1. Mary Kosut, “Tattoo Narratives”
    1. Tattoos as a form of visual communication within a multiplicity of contexts; the tattooed body is communicative and active
    2. Sign vehicles: conveys and transports meaning, presentation of the everyday self; allows for a mobile and transient signifer of the self
      1. Meaningful for dentity and culture 
    3. “Grotesque and carnivalesque” – disrupting conventional standards of beauty, fighting against gender norms, something labeled as unappealing
      1. Mikhail Bakhtine: “the carnivalesque” → determined period where people can let loose, leave constraints of mundane social life
      2. “Carnival” comes before liturgical season of lent (40 days); eating meat, fried food, drinking, and costumes (transformation into something else) 
    4. Kosat wants to account for diversity when studying tattoos; body is both biological and cultural, produced and constructed by its environment, and the different experiences and identities need to be accounted for
      1. Body is an agent, action system, a mode of praxis; indispensable to keep one’s own narrative ongoing
    5. Social components of embodiment; disjunction between self and physical body? 
    6. Idea of the Gaze: power dynamic, shapes subject with gaze into an object that loses agency (put into position of inferiority without control), but also grants it visibility and a sense of social context –> what informs this gaze? How is the recipient determined?
    7. Authentic construction of an identity, distinct from social conventions; also serves a talismanic function; personal landmark; rewriting identity; rebellion; conversation with yourself
      1. Shifting meaning  
  2. Atkinson, “Pretty in Ink”
    1. Framework of body projects, constant modification, communication (of femininity): assumption of tattooing as masculine, impure, ugly, not ideal, outside (all part of binary systems)
      1. “Grotesque”- 16th century, found golden house of Nero in Rome underground, term developed to describe decorations as grotesque: something that was eclectic and encompassed different kinds of components (architectural, natural, animal elements- encompasses different realms, dynamic, cannot be contained → same thing happens during carnival, very expansive and uncontrolled)
        1. Gender and the grotesque; unconventional, unbounded forms of gender expression (something that doesn’t fit into categories) 
    2. Foucault: ways in which society controls people, all about power
      1. Docile bodies, passive and submissive, demure, small (don’t take up space) 
      2. Models: unsexualized bodies that behave without personality (blank and empty expressions) 
    3. Negotiation for women, through tattoos: dainty tattoos (size, symbol, placement) as a form of acceptable deviance, allows women to negotiate their position in society and express themselves while still being socially accepted  
  3. Braunberger: bodies in revolt
    1. Monster beauty of tattooed women; body in excess, becomes spectacle or show; invitation for visibility?
      1. Grotesque applied here too; “freak show”   
    2. Monsters as hybrids, not one thing nor the other; combines aesthetics with anger, still form of beauty but born out of power and reclamation and authority
      1. Process of decolonization 
    3. Sexualization of the body that accompanies tattoos, even though it is seen as less desirable
      1. Beauty to beast 
    4. Introjection: absorption of cultural symbolism, 2 way flow between body and the world (interior and cultural exterior) → tattoo
      1. Alfred Gell comes up again  
  4. Caplan, “Educating the Eye”
    1. Overlap of sexual theory (sexology) and criminology; very visible, socially controlled
      1. Lombroso, Havelock Ellis- criminological studies that rely on biological justification (rationalizing discrimination…)
    2. Social hygiene, concept of deviance emerges → psychologization of crime
      1. Degeneration: hereditary qualities, inevitable cycle  
    3. Double abjection (repels, revolting, shunned out of disgust) of tattoos: emblem of deviance, subjection to men, and also shows her own inferior will
      1. “By being revolting it’s a revolt”
  5. Helen Cixous: laugh of the medusa