and what effects it produces. It challenges the ways in which identity and difference are discursively produced, particularly in psychological, criminological, and counter-cultural discourses. The writings of such theorists as Foucault, Levinas, Barthes, and Lingis are scrutinized to reveal how their discourse interprets the tattooed body as simply an aberrant threat to the body or simply a positive counter-cultural challenge. These theories are supplanted with this unique approach to notions of subjectivity, textuality, ethics, and pleasure and to the relationships among them. This examination of the role of the body in social, political, and ethical relations will attract scholars from a number of disciplines, including cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy, visual arts, sociology, and English. It will also appeal to critics and practitioners in contemporary practices of body modification.

An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a more middle-class movement in the period from the 1970s to the present.

The seminal volume on body painting and adornment by the world’s preeminent photographers of African culture. Following the international masterpiece Africa Adorned, Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have focused on the traditions of body painting spanning the vastly unique cultures of the African continent. In a contemporary world so fascinated with tattoos and piercings, Beckwith and Fisher document the origins of these fashionable adornments as passed down through African tribal culture. Featured are portraits of the richly colored, detailed, and exquisite body paintings of the Surma, Karo, Maasai, Himba, and Hamar peoples, among others. Drawing from expeditions in the field and firsthand experiences with African peoples and cultures over the past thirty years and with more than 250 spectacular photographs, this is the definitive work on the expressiveness and imagination of African cultural painting of the human body.