by
Joy Ralph
Accepted in Partial Completion
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
[signature]
_____________________
Moheb A. Ghali
Dean of the Graduate School
Advisory Committee
[signature]
_____________________
Joyce Hammond, Chair
[signature]
_____________________
Joan Stevenson
[signature]
_____________________
Laura Crary-Ortega
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree at Western Washington University, I agree that the Library shall make its copies freely available for inspection. I further agree that extensive copying of this thesis is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this thesis for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without my written permission.
Signature: Joy Ralph
Date: 5/14/96
A Thesis
Presented to
The Faculty of
Western Washington University
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
Joy Ralph
May 1996
This thesis examines the tattooing practices of women in Western culture in the framework of feminist body politics. Focusing on contemporary women of the United States of America, it investigates some possible reasons for differences between women's tattooing behavior as predicted in the literature and the actual types and locations of tattoos women choose as depicted in a selection of popular magazines on the subject of tattooing. Included in the discussion is a brief history of tattooing methods and symbolism, as well as the artistic and cultural history of the practice. The conflicting reports in the literature of tattooing about the prevalence and extent of women's tattooing practices merit discussion, particularly work by Scutt (1986), Sanders (1989), and Steward (1990) who assert that women (especially 'ladies' or women of education and cultured attitudes) don't become tattooed, or that if they do, choose feminine designs and discreet locations. A reexamination of the evidence supports the contrary conclusion, that women do become tattooed and continue to become so in increasing numbers as tattooing has again become a popular means of personal expression, as it was in the late 19th Century (Ebensten, 1953). Additionally, the evidence shows that women choose a variety of designs and body locations rather than restricting themselves to one particular category of image. In light of current feminist theories of body politics, exemplified in the work of Bordo (1993) and Grosz (1994), prior assertions about women's tattooing practices can be seen as reflections of prescriptive cultural attitudes about women's bodies in the scheme of Western philosophical dualistic categories, rather than accurate descriptions of women's behavior.
The following people have contributed to my research efforts, and without them I would have been unable to complete this work: Jo Bagdasarian, Ben Bittner, Erik Freske, Mike Kinsella, Cari Kreshak, Corey Nelson, Gary Pomeroyq, NoraJean Schroeder.
This thesis is about women and tattoos. Invariably when I tell people about my topic, they respond with interest. Usually they are curious, intrigued, often a little disturbed. They may feel personally distant from the topic, and ask me why I find it interesting. They often ask me if I have any tattoos in spots I can show them in public; they may be enthusiastic aficionados who show me their tattoos in turn. They may frown, sigh with envy or disapproval, or be passionately fascinated, but I have never had anyone turn away in boredom from the subject.
I chose to study women and tattooing because it is an intersection of topics of personal interest to me. I am a tattooed woman, although I don't look much like the women on the covers of the magazine Tattoo Revue or the women in Chris Wroblewski's books Skin Shows, the Art of Tattoo (1985) and Tattooed Women (1991). I have been drawn to tattooing all my life, beginning with my fascination with skin designs drawn in various pens when I was a small child. (My parents didn't approve, particularly when I found the permanent markers.) Decorating my skin had a soothing effect, however, and looked beautiful. When I finally chose to get a real tattoo of a personally significant design, it felt like the logical extension of my childhood inscriptions.
I was brought to my concentration on women's tattooing practices by a number of occurrences. The first was the intense focus of the tattoo related literature on men's tattoo experiences. When women were mentioned, it was often briefly and negatively. Women with tattoos as described in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (Steward 1990), seemed to be locked by the author into stereotypical gender roles: playthings of male bikers or lesbian outsiders. A varying approach describes tattooed women in terms of comedy; Art, Sex and Symbol (Scutt 1987) is a classic example. The chapter on women's tattoos is titled 'Sex Appeal' and most of it recounts popular contemporary novelty songs and ditties about 'tattooed ladies,' such as this short poem by Tattoo Joe Pancho of Antwerp:
Marry a fat tattooed lady
And you'll get
Heat in the winter
Shade in the summer
And moving pictures all the year round.
Samuel M. Steward, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (1990), relates how he refused to tattoo any woman unless she was "twenty-one, married, and accompanied by her husband, with documentary proof to show their marriage." Exceptions were made for openly identified lesbians, who only had to prove they were twenty-one. Elsewhere, he describes the women he tattoos as "longhaired skags". Clinton Sanders, in Customizing the Body (1989), is fairly neutral toward women who become tattooed, but he focuses on men, and his discussion of women reflects the opinion that women are an anomaly in the tattooing subculture.
The second related circumstance which brought me to my subject was the discrepancy that I found between my own experience as a women with tattoos, the experiences of other tattooed women I knew, and the portrayal of tattooed women in the literature I reviewed. Some time before I became interested in this topic from a scholarly standpoint I had noticed that the descriptions of women's behavior in the male authored books that I looked at didn't resemble my thoughts, feelings or actions. Even early books authored by female writers have this bias; W.D. (Willowdean) Hambly's Forever the Land of Men (1965) concentrates entirely on the tattooing practices of the men of the Marquesas Islands, apart from one ambiguous chapter describing an unusual day she spent traveling to visit and sketching the full-body tattoo of a "tabu chiefess". (I do not mean to imply here that women should only write about women's cultural practices; merely to express sadness that a scholarly woman would choose to mention women's practices as little as she did.) Fortunately, in the 1990s the number of tattoo books by women has increased almost exponentially, and the focus of these books has widened to include women. Amy Krakow's The Total Tattoo Book (1994), for example, is egalitarian in its examples and descriptions, focusing on both women and men throughout the book.
The intent of this thesis is to contribute a work to the scholarly literature about tattooing with a female and feminist perspective. By focusing on women, a group who have been neglected in the literature in the past, I sought to link my experiences as a woman with tattoos and the experiences of my tattooed women friends with the study of human behavior that is anthropology. My examination of women and contemporary tattooing practices in the United States focuses on body politics and the Western cultural attitudes toward women who choose to become tattooed, as exemplified by the way women and their tattoos are displayed in popular tattooing magazines. Chapter 1 contains an overview of the history of tattooing, covering types of images and styles of tattooing, cultures that have historically practiced tattooing, and tattooing as it is practiced today in the U.S. In addition, I elaborate on the classification and statistical analysis of women's image choice and tattoo location that I have developed. Chapter 2 discusses the theoretical orientation of this thesis. The body politics theories of Susan Bordo and Elizabeth Grosz are particularly insightful, and provide a framework for my analysis. This chapter also includes a short discussion of methods of the form of feminist critique I used. Chapter 3 includes a review of tattooing literature focusing primarily on what has been said about women's tattooing practices. The works of R. B. W. Scutt and Christopher Gotch, Clinton Sanders, and Samuel M. Steward are highlighted with particular attention to the internal and external discrepancies in their reports.
Chapter 4 is a feminist critique of the tattooing literature. It incorporates examples of contradictory evidence that women do become tattooed in a variety of ways. A discussion of sources is included: tattoo magazines, tattoo conventions, books by women about tattooing, women tattoo artists, and other relevant work. Chapter 5 focuses on the processes causing the conflict between the (primarily male-authored) literature and the 'reality'. This entails an analysis of prescriptive female roles, the phenomenon of female as 'other', the coding of women's tattoo activities as exotic, and the presentation of women's bodies as objects for male consumption. In addition, I will look at the implications of tattooing and some of its relations to ideas of body politics. I intend to review the literature regarding women and tattooing to examine the types of research done on this subject in the past. I will also briefly discuss the types of tattoos women obtain with regard to placement, style, and image type as presente d in some of the magazines that are targeted towards the tattooing subculture in North America, particularly Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review, Tattoo, Skin Art, and Skin & Ink. Using statistical analysis and frequency tables, I classify women's tattoo practices in a set of categories similar to those discussed in Sanders (1989), and Scutt and Gotch (1986). All of this information will provide examples of the range of human decorative and social behavior, which help to inform our ideas and theories of how people present themselves to the world and their society. By concentrating on women, I hope to fill a gap in a literature which has tended to focus on male behavior and activities.
Tattooing is an ancient art and has been practiced by men and women in many areas of the world throughout history. The tradition of Polynesian tattoo dates from approximately 5,000 B.P. (Taylor 1981). The recent discovery of tattoos on the body of a man found encased in a glacier in Northern Europe indicates that marking the body with decorations has probably been part of diverse human cultures at least as long as marking the walls of caves with paintings. Tattooing in Melanesia, New Zealand and the islands of the South Pacific was an important social marker and part of common practice in times previous to contact with western European cultures (Handy 1965). The Maori tradition of intricate facial tattoos used in Aotearoa New Zealand, known as Te Moko, is one that has often been discussed in anthropological literature (Sangh 1980). The Inuit of North America used needles with soot-covered thread drawn through their skin to mark their lips and lower face (Vale and Juno 1989). Ainu women of Japan tattooed th emselves by cutting their flesh and rubbing wood ash into the wounds (Wroblewski 1991).
