Author: Ainsley Bonang (Page 2 of 2)

I focused a lot of my attention on chapters 13 and 14 this week because I’m doing presentations on both of them, and I found both of these topics to be very interesting.

For both chapters, I’m particularly intrigued by the way culture around tattooing and piercing has changed over the years, especially how socioeconomic status has been perceived and also how different groups have claimed trends of tattooing and piercing. Chapter 13 documents how tattooing was perceived as exotic and seen as something worthy of a show in the circus. But tattooing began to lose its appeal in the circus as it became more widespread. I also thought it was interesting how people started moving to the suburbs in the post-war era and focusing on middle-class life and materialistic culture, excluding tattoos in this lifestyle and deeming them something to be looked down upon. Piercing also has negative connotations surrounding class, and the quote that really put it into context for me was “The guy with the $10,000 tattoo and a few thousand dollars worth of body jewellery is no different than the guy in the Italian designer suit wearing a Rolex” (Benson in Caplan 244). There is so much stigma around tattooing and piercing that people have neglected to honor both art forms as the sophisticated, expensive, high art forms they are. Even though tattoos and piercings might cost the same as a fancy suit and watch, they aren’t always perceived as having the same style or quality.

I felt like Chapter 5 was really addressing the theory of tattooing, which I appreciated. Fleming identified tattooing as a fine art, also contextualizing it as a magical form of human expression in a culture where all other expression is academic (61-62). I also liked the idea that tattooing is therapeutic, especially how one tattoo artist “can see, as her clients can not, what ‘crawls beneath their skin…everything I ink on people is already inside them, their history'” (63). This concept goes well with Didier Anzieu’s idea that “thought were as much an affair of the skin as of the brain,” which explores the connection between our internal and external worlds (65). Tattooing can be a necessary part to how we feel the most ourselves in the world, and this authenticity is so important for our mental health.

In the beginning of Chapter 7, Anderson mentioned that in some cultures, people needed to have tattoos in order to get married, which I found interesting (102). I was also drawn to the Hindu belief that tattoos could survive death, and they were “seen as evidence of earthly suffering which would be accepted in heaven as penance for sins” (104). In these cases, tattooing seems to be a requirement to achieve something many people want (marriage, to get into heaven). I think this brings up the question of agency, as does forced tattooing onto convicts. Anderson said that people could cover up tattoos through cultural practices like turbans or growing hair, which gives convicts some level of agency but not much. In Chapter 8, Maxwell-Steward and Duffield discussed how convicts would consistently be subjected to full-body inspections by officials, where all their physical features — including tattoos — would be recorded in detail (121).

I am very intrigued by this idea of agency when it comes to tattooing. Because in some cases, when people are choosing their tattoos, it can be a healing, essential process. But in other cases, when tattoos are being forced upon people, it can be a traumatic process.

I really enjoyed our discussion in class on 9/13 and particularly thought the concept of ritual was very interesting. In our worlds that are constantly changing, we need some sort of continuity to ground us. Tattooing as a practice is one of those rituals that people keep turning to in order to connect the exterior and interior, as Alfred Gell described. I also think it’s interesting how tattooing can give us a sense of agency over our own bodies, as we can’t always control how history marks us. But it’s quite disturbing how people tattoo others against their will, which completely deprives them of agency in marking their own body and serves almost as a way that history marks them instead. I feel like that takes away from the spirituality and expression of tattooing as a ritual.

I thought this selection of readings was very interesting, and I was particularly drawn to the word “stigma” and how it has been used to define tattooing throughout history. The word “stigma” as used today tends to refer more to a social, collective agreement to look down upon something. Whereas, “stigma” has also been used to refer to tattooing or body marking. In chapter one, it was defined as a “mark of infamy” or “moral blot” (Caplan 1). It is really interesting to think of how that definition has transformed to be less about a physical mark and understood more as a social mark of infamy. In the cases of some of the examples from the readings, though, it was both.

While tattooing was sometimes used as an honor or to mark high social status, the reading mostly focused on how it was used negatively. I would have liked to learn more about high-status tattooing, but I did find the negative associations to be very interesting. For example, the Maenads, or mad women, were portrayed with tattoos on Greek vases. Also, tattoos were used on enslaved people who ran away to mark them and have them returned.

Chapter two goes more into depth about tattooing as a punitive practice. I was intrigued by the concept of religious punishment and how it was unlikely for Christians to tattoo the cross onto people. From my understanding, doing that would give the person too much power because they would bear the marks of Christ. But, talking about it as if it were a cross gives the Christian more power over the person they tattooed. Tattooing itself is a somewhat painful practice, which contributes to the punishment, but I think the biggest punishment is social. As stated in the chapter, “the body can function as a permanently running advertisement of one’s guilt and subjugation,” which perfectly embodies the physical and social dimensions of stigma.

Chapter three also discusses the power of religious tattoos, as it references someone who claimed nobody could hurt him because he had a tattoo of the cross. While some tattoos themselves had stigma, some people saw them as protective and empowering. Similarly, as discussed in chapter four, people found power in tattooing their horoscopes and celestial symbols to try and gain a sense of power from the universe.

Tattooing has a very layered history, and it is still something that seems to hold a lot of stigma today. While I feel that the culture is starting to change, many people still look down upon people with tattoos and view them as unprofessional or societal outcasts (kind of like the Maenads), demonstrating how this stigma today is rooted in the history of these “mark[s] of infamy.”