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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11776,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":552,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}