Tattooing is also a modern art. The electric tattoo machine developed in 1891 can utilize varying numbers of needles (Ebensten 1953). It is nearly as versatile as the airbrush in terms of artistic flexibility since it can inscribe diverse types of lines and values of shading (Vale and Juno 1989, Sanders 1989). All over the United States, contemporary tattoo collectors and artists meet at tattoo conventions to look at each other's work and collect new art from popular tattoo artists who often travel long distances to attend (Uncredited, OBTR Special #10, 1993). There are a number of popular magazines, such as Tattoo, Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue, Skin and Ink, and Skin Art which are devoted to the culture of tattooing. They display photographs of individual tattoos or provide information on where and from whom quality tattoo work can be obtained. As a sign of solidarity, groups of individuals from the military or from sports teams sometimes get matching tattoos of insignia or team mascots (Sanders 1989). Coupl es may receive identical tattoos as a sign of commitment to a relationship (Vale and Juno 1989). A tattoo can be chosen to mark an event - graduation, a new job, freedom from an abusive relationship, or reclaiming the body as one's own (Wroblewski 1991).
Tattooing is sometimes perceived as dangerous, both by those who practice and collect the art and by those who hold tattooing and the tattooed in disdain (Sanders 1989). Uninformed people may spread horror stories about hepatitis and AIDS acquired from less reputable tattooers who have inadequate sterilization techniques or who have reused needles. Some people consider tattoos ugly or think of them as mutilations (Raspa and Cusack 1990). People better acquainted with the practice are aware that any reputable tattoo artist uses an autoclave to sterilize equipment, does not reuse inks or needles, and refuses to work on clients under the influence of alcohol or drugs (Vale and Juno 1989). Nevertheless, anyone who becomes tattooed is rapidly made aware of the stigma attached to tattooing by people who see tattoos as an indication of criminal or anti-social behavior (Sanders 1989). Pain is also a factor which influences people's opinions about tattooing. Different areas of the body are more or less painful to t attoo, depending on the depth of body fat between bone and the skin surface (Sanders 1989). The permanency of tattoos is also perceived as culturally dangerous. There is the risk of being permanently marked with a symbol or picture whose meaning to the individual may change or which the person may come to dislike or even resent over time. There is also the possibility that a tattoo may be distasteful to intimates and family, causing strife within personal relationships. Finally, a tattoo in some of the more visible body locations can have career consequences, making it difficult to find work in some occupations (Sanders 1989).
In spite of these risks, or perhaps in some cases because of them, many women and men continue to choose to have tattoo marks inscribed on their bodies. Some bear only a single design; others make somewhat of a career of collecting different images. Still others design and implement what can be viewed as a body- encompassing work of art, executed by one artist or many on the canvas of their skin (Delio 1994).
For some, the tattoo has great meaning, personal or social. For others, it is not so important, merely one more way of differentiating themselves from the "norm," or an idea they liked and process they chose to participate in, but which lacked much lasting impact on their lives other than the inscribed mark. Those individuals who obtained their tattoos as part of incarceration in an institution (penal, mental or military) may look on the images as symbols of a life they wish to put behind them (Scutt and Gotch 1986). All of these factors serve to formulate an attitude towards tattooing that is often ambivalent.
Women incur more negative reactions from the non-tattooed majority when they decide to obtain a tattoo than men do. Due to the associations with pain and military service (particularly in the United States), tattooing carries overtones linked with forms of expression primarily coded as masculine, which is often perceived in general as inappropriate for women. In addition, tattooing represents a cultural (rather than a natural inscription), therefore women choosing to become tattooed are crossing cultural categories and entering an ambiguous zone of coding. This crossing of cultural boundaries into a place of double coding usually causes psychical discomfort of one degree or another (Douglas 1973). Women who choose to become tattooed, then, may have additional motivations outside their personal desires influencing their choice of image type and placement. A reaction to perceived or actual public opinion may therefore cause women to choose different designs and locations for their tattoos than men. On the ot her hand, since tattooing is still regarded for the most part as an activity well outside the norm of mainstream society in Western North American culture, women who have taken that step outside the boundaries of middle-class society and been tattooed may in fact choose to be tattooed with the same types of images as men, having already exempted themselves in part from mainstream ideas and ideals.
The data that I collected from examining popular images of women in the tattoo magazines mentioned previously indicated that there is not as great a difference in men's and women's tattooing practices as is recorded in the literature on tattooing or as discussed by people in conversations at large. I found that contemporary women are nearly as likely as men to have large tattoos, to have tattoos in 'public' areas of the body, and to choose a variety of images - some bold, some violent, some delicate - that may or may not align with Western philosophical and cultural expectations of the feminine. The way women practice tattooing is not particularly 'feminine', nor does it match the portrayal of women's tattooing practices I found to be prevalent in the literature. Instead, women participate in this set of rituals and behaviors in a manner which indicates that the activity of tattooing is neither intrinsically masculine nor feminine, despite the traditional coding of the activity as male.
The history of European tattooing (of which North American contemporary tattooing is a heir) is summarized very elegantly by Hans Ebensten in his book Pierced Hearts and True Love (1953). As most of the literature that mentions the history of tattooing in any detail borrows heavily from his book, I will briefly outline what he says. The earliest written records of tattooing in Egypt have been found dating to 4000 B.P. Some of the designs found then are still in use in North Africa. Tattooing is found in South East China from 3100 B.P. In Japan, tattooing has flourished since at least 1000 B.P., and there is speculation it was brought over from mainland Asia some six hundred years earlier. There are records of tattooing in the West Indies and Central America from 1100 B.P. Many North American peoples practiced tattooing from this time, using charcoal and soot as their ink media. In Europe, the ancient Britons, Thracians, Gauls, Germans, Greeks and Romans all used some form of tattooing to decorate themselve s or to mark social statuses. Cicero, Herodian and Heroditus all bore tattoos, while the Romans tattooed criminals and slaves to set them apart from the citizenry. Early Christians tattooed themselves with small icons such as the icthys so they could recognize each other subtly and avoid persecution. This practice was ended by the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Churches, who forbade facial tattooing in particular, but the stricture soon expanded to all tattoos.
Documentation of Eskimo/Inuit tattooing exists from 1576-8, and Crantz records tattooing present in Greenland in 1750. In 1723 and 1774, North American natives and South Sea Islanders with tattoos were exhibited in various traveling shows around Europe, setting off the first wave of the fad of 'modern' Europeans getting tattoos.
In the 1820s early anthropological literature surveyed the frequency of tattooing among men in prison populations or military services, leading Ebensten to remark "The results of these findings are... highly misleading. It is in groups where men are forced to live close together and lacking in the usual forms of amusement and entertainment that tattooing is highly predominant, while the criminal background of so many of these men later led to the erroneous belief that tattooing is more widespread amongst the criminal classes than elsewhere" (1953: 21). Ebensten's statement points out an early foundation of the coding of tattooing as dangerous or indicative of tendencies toward the 'Other', although in this case the Other is the class of criminals rather than the class of women.
The history continues with the first documented professional tattooist in America working in the 1870s. Martin Hildebrand claimed to have been working since 1846 and the Civil War, but no records exist other than his word. The British Army discontinued marking deserters with a tattooed 'D' and bad characters with 'BC' in 1879. In 1891 O'Reilly invented the first electric tattooing machine, setting off the second wave of tattooing popularity in England and the English speaking world. A number of tattooed men and women traveled around exhibiting themselves at circuses and fairs until World War I. [That people would pay money to see a side show of tattooed men and women indicates that during this time, most tattooed individuals (male and female) were among those marked as Other, and therefore worthy of note as contrasting curiosities to the unmarked norm.] Officers and gentlemen who traveled to the Far East encountered the Japanese style of tattoo, and often returned with a design engraved upon their bodies. At the time of the Boer War, an American anthropologist estimated that 90% of all men in the U.S. Navy had tattoos. In 1909 the U.S. Government regulations on recruiting mandated that "indecent or obscene tattooing is cause for rejection, but the applicant should be given an opportunity to alter his design in which case he may, if otherwise qualified, be accepted" (Ebensten 1953: 21). Prior to World War I, tradesmen often liked to be tattooed with the symbol or emblem of their trade. During World War I and II, patriotic designs became very popular. Around this time, new designs from picture postcards, postage stamps and early cinema characters also came into vogue. After World War II, prices fell with commercialization "which made [tattooing] so popular amongst the lower orders [and] ruined it as an attraction or fashion among the wealthier, more discerning sets. The quickly applied and hurriedly drawn designs lacked both the individuality of such masters as Hori Chyo or Southerland MacDonald and the artistry or delicacy of the early tattooists, and it is hardly surprising that when more and more working-class people became tattooed in this crude way the demand for exclusive tattoos by the elite diminished" (Ebensten 1953: 21). Popular tattooing became the province of yet another category of Other, the lower classes. In addition, the Nazi practice of tattooing identification numbers on the arms of prisoners in concentration camps resulted in tattooing becoming stigmatized among certain cultural populations (Crary-Ortega, 1996).
