Reading “Chapter 5: The Renaissance Tattoo” by Juliet Fleming of Written on the Body was a dense reading that honestly left me confused. While I was able to highlight some themes and examples that were placed throughout the chapter, I could not find an organizational pattern and Fleming brought up names without any context or how they held significance to the tattooing world of art. Overall, I found that Chapter 5 brought forward various examples of the varying purposes of tattoo as an art form in Western culture.
Chapter 6 of Written on the Body was written by Harriet Guest and was structured in a way that was much easier to follow than Chapter 5. Guest’s essay focused on the ways in which British people sought tattoos in the 18th century to create perceptions. Guest also notes the influence of gender in the analysis of tattooing and its perception in appearances. Guest explores the way that gender and appearance play roles in the recognition of one being acknowledged as civilized or uncivilized. Guest uses’ Banks’s conception and observation of the blurring of gender definition to further understand “the feminizing elision of the comparison between male and female Tahitians and European beauties works to endorse a homogenized and universal notion of feminine vanity untroubled by the cultural specificities of ornament” pertaining to theories concerning masculine fashions in Reynolds’s Discourse (Guest 91). The paintings of Omai seen in the book allude to the notion that colonization is for the good of the people and colonizers are therefore, saving their souls. What was interesting was how Omai was described as having various tattoos, but the images shown in the book do not highlight them. The relationship between Omai, colonization, and the perception of tattoos remains complicated in our comprehension, but sheds light on how to further understand the ways in which people brought forward the mark of exoticism through tattooing.
Chapter 7 again brings forth the correlation between social class or status to tattoos. However, Anderson focuses on the voluntary ways tattoos, or referred to as Godna, were present in India. She describes the Caste System and its direct correlation to tattooing with regard to social class. Dalits (outcastes) were the most likely to have the most tattoos due to their low status in the social hierarchy, versus Brahmins, who were least likely to have tattoos. Anderson sheds light on the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which created a psychological relation between criminals and social class. The association of tattoos to crime became inseparable and thus gave the government the power to control social groups and identify criminals easily.
Both Chapter 8 and 9 discussed the presence and purpose of the religious tattoo and convict transportation to Australia for the overpopulation of prisoners in Britain. I found it interesting that Britain relocated over 162,000 convicts to Australia who were assigned to settlers and forced to do free labor.