Ebensten's precis, while the foundation source of most historical references in books on tattooing written since 1953, rarely mentions women and their tattoos specifically. It is impossible to say for certain what this omission implies. Most probably, it was simply a result of the male bias in Western cultural studies of the time, and the habit of scholarly historical literature prior to the 1970s to ignore or skim over the contributions and participation of women in history. However, since Ebensten is a primary historical reference whose influence is noticeable upon reading any of the tattooing literature that comes after his book, it is probable that his lack of mention of women's tattooing practices set the stage for those who followed him. Only in the 1990s with an increase in literature written about tattooing authored by women (Krakow 1994, Delio 1994) does the balance begin to be restored with an examination of tattooing practices that look at the behaviors of women and men.
Paralleling the history of European tattooing is the history of the Japanese tradition of tattooing, as discussed by Sandi Fellman (1986). The word for tattoo in Japanese is irezumi (insertion of ink) or hori-mono (a thing carved, sculpted or engraved). Hanebare is the "fluttering technique" unique to Japan of feathered details and accents. Heavily tattooed people in Japan are a close-knit group, and advertising is by word of mouth. The artists are very competitive, considering tattooing to be a territory, and are concerned about others stealing their secrets of colors, designs and needle techniques. There is still some association of heavy tattooing with the Yakuza, Japanese gangsters who take their name from a gambling card game where the combination of the numbers 8-9-3 (ya- ku-za) is "worthless" (Fellman 1986). The association of the criminal element with the practice of tattooing here again reflects the tattooed person as set apart from the mainstream of society, marking the tattooed as Other.
Chinese records indicate that in that part of the world as well, tattooing was a marked, non-normative process. They maintain that in Japan of 249-327, "men both great and small tattoo their faces and work designs upon their bodies," a practice that for centuries would be absent from China itself (Fellman 1986). Circa 700, ostracism by facial tattoo was used as a punishment. In 18th century Edo, tattooing became popular with courtesans (another outside, Other class of primarily women), who would get kisho bori (promise engravings): hidden tattoos only visible when naked or in the act of love. In 1805, Bakin's translation of Suikoden (The Water Margin) with its tattooed hero and main characters became popular, and the scenes and characters became frequent subjects for tattoos. In 1869, tattooing was interdicted and tattoo artists were forced to destroy their pattern books, although some years later they were allowed to reopen shop in Yokohama, a district set aside "For Foreigners Only" (Fellman 1986). Again , tattooing becomes associated with a class of Other, this time the European sailors and gentlemen who were tolerated for trade purposes, yet still regarded with suspicion by the Japanese people.
Many of the design choices for Japanese tattoos are related to Kabuki, and reciprocally, many Kabuki plots revolve on tattoos and ensuant revelations. In The Scarlet Princess of Edo, for example, the male and female leading roles require tattoos. Other plots hinge on tattoos as identifying marks for long lost lovers. In these plays, the woman who becomes tattooed usually does so for the sake of a man (often her lover), either to identify with him by getting the same tattoo he has, or in a manner so that he will be able to identify her at some later time. The tattoo here is again an identifying mark singling out one person from many, marking them as Other. There are also parallels with the Western expectations here, as the women are primarily depicted as choosing to become tattooed because of a man.
In the intervening 43 years since Ebensten published his book, tattooing has waned then waxed again in popularity. In the late 1950s through the early 1970s, tattooing was the province of gangs, sailors, and street-corner punks (Steward 1990), still another set of marginalized, Other categories. The later 1970s through the 1990s has seen a rise in what is called fine art tattooing (Vale and Juno 1989, Krakow 1994) where people with backgrounds in painting, drawing and other academic arts have been drawn to tattooing, bringing their expertise and abilities to the medium of skin rather than canvas or paper. Artists such as Vyvyn Lazonga and Julie Moon with formal artistic training and flexibility of design, or Ed Hardy with his specialization in Japanese style influenced work, have touched off the current wave of tattooing popularity. As Michelle Delio (1994) remarks: "Nowadays, when choosing a tattoo design, your imagination is your only limitation."
Philosophers have wrestled with questions about the body from the beginnings of analytical thought (Jaggar and Bordo 1989). One of the earliest recorded Western assumptions was that the mind and the body were separate, and that there was an inherent duality between human physical and human psychological existence. This dichotomy was ranked and hierarchical. Some scholars who put forward a mind/body (or soul/body) split, such as Thomas Aquinas, St. Paul and St. Augustine, were religiously trained. They therefore tended to think in terms of a distinction between sacred and profane, mapping that difference onto the soul and body (Wilshire 1989). If the mind is postulated as the closest empirical evidence that can be derived of a spirit, it is easy to see how differing or opposed mental and physical impulses could cause early philosophers and religious writers to emphasize an artificial division of human existence into the spiritual-mental and physical. While there were some challenges to the hierarchical dich otomy model from writers like Benedict Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Grosz 1994), the binary focus of Western philosophy persisted.
A core problem that arises from this division is the devaluation of the body and the extrapolation of negative values to things closely associated with the body. Important body processes, systems and needs are denigrated and ignored. This causes a wide spectrum of difficulties, from illnesses and diseases resulting from either a lack of knowledge among the general population or a willful denial of nutrition and hygiene issues on the part of the members of the cultural establishment, to the devaluation of those members of a society or culture who are intimately involved or associated with the body and its workings, such as prostitutes, or those who care for the very young or very old.
On a broader scale, the dualism of the mind/body leads to the nature/culture divide. The category of nature is seen as raw, uncivilized, and of lower value than the category of culture, which is perceived as finished, polished, civilized, and of higher relative value (Levi-Strauss 1969). In addition, the things of the cultural category are given dominion over the things of the natural category. The body, in this dichotomy, falls into the category of the natural, with the mind or spirit being seen as cultural. Women and women's bodies are often traditionally linked to nature and the natural in this schema and therefore ranked as less valued than men and men's bodies. The male has been coded as active, conscious; the female has been coded as passive, primitive (Bordo 1993). The arena of feminist body politics theory explores this demarcation of the female as more natural. Sherry Ortner's discussion of the universal secondary status of women in society (1974), and the work of other American feminist scholars like Naomi Wolf, Susan Griffin and Nancy Chodorow examines the prescriptions for female behavior and ways of being that have arisen as a result of attempts to control and civilize what has been coded as the wild or natural feminine.
In pre-feminist discourse, beginning with Plato and Aristotle through Rene Descartes and such thinkers of the scientific revolution as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the foundation metaphor for describing the world and human experience has been dualistic. Ruth Berman (1989) relates how Plato considered the soul to come from the superior world of ideas, and the body from the temporal, inconstant and derivative material world. The mind ruled the body, and furthermore, the more perfect creations in the world (which included men) were destined to rule over the less perfect creations in the world (including women, slaves and nature). As a member of the ruling class of a slave society, Plato would have seen around him all his life the subjugation of one set of human beings to another, and would have grown up thinking it natural, finding it easy to extrapolate that type of relationship to the world at large.
Berman (1989) demonstrates how Aristotle expanded on this theme. Aristotle emphasized that women have different, less rational souls than men. Taking examples from the natural world, such as mollusks and cuttlefish, he drew parallels between their behavior and the behavior of women. The implication was that females were merely mutilated males, with the recycled souls of inferior, cowardly men. This early exposition of the biological determinist argument cited immutable, inherited differences in the soul as the natural basis for the dualist categories underlying existing racial and sexual relationships. The psychoanalytic framework developed by Sigmund Freud, in which the female body is identified as lack, by the absence of the phallus (Grosz 1994, Hunt 1993) was clearly heir to these ideas.
Formal and informal dichotomies govern peoples' perception of how scientific inquiry should be conducted. These dichotomies also provide the framework of opposed categories into which scientists have traditionally fit their discoveries and perceptions and with which they have categorized behaviors. As the writings of Plato and Aristotle are some of the pillars in the foundation of most Western philosophy and science, the die was cast very early to favor men as the models for what was rational and right, and therefore most valued. Donna Wilshire (1989) discusses Aristotle's writings which stated that reasoned knowledge was the highest human achievement possible; therefore men, who were more 'active' and capable of achievement in this area, were closer to the divine and therefore superior to women. Wilshire lists a number of the hierarchical dualisms that characterized Aristotle's work and world. Forcing all knowledge into these structural dichotomies has resulted in a biased world view where one half of the resulting dualism has been valued more than the other. One half of the world has been given dominion over the other in traditional writings such as the Bible, another pillar in the foundation of Western thought. So Western philosophy has come to consist of a number of hierarchical dualisms where one member of the dyad rules over the other - thus pure mind and divine soul rule over all things earthly and of the body. Some of the Western dyads Wilshire lists include:
Knowledge (accepted wisdom) / Ignorance (the occult and taboo)
higher (up) / lower (down)
good, positive / negative, bad
mind (ideas), head, spirit / body (flesh), womb (blood), Nature (earth)
reason (the rational) / emotion, feelings (the irrational)
order / chaos
control / spontaneity
light / darkness
male / female
Val Plumwood (1993) adds:
subject / object
culture / nature
civilized / primitive
In the hegemonic structure of Western thought, culture rules over and modifies nature; men rule women; reason conquers the emotions. Wilshire argues in an important point that the right hand, less valued side of these dichotomies needs to be reclaimed and re-visioned by both women and men.
A further look at Freud provides an example of how influential a perceived dichotomy can be. Freud wrote from an overwhelmingly male perspective, but cast his observations in the 'neutral' scientific and omniscient voice. The use of the 'neutral' voice resulted in Freud's admitted personal inability to understand women's wants and needs (Hunt, 1993) being read as the universal human condition. The implication is that no one anywhere is able to understand women, and this forces women's needs and wants into a position coded as one of strangeness and enigma. Once the female body and experience has been encoded as a lack, or as the Other, it becomes easy to deny or omit that experience from the cannon of what constitutes human behavior (Grosz 1994). In this way the male body and experience, when spoken of in the universal voice, becomes encoded as neutral, while the female becomes coded as marked, a deviation from the norm. This coding reinforces the position of female as exotic, different, less than human and closer to nature, while the male experience retains the position of normal, civilized and cultural. As Dorothy Sayers wrote (1969, pg 117): "The fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. They are human beings. Vir is male and Femina is female: but Homo is male and female. This is the equality claimed and the fact that is persistently evaded and denied. No matter what arguments are used, the discussion is vitiated from the start, because Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but Woman only as Femina..." These beliefs are coded strongly into current Western philosophy and societal prescriptions, to the point of being codified in the law, particularly on the subjects of pregnancy, paternity cases, abortion rights, divorce proceedings and child custody (Eisenstein 1988).
Human actions transgressing these traditional dichotomous philosophical categories can run afoul of cultural prescriptions for behavior. This results, particularly in the case of my topic, in the accepted ideas pertaining to women getting tattoos bearing little resemblance to the actuality. The difference between the real and the ideal is highlighted by these boundary-crossing actions. Culturally, the ideal prescriptions that come across in the literature about women and tattoos are not borne out by the reality of women's actions as recorded in photographic evidence.
Women who choose to become tattooed transgress the nature/culture dichotomy because this practice combines the two categories. Mary Douglas has written on the dangerous nature of ambiguity and anomaly (1966). She relates this to an inherent human need for order, with the result that one of the primary functions of culture is to provide a schema of categories for the ordering of perceptions. Bodily control is a form of social control (Douglas 1973), and it is only by emphasizing and exaggerating the differences between male and female bodies that a semblance of order is created (Douglas 1966). Edmund Leach concurs that meaning is dependent on contrast (1976), and further hypothesizes that it is the boundaries between contrasting categories that are charged with special value and the most emotional and 'sacred' weight. A boundary, being a site of ambiguity, inherits the negative cultural baggage inherent in a lack of order, as do actions or people who exist in a similar state of ambiguity. Women who become t attooed, by inscribing culture upon their bodies, engage in boundary transgressing acts. Acts or behaviors that span both sides of the dichotomy are then seen (consciously or unconsciously) as subversive, improper, exotic, dangerous, arousing, troublesome. As a result of the Western cultural tendency to enforce order and place human behaviors in previously constructed categories (Leach 1976), when the major categories (such as male::culture and female:: nature) are crossed, the expectations and prescriptions regarding appropriate behavior for women are transferred from the category (women) to the action (becoming tattooed). It is this transgressive quality of women's decisions to become tattooed and their image choices which lead to the common and inaccurate perceptions of why and how women choose to become tattooed. In this way, the prescriptive ideas concerning women's image choices I have observed in the literature are developed. In an effort to heal the mental breach in the order of cultural categories, w hen women behave in an un-womanly fashion by becoming tattooed, the prescription is shifted. Confronted with evidence that women do in fact become tattooed, the tendency for many people is to believe that when women choose to become tattooed, they would do so in what is prescribed as a womanly fashion - either by choosing designs coded as feminine, or by choosing small, delicate tattoos, and by placing them in discreet or private areas of the body: areas that can be easily hidden by clothing, areas that only intimates would see.
By obtaining tattoos, women inscribe culture on their bodies, which are paradoxically coded as doubly natural by the traditional dichotomy: once for being body and again for being female. In reaction, the details and manner of the behavior of women with tattoos are perceived by people enculturated with the Western philosophical dyad schema as functioning in the categories of the hyper-feminine. The present culture of the United States contains the ideals that women choose 'feminine' designs for their tattoos such as hearts, flowers, or butterflies; that they choose to place these tattoos in areas that are thought of as discreet (a category coded as feminine); and that they choose to become tattooed at the behest of men in their lives. The fact that these categorizations of female behavior may bear little resemblance to the actual choices women make when they become tattooed merely reinforces and points to the strength conventional categories have developed in the Western psyche. This phenomenon is similar to the difficulty some anthropologists have had in seeing beyond their ethnocentric values when observing other cultures. The empirical status of women in other cultures is frequently overshadowed by false beliefs of anthropologists with a Western cultural bias that reproductive roles cause women to be subordinate, and that males are somehow intrinsically biologically and culturally dominant. Expecting this to be the universal case, Euroamerican ethnographers have often seen it to be so, even in cultures where women are neither superior nor inferior to men, and both sexes are valued for the contributions they make to the society (Wilshire 1989).
Body politics theory exposes the perceptions and ideas commonly held about bodies and their place in the world as a result of the traditional Western philosophical dualism. This type of feminist body politics theory focuses on women, examining in part how the construction of the female role in society is related to the association of women and bodies with Nature. As Arleen B. Dallery remarks (1989: 58), "writing the body celebrates women as sexual subjects not objects of male desire...[it] celebrates woman's autonomous eroticism, separate from a model of male desire based on need, representation and lack....[it] precedes self/other dualisms." Each major contemporary feminist theory has taken up the issue of the relationship between women and nature, although many times these theories have been unable to escape dualistic thinking, equating the reclaiming of the category of nature with surrendering to some form of natural determinism (King 1989).
"Feminists first began to develop a critique of the politics of the body, however, not in terms of the body as represented (in medical, religious, and philosophical discourse, artworks, and other cultural texts), but in terms of the material body as a site of political struggle."(Bordo 1993: 16). Part of Bordo's work has focused on women's struggle for the control of their bodies. For example, sufferers of anorexia glory in the power of controlling their bodies (as they feel they can control no other aspect of their lives) while in actuality they are destroying themselves through starvation. In parallel with the phenomenon of hysteria in the Victorian era, Bordo (1993) reads anorexia as a critique of the roles that women are offered by Western society. Tattooing can be read as a similar critique. Women's ideal outward appearance has long been dictated by societal attitudes about femininity (e.g., in contemporary society, thinness) as is illustrated by analyses of anorexia nervosa or beauty contests. Due to the emphasis on outward appearance, women's inscriptions (choice to have tattoos) on their own bodies allow them to "make their own mark" and take control of themselves (Hammond, 1996). Anorexia nervosa, from a strictly psychical standpoint, simply takes the received prescriptions for the female role in society to an extreme. By starving themselves until they obliterate all female secondary sex characteristics (menses, breasts, rounded hips) they simultaneously fulfill a desire within themselves not to become coded as female (strange, non-human, uncivilized, other) and make visible the strictures placed on women in Western society not to take up space or resources, to be passive (Chernin 1981).
Another area of focus derived from this interpretation of feminist body politics is the discussion of the masculine coded as neutral. The universal, omniscient voice commonly used in the scientific and philosophical researches of the Western tradition has functioned as a veiled representation and projection of a heterosexual masculine voice which takes itself as the unquestioned norm, the ideal representative of the species, without any idea of the difficulties this causes to arise when the reader lies outside the category of male: women; the 'disabled'; cultural and racial minorities; homosexuals; different classes (Grosz, 1994). For example, literature on tattooing that discusses women is clearly marked in the title. Works such as Art, Sex and Symbol: the Mystery of Tattooing (Scutt and Gotch 1986) or Tattoo: the Exotic Art of Skin Decoration (Delio 1994), deal mostly with men's tattooing practices, while works with any substantial portion devoted to women's tattooing practices are clearly labeled as suc h: William De Michelle's The Illustrated Woman (1992) or Wroblewski's Tattooed Women (1991).
This being the case, a primary work that researchers in the field of feminist body politics have undertaken is the visioning and re- visioning of ways to discuss the differences between men and women without becoming trapped in the old dualisms. Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1973) suggests moving toward considering not the separate categories of men and women but the more fundamental category of human beings, through a pursuit of the ideal of androgyny, a balancing of traditionally masculine and feminine traits. She points to the Bloomsbury Group (the literary circle of the 1920s and '30s that included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes) as a model for men and women working together with a blurring of traditional gender boundaries, and she suggests that further movement toward encouraging an androgynous manner in men and women will defuse some of the old dualistic conflicts. Women who become tattooed, by participation in an activity coded as male, break down part of this dichotomy in a manner analogous to and moving toward androgyny.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) discusses some radically different possibilities being explored by post-modern body theorists, based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Grosz proposes understanding corporeality in terms of surfaces, aggregates, flows, intensities and investments. The body is a discontinuous, non-totalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations. While this conception seems confusing at first, on further thought the idea of the body as a set of potentialities which are actualized in one way or another, as an aggregate of connections, seems useful in attempting to move beyond dualistic methods of describing bodies and their relations. Conceptualizing the body as a series of relations restores the figure to the ground, counteracting the backgrounding of women into the position of supporting a dominant foreground sphere of recognized achievement or causation (as discussed by Plumwood 1993). It als o emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things in the world system in a way that none of the traditional scientific methods has done. Grosz' paradigm reemphasizes the idea that the conception of body cannot be removed from its cultural environment any more than the physical body can be removed from the environment which surrounds it. A body can be deprived of but cannot be separated from the surrounding air it breathes, the food it ingests, its speech patterns, gestural repertoire, etc. To do so creates an artificial dichotomy that cannot be sustained in any real sense. Just as the behaviorists found it impossible to isolate one stimulus among the thousands received every moment as the cause of any one psychological behavior, so too it is impossible to remove the human being from the human environment and the complex of interrelations therein. Tattooing in this sense can be seen as a border marker, the site of an inscription of identity that sets the self aside from the environment at large. It provides a signifier of individuality and indicates an attempt to direct and affect perceptions. It is an external energy investment that symbolizes internal boundaries.
Bordo (1993) reminds us that the context of interpretation of these cultural texts is constantly changing, and that while women are now accepted in the public sphere, it is the acceptance of only those women who have adopted a male perspective. Women who can "think like men" and fit themselves into the traditional masculine codings of rigidity, solidity, professional balance, critical detachment, and rigor have been able to make their way into academic and business circles formerly closed to women; those women (and men) who can not or do not fit the prescribed patterns continue to be denied acceptance, publication, tenure, and promotions. Those women who do carve themselves a niche in the public world do so at a price and may be severely criticized for being too masculine. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, has been censured for her lack of conformity to the feminine ideal expected of the wife of the President of the United States. What has happened is not an acceptance of traits and ways of being tradit ionally coded as feminine, but an insistence that women who want to be accepted and taken seriously in the public sphere (coded as masculine) must adopt and shape themselves to masculinely coded ways of being (Bordo 1993). Objectivity is valued because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable (Le Guin 1989), qualities associated with the feminine.
Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (1989) expand on Laura Mulvey's pioneering article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) which identified the gaze in film as primarily heterosexual and male. They explore the possibilities of other gazes such as those of homosexuals, people of lower classes, and all women who are not already included in these other categories. Gamman and Marshment raise questions from these various non- traditional perspectives as to why gender should be privileged as the category which structures the viewing perspective. They argue for a multiplicity of viewpoints, a movement toward heterogeneity, and an effort toward understanding that looking beyond the prescriptions of psychoanalysis regarding dominance, identification and objectification can be useful in discussions of power imbalances and value differentials in Western thought. The popular tattooing magazines from which my data is drawn are aimed primarily toward the gaze of a male heterosexual audience. Gamman and Mars hment's critique provides an important perspective on this material.
In each case, it is clear that whatever the particular perspective, a method of feminist critique can be useful in disclosing the traditional biases of Western thought and philosophy. The primary bias of dualism, with its attendant higher valuation of one half of the gender dyad, can be identified, and attempts can be made to avoid falling into the traps and repeating the mistakes that are engendered by these dichotomies. This type of feminist critique also emphasizes heterogeneity, a multiplicity of viewpoints, and the need to remember that overgeneralization can severely handicap scientific attempts to understand human experience and surroundings. In pointing out the traditional Western overemphasis on the male viewpoint, particularly when that viewpoint is coded as neutral or universal, feminist critiques of Western hegemony can aid in understanding why past theoretical positions have remained inadequate to accurately describe women as subjects. This critique is illuminating when applied to the literatu re concerning tattooing practices, providing insight and possible explanation for discrepancies between the literature's account of women's tattooing behavior and the reality.
The body of literature about tattooing is neither particularly wide nor scholarly, although this has changed somewhat recently with the contemporary resurgence in popularity of tattooing, particularly among younger people. Many of the books and articles which I found were primarily of a popular nature and consisted of discussions by tattooing aficionados of their experiences and pictorial works documenting designs by photograph (for example Wroblewski 1991, De Michelle 1992.). Much of the medical and sociological literature sees tattooing as at least partly pathological (Lanier and Werner 1992, Raspa and Cusack 1990). Customizing the Body by Clinton Sanders (1989), for example, comes out of a sociological rather than an anthropological background. This leads Sanders to focus more on his subjects' deviance from what could be characterized as the solidified and unchanging social norms for their class, and how this affects their daily interactions with other members of their society. In contrast, the anthropo logical approach of Leach (1976) and Douglas (1966, 1973) emphasizes that the categories are themselves relative, and that deviance in one setting is normative in another. The category of Other is a constant, yet what defines membership in that category will change from one culture to another. Sanders is working from a symbolic interactionist perspective, emphasizing the concepts of process and meaning, and so stresses the typical stages actors moved through as they became tattooed (Sanders 1989; italics in original) rather than focusing on the subjects' interaction with or transgression of social categories. Even though Sanders is himself tattooed, there is a slight air of embarrassment about his choice of topic in his introduction. Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation and Adornment, edited by Francis Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe (a collection of essays, only one of which deals specifically with tattooing) indicates merely by its title that tattooing often is placed in the category of body mutilation by non-practi tioners.
Another of my important references is a somewhat contradictory text called Art, Sex and Symbol, by Scutt and Gotch (1986). Based on the personal experiences of a medical doctor, this book is primarily concerned with men in the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, but it provides a wide range of background information on tattooing, including a set of design and placement categories similar to those I used in my analysis of women's tattoo placement and designs. Art, Sex and Symbol also covers topics such as tattoo removal, and it has one chapter concerning tattooed women. This is entitled Sex Appeal and begins "The fair sex, in general, is not prone to acquiring tattoos. There are, of course, exceptions, plenty of them...It would be fair to state that most women who possess tattoos gained them under or through the influence of their menfolk. But this was not always so."(pg. 143) Scutt continues in this vein, asserting at times in the same sentence that women don't get tattooed, except of course for the ones who do. It is clear that Scutt does not take women's desire to participate in this activity seriously. He quotes several novelty songs that make fun of tattooed women, and nowhere does he accord women with tattoos any of the respect that he gives men with tattoos. Nevertheless, Art, Sex and Symbol is one of the few references which discusses the tattooing practices of Western women.
Stepping outside the realm of academia, however, there is a rich and varied body of literature for and about tattooed people. In terms of books, there are plenty of works which fall into the voyeuristic category. These books often seem to hold the somewhat narrow attitude of looking curiously at what strange things people (especially people of non-white, non-European cultures) do to themselves. Robert Brain's The Decorated Body (1979) is an example of this type of work. These books tend to be long on photography and short on text, limiting themselves to a few observations on the nature of human beings' urges to decorate themselves.
A second, similar category of book exists that might be labeled "coffee table" books, pictorial depictions of tattooed people with little text beyond identification of the tattooed individuals, if that. Chris Wroblewski's books Skin Shows, the Art of Tattoo (1985) and Tattooed Women (1991) fit into this category. These books have beautiful photographs of interesting looking people and their tattoos, but there are no details about them other than a short section called Key to Photographs in the back of the book listing the names of the tattooed person and their tattoo artist(s).
A third category of book aimed at tattooed people themselves (as opposed to purporting to be an objective study about tattooed people) is exemplified by the RE/search book Modern Primitives (Vale and Juno 1989). This book consists of articles about and interviews with people who practice the "primitive" rituals of tattooing and piercing in "modern" society. Its principle identifying characteristic is a more scholarly stance than the other two categories, yet it still falls outside the realm of "sanctioned academic literature" since its authors claim no degrees or affiliations with institutions of academic research. V. Vale and Andrea Juno attempt to come at the question of tattooing from a more visceral, artistic or intuitive level; literally they are most interested in exploring the interconnecting relationships of the body, the imagination, art, and life. Modern Primitives in particular presents a different vantage point from academic studies that take the traditional Western philosophical viewpoint that an observer can be separated from the phenomena observed; instead, the authors are working in the legacy of Werner Heisenburg, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari by acknowledging that the observer is intimately related to their observations, that it is impossible to separate one from the other, and that the relationship between the two must be acknowledged. In this case Vale and Juno not only acknowledge that they cannot be separated from what they observe, but freely admit to being part of the milieu and subculture which they are studying. Using a reflexive viewpoint, they discard a false illusion of objectivity for the insights that only someone personally acquainted with the processes and procedures they are studying could formulate (Vale and Juno 1989).
In terms of magazines, most of the literature available is aimed at the general public or the subsection of the general public interested in tattooing, rather than an academic population. The titles are a good indication: Tattoo, Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue, Skin & Ink. The articles are not scholarly in nature and tend to be interviews with people who have tattoos, accompanied by photos; interviews with tattoo artists, accompanied by photos of their work; or documentation of tattoo conventions, with photos of participants and events taking place there. The purpose of these magazines is, on the one hand, to display the tattoo work for appreciation or imitation, and on the other hand to present tattoos for consumption as titillating images. The latter applies particularly in the case of images of women with tattoos. Drawing on a presentation similar to that of soft core pornography magazines and targeted at motorcycle or "biker" readers, the features on women rarely focus on the reality of the woman presen ted or her tattoos. Instead they craft a fantasy image for heterosexual male consumption. Outlaw Biker is a good example of this type of magazine. Ostensibly about motorcycles and machinery, Outlaw Biker presents many of its photographs of motorcycles with bikini-clad female models draped across the machines in seductive poses. Most of the tattoo magazines such as Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue ( by the same publisher as Outlaw Biker motorcycle magazine) or Tattoo (by the same publisher as Easyriders motorcycle magazine) employ similar layout styles, article types and poses for the women depicted. Despite the fact that the tattoo magazines' target audience is ostensibly both male and female tattoo aficionados, or that the women posing for the photographs may feel their actions are aggressive and empowering (Crary-Ortega, 1996), the presentation particularly objectifies the female form. Women viewers as well are encouraged by this perspective to adopt the male gaze.
The magazines that I am primarily drawing on for this work are Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review, Skin Art, and Tattoo. These magazines, in particular, come from the genre of motorcycle magazines and are similar to soft core pornography magazines in terms of method of display of female bodies for visual stimulation of the heterosexual male reader. For example, photographs of motorcycles with semi-nude women on or around them are often used as an attractant and advertising ploy. The articles are often short features that are not particularly in-depth or informative, and advertising accepted (pornographic videos and magazines, 1-900 sex numbers, "hot" personals for those who want "new legs to wrap around their bikes," sex and fetish catalogs) is often the same as that in pornography magazines down to the exact layout of the advertising pages. Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review and Tattoo are the closest to the "biker" or soft porn model: the articles are often short, shallow and poorly written, while the poses of women in the photographs recall poses from soft core pornography (hipshot, hands cupped around and uplifting breasts, arched back, pouting or sultry facial expression, and the model looking into the "eyes" of the camera). Skin Art, on the other hand, shows primarily photos of just the tattoos themselves, grouped under the headings of "backs," "fronts," "arms," "legs," etc. This style is more reminiscent of harder core pornography in iconography, but may instead be inspired by the magazine's focus on the actual tattoo image itself and the concentration on style and design content, rather than the person who has the tattoo.
It is interesting to consider what these presentations of women in tattoo magazines imply when compared with the coding of tattooing as a masculine activity, as discussed earlier. While tattooing is mentioned over and over again in the literature as something men primarily do, and as men's tattooing is what has been focused on in the cross cultural literature (Handy 1965, Taylor 1981, Steiner 1990), an examination of these popular magazines yields feature after feature on women. However, these features are not scholarly. Instead, they are designed for heterosexual male consumption as arousing fantasy images. The text focuses not on the motivations or meanings of the tattoo to the woman, but more on her personal likes and dislikes, how old she is, what she does for a living, where she lives. These details echo the sort of information provided in pornographic magazines about the models in the pictorial layouts. The result is a pre-processed package, aimed at the male gaze, with just enough detail to spark a fantasy. The articles on men with tattoos in the same magazines, in contrast, focus on the personal meaning of the image, the reasons a particular artist was chosen, and the events or emotional states commemorated by the tattoo.
This difference is reflective of the Western philosophical dualisms discussed in Chapter One. Following Plumwood's dichotomy, women fall onto the same side of the divide as object (1993). This categorization reads women and women's experience as Other, outside the norm, and exotic. Because women who become tattooed are partaking in an activity coded as male and cultural, they are seen as even more exotic. They inhabit a state of ambiguity where categories of being (male/female, cultural/natural) overlap and intersect, a state charged with symbolic energy (Leach 1976); a state which makes many people uncomfortable because ambiguity contradicts order (Douglas 1966). At the same time, this energy and ambiguity can also be enticing. In the context of these magazines, women with tattoos are objects for the consumption of the male gaze, like the women in the soft-core pornography layouts of Playboy or Penthouse magazine. Rather than moving from the female, undervalued side of the dyad to the dominant male side b y partaking in an activity coded as male, women with tattoos become still more marginalized. Once marked as Other by the process of becoming tattooed, it becomes more logical for women to choose designs that are outside the purview of the traditional coding of "feminine." By becoming tattooed in the first place they have already moved still further into the margins of the exotic in philosophical perception, and therefore have less invested in devoting themselves to an ideal of femininity. Having stepped outside of the boundaries of the traditional feminine, women who get tattoos are free to indulge their desires in image choice and design placement, to assume the label of exotic and manipulate it, regardless of how these choices are perceived in relation to the social norms. A woman in contemporary United States culture who is secure enough in her self-identity to make the choice to get a tattoo in the face of societal prescriptions which tell her it is an unwomanly, unfeminine thing to do is also likely to b e secure enough in herself to choose a design from the entire range of those available, rather than being guided by the received notions of Western cultural female behavior. The same is true of placement choice: having risked social censure for obtaining a tattoo in the first place, how much more is risked in displaying the tattoo by placing it in a more visible body area. Women in contemporary United States culture who choose to become tattooed have already voluntarily crossed the boundaries of one type of expected female cultural behavior. Having crossed one such boundary, I believe it becomes easier for them to cross more, thus resulting in the women in my research choosing from a greater range of tattoo design and placement than a straight reading of the prescriptive Western cultural categories would seem to allow. In addition, women who choose to be photographed in a provocative manner as displayed in these magazines may see this choice as one made from a position of strength, as an aggressive assertion of their sexuality and their control over their bodies. The reasons for these women's participation may stem from the same impulses that led them to become tattooed in the first place (Crary-Ortega, 1996). It is the slant of these magazines toward the male heterosexual gaze and the implication of this gaze that women are passive subjects for sexual titillation that results in an apparent conflict between the desire of these women to transgress boundaries and own their bodies and actions, and their lack of resistance to others posing her as an erotic object.
Methods for this project consisted of examination of a cross section of the tattoo magazines available on the market. Over the period of a year, I collected twelve issues of Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review, eight issues of Tattoo, six issues of Skin Art, and the premiere issue of Skin & Ink. I examined 752 images and made a raw count of location, style and design type. As I was working with nominal data, I generated frequency tables using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). I have also looked at the way the images of women are presented in alignment with Gamman and Marshment's discussion and presentation of male and female gaze in The Female Gaze(1989).
There are a number of questions which can be asked with regards to women and tattooing. I have chosen to focus on the types of images which women choose and their placement on the body. Specifically, I looked at whether or not there is a substantial difference between the types and locations of images women choose for their tattoos and the types and locations of images which men choose for their tattoos. My primary sources for discussion of men's tattooing choices are Art, Sex, and Symbol (Scutt and Gotch 1986) and Customizing the Body (Sanders 1989).
I have divided the types of tattoos into two major subcategories: style and design. I use style to refer to the artistic style of the tattooing and further divide it into the following eight groups: 1) tribal blackwork, 2) tribal work with color, 3) traditional or sailor style, 4) fine art with color, 5) fine art work consisting of black and grey single needle work, 6) Japanese style, 7) Celtic style, and 8) handpicked or homemade tattooing (this last refers only to the style of tattoo, not the method or technique of application).
Tribal blackwork is a type of tattooing that is based on or reminiscent of the tattoo work of the South Pacific Islands. It often recalls Melanesian tattoos in image, though not as often in placement. Tribal blackwork consists most often of large, bold designs, filled in with solid black coloration. These designs, especially where they are most strongly based on traditional forms, are usually abstract. However, this is not always the case, as artists in the west have modified the traditional designs. The easiest way to characterize tribal style blackwork is that it consists of a combination of discrete design elements, each of which is self contained, abstract, and without shading. These elements are combined in groupings which may or may not have a separate specific meaning. Common elements include stripes, swirls, geometric shapes, and combinations of the above [see Figure 1].
Tribal work with color is a style that is a modification of the tribal blackwork style. Traditional South Pacific Islands tattooing consisted entirely of images worked in black or a bluish-black pigment. Western artists have, with the development of color pigments, taken the geometrical elements of tribal designs and executed them in color. This style includes the same types of design elements as blackwork and may be done in combination with blackwork design elements. Variations also include color geometrics with black outlines as well as solid color geometric design elements [see Figure 2].
'Traditional' or sailor style of tattooing is used here to refer to the Western tradition of tattoo, what Hans Ebensten (1953) refers to as "American" tattooing: "the habit of arranging scrolls of words amongst decorative vignettes, flowers, hearts and animals." This type of tattoo is very stylized, quite two dimensional, and often executed with little regard for 'art'. The lines tend to be thick and bold, the colors are rarely blended or life-like, and the images tend to be iconic, cartoon-like, and essentialistic or non-representational. There is little effort made to make things look realistic. Common design elements include hearts, anchors, birds, panthers, simple flowers (roses in particular), and vow banners or names. This type of tattooing is what often what immediately springs to mind when tattoos are mentioned to the casual observer, or depicted in cartoons [see Figure 3].
Fine art tattooing, on the other hand, refers to images where an effort has been made to produce an effect similar to looking at a drawing or painting on the skin. This type of tattooing falls into two categories, 1) color work and 2) black and grey (also sometimes called fine line or fine needle tattooing). Fine art color work often resembles art on skin. The desired effect is that of the skin being just another type of canvas or medium for the artist. This type of tattooing often strives for a harmonious effect and placement that takes advantage of body location, rather than just being a picture stuck on the body haphazardly. Shading, perspective, color blending, and working with body contours are all important elements in fine art tattooing [see Figure 4].
Black and grey work is similar in spirit to fine art color tattoos, working with body contours, perspective and shading; yet it deserves its own category as the overall effect is strikingly different from fine art work. Unlike black and white photography versus color photography, an easy parallel to attempt to make, black and grey tattooing relies not so much on value contrasts as the skillful use of extremely fine lines and shading or stippling. Often tattoo equipment with a single needle is employed, making the work even more time consuming and somewhat more painful than other types of tattooing. This type of work is extremely detailed, and it is one of the more demanding styles both for the tattoo artist and the person getting the tattoo. An extremely high level of almost photo-realism is possible making this style often the choice for portraiture [see Figure 5].
The next category, Japanese style, refers to tattoo work (available in western shops and studios these days, as well as in Japan) whose images, background fill-work, and execution are based on traditional Japanese tattooing. This style is characterized by flowers with symbolic value (particularly chrysanthemums), fish (again with symbolic value), such as carp, the familiar dragon imagery, and background fill-work reminiscent of water and waves. These images are often stylized in a particular fashion that follows the design rules of traditional Japanese art. Individuals in traditional Japanese dress may also be part of the images. I do not use Japanese in this context to indicate only a full body suit of tattoo work, but purely in reference to image style [see Figure 6].
Celtic tattooing refers to tattoo work based on Celtic styles of art and design. Scroll-work in particular, Celtic knots, and traditional design elements such as griffins and other stylized mythological creatures, arm bands utilizing triskaleons or interweaving knot-work designs, and the Celtic cross and circle are motifs representative of this category [see Figure 7].
Handpicked or homemade, the final category, refers to tattoo work which is obviously done nonprofessionally. 'Prison' tattoo work falls into this category; work that is most likely done with a single needle, often a sewing needle or a pin, dipped in India ink or a similar medium, and then pricked into one's own skin or the skin of a compatriot or friend. While this technique can reach a fairly high artistic level depending on the skill and practice of the artist, and is reflective of the origins of tattooing, in my schema this category indicates solely the style of tattoo, and not the method or technique of application; it represents a nonprofessional, rawer-looking mode of tattooing which is somewhat inferior to most professional work from an artistic viewpoint [see Figure 8].
From a design standpoint, I have divided the tattoos in my sample into six categories: 1) vow, 2) icon, 3) abstract, 4) pictorial, 5) complex/combination and 6) other. Design here refers to the actual design elements - the components of the tattoo, the specific images and pictures chosen. Vow tattoos are a particular type of design that is often found in sailor or 'traditional' western tattooing. These are tattoos that commemorate someone or something. The heart and name banner tattoo, the ever-present 'MOM' tattoo found in cartoons of military individuals, the anchor with a ship name, and the insignia of a military regiment are all types of vow tattoos [see Figure 3]. I have included portraiture in this category, as I find the best place to fit a pictorial dedication or remembrance of someone is this category. Portraiture, as is indicated by the name, is the practice of selecting someone's picture to be the subject of the tattoo as a permanent memorial to them or as a sign of love and affection. Some of t he finest black and grey work that has been done involves this type of photographic reproduction.
Icon tattoos are also found in sailor type tattoos, but appear in other styles as well. An icon tattoo is a stylized image of some sort. It can be a cartoon character, or a traditional piece of flash from the wall of the tattoo shop, such as a panther or a rose. Flash refers to pre-drawn, often standardized work that is available for a set price from the tattoo artist. These designs may have been drawn by the artist running the shop, or the permission to use them may have been purchased from or granted by the artist who drew them. Flash can also be ordered from tattoo magazines along with inks and tattoo machines. Custom work, on the other hand, refers to work designed specifically for the customer by the tattoo artist, and is often a collaborative effort between the customer and the artist. Charges for custom work are usually calculated per hour. Non-flash, custom tattoos can also be iconic, however. I have placed all stylized non- abstract tattoos in this category; it includes hearts, stylized flowers (a s opposed to realistic reproductions with shading and shadows, etc.), and other simplified images [see Figure 9].
Abstract refers to those designs that are mostly drawn from "primitive" tattooing. These designs often come from non-western aboriginal tattooing traditions, and primitive here is in no way meant to indicate a value judgement; rather it refers to a boldness and simplicity of design elements, an essential quality - primitive in the sense of primitive versus derived, to borrow a term from biology. These designs do not necessarily convey any meaning in and of themselves, thus the category name abstract, but they often have definite meanings assigned to them; for example, the Pacific Northwest Native style of art and tattooing is made of specific abstract design elements such as particular types of ovals or curves which represent eyes, wings, etc. This category also includes designs from the Pacific Islands (for example Borneo, Melanesia, or Micronesia), traditional North African designs, and tattoos based on these elements [see Figure 2].
Pictorial in terms of design is used to indicate an image which is clearly meant to be a specific artistic representation of some particular thing. It involves detail, shading, perspective, and other artistic techniques used to make a picture or images seem realistic. Pictorial designs are not as abstracted or stylized as icon designs, and resemble a drawing or painting on a canvas of skin [see Figure 10].
Complex or combination is a category I was forced to use as, particularly in heavily tattooed individuals, it becomes difficult to separate out specific images as singular tattoos. This is a limitation of the medium, as there is only so much room for tattooing on any particular person, and so images tend to become interwoven and can become somewhat crowded. It is an effect that can be extremely striking when well done, as with the traditional Japanese body suits, or extremely distracting when ill-executed, a jumble of unrelated images with no connecting theme or fill work. Designs were placed into this category when the work involved more than one differing style in close harmony [see Figure 7].
Other is a catch-all category for work which did not fit easily into the other categories.
These categorizations enabled me to construct frequency tables for location of tattoo, style of tattoo, and type of design. Once I had done this, I compared my findings with the predictions from the past findings of others who had written about tattoos, particularly Clinton Sanders (1989). Sanders lists breast, hip, lower abdomen, back or shoulder as the preferred body sites for women to place their tattoos and reports it to be unconventional for women to have tattoos on their arms. My findings were closer to the predictions he makes for male tattooing location patterns (arm/hand primarily, then back/shoulder and hip) than the predictions he makes for female tattooing location patterns. While it is possible that my data may be skewed, since it was taken from photographs chosen by magazine editors, the fact remains that the women involved owned these tattoos (in these locations) and made them available to be photographed. Though Sanders reports that women prefer smaller designs, my sample contained women wi th designs he attributes to men: larger tattoos including images of snakes, dragons or skulls. This, coupled with research regarding the nature of body politics and the way certain cultural activities are encoded to be either male or female in the Western philosophical tradition, led me to speculate as to the nature of the difference between my findings and the way women's tattooing practices are portrayed in tattooing literature. In keeping with the works of Plumwood (1993) and Grosz (1994), tattooing is an activity that is culturally coded as male (as opposed to female), and those women who engage in it are expected by those enculturated in the milieu of the contemporary United States to do so in a hyper-feminine manner. This leads to the postulation that women would choose small, discreetly placed tattoo designs that are "feminine" in nature: flowers, hearts, gentle animals, as Sanders, for example, predicts that women commonly get a "small, delicate design...primarily intended for personal pleasure and th e enjoyment of those with whom they are most intimate...favor[ing] the gentle imagery of nature and mythology (flowers, birds, butterflies, unicorns, and so forth)" (pg. 49-50). This is in opposition to my findings, which showed that women choose much the same type of images as men, and get tattoos of multiple sizes in various locations, discreet and public. Men, it should be noted, also choose a variety of designs and placement that conflict with the projected notion that they would select only bold "masculine" designs such as skulls, panthers, and anti-authoritarian slogans. The traditional cultural prescriptions surrounding tattoo image and placement choice are equally restrictive and false for both men and women. Perhaps this reflects a bias towards perceiving women as having as a primary role decorative objects, and therefore being 'naturally' more concerned with adornment issues (Gamman and Marshment 1989). Sanders postulates that women see tattoos as primarily decorative, while men see them as an ident ity badge.
Upon analysis of the frequency tables I generated I found the following results: the location of greatest frequency chosen by women in my sample was the arm and hand, followed by leg and foot and hip/buttock [see Table 1]. This is different from the pattern for women found by Sanders for the choice of location of the first tattoo, which was primarily chest/breast, secondly arm/hand and third most frequent, back/shoulder in his data drawn from "direct and intimate" participation in the tattoo subculture, a series of interviews with ten men and six women, and a self-administered questionnaire given to 111 men and 52 women (1989: 169-170). My data more closely parallels the pattern Sanders showed for males: first choice of arm/hand, second choice of back/shoulder, and third choice of leg/foot.
Table 1. LOC: location of tattoo Value Label Value Frequency Percent arm/hand 01 316 37.7 leg/foot 02 109 13.0 chest/breast 03 85 10.1 hip/buttock 04 102 12.2 upper back/shoulder 05 92 11.0 lower back 06 29 03.5 genital 07 4 00.5 face/neck/head 08 17 02.0 abdomen 09 17 02.0 full back piece 10 55 06.6 other 11 12 01.4 Total 838 100%
As indicated in Table 2, the most popular style within my sample was by far fine art - color, followed by fine art - black and grey, then tribal blackwork. The most popular type of design for my sample was pictorial, followed by icon and abstract [see Table 3]. Sanders did not address design elements and style in his study, as he was focusing more on what motivated the choices around the decision to become tattooed rather than on what images were chosen by the person becoming tattooed.
Table 2. STYLE: tattooing style Value Label Value Frequency Percent tribal blackwork 1 94 11.2 tribal work with color 2 89 10.6 traditional/sailor 3 82 09.8 fine art - color 4 319 38.1 fine art - black and grey 5 166 19.8 Japanese 6 76 09.1 Celtic 7 10 01.2 handpicked/homemade 8 2 00.2 Total 838 100%
Table 3. DESIGN: type of design Value Label Value Frequency Percent vow 1 36 04.3 icon 2 218 26.0 abstract 3 188 22.4 pictorial 4 283 33.8 complex/combination 5 106 12.6 other 6 7 00.8 Total 838 100%
My findings are essentially what I expected, based on my own personal experience as a tattooed woman and on my personal observations of other tattooed women. They are different from what the literature leads one to expect. Unlike many sources which predict private body placement, my findings indicate women choose both public locations (arms, legs) and large designs. The works of Sanders and Scutt and Gotch, contrastingly, indicate a perception that women, should they choose to participate in what is coded as a masculine activity, would do so in a hyper-feminine fashion, reinforcing on a separate level their membership in the category of female and acting to ameliorate the dissonance caused by their movement from one philosophical category through a zone of ambiguity. Trapped in the Western cultural dyadic bias, authors such as these have in the past been unable to see the implications of a balanced discussion of tattooing in both men and women and have been unwilling to examine their own assumptions ab out women's behavior.
It should again be mentioned that the data I collected has the possibility of bias within it. I collected the photos from magazines which are skewed toward a male heterosexual gaze. As a result, it is hard to know that these magazines are not presenting a biased picture by focusing on those tattoos and body parts of interest to that category of viewer. Although beyond the scope of this thesis, a further avenue of research might be a field project which focused on interviewing and photographing women with tattoos in person. By removing the mediation of biased selectors (the editors of the magazines, who are doubtless motivated more by what they feel will sell issues rather than a scholarly interest in the range of tattoos owned by women), this type of further study could confirm or deny my research, and shed more light on the actuality of women's experiences. Another avenue of possible additional research might be a focus on the reasons why women choose to become tattooed, and why they choose the designs th ey do. Although this is an area I was unable to cover in this project, it is certain to be fruitful as an exploration of women's activities, to reveal how women's behavior compares to men's behavior, and how their choices compare to the projections and predictions that have been made about how women behave. With further resources, it would also be interesting to conduct interviews with tattooed women, to obtain specific observations and material on their perceptions of their own actions, their reasons for becoming tattooed, and their experiences, as well as a possibly less-biased catalog of the types of images chosen. Additional study could also address the area of demographics, to investigate possible age and class trends in the data population that I was unable to explore because of resource and practical limitations. Pursuit of these topics at a later time would provide a wider range evidence for exploring women's ways of being.
The theoretical background of this investigation comes primarily out of a feminist critique of traditional ways society (and male thinkers in particular as ones who have wielded great power) looks at women, both those with and without tattoos. Studies of tattooing in the past have focused primarily on men, passing over women both in terms of data collected and in terms of focus on women as an group of interest for study with regards to this topic. Popular literature and magazines concerned with tattooing, on the other hand, have focused on women with tattoos as images for consumption by the male gaze, objects for viewing. In spite of the occasional nod toward women tattoo artists, the majority of research is still characterized by a patriarchal attitude that women with tattoos or who tattoo are still further outside the 'norm' than men with tattoos or who tattoo; oddities among the odd, as it were. The prediction that women who become tattooed would choose feminine designs results from the attempt to impos e order on the structural chaos caused by tattooed women's movement into an area that is the ambiguous boundary between categories characterized as separately male and female (Douglas 1966). When on one level women engage in what is coded as unfeminine behavior (becoming tattooed), the expectation becomes instead that they will engage in this unfeminine and now ambiguous behavior in a manner that fits within the category of feminine. So the expectation of femininity is shifted from one level (participating or not participating in the general behavior of tattooing) to another level (the type of design chosen and the body location it is placed on) in an attempt to fit the established cultural scheme of Western behavioral expectations for women.
Western European traditions of art have long been dominated by the male gaze (Mulvey 1975, Gamman and Marshment 1989). Women have been the opposite sex, the object of male desire: the model to be painted and the muse who inspires greatness from the assumed-to-be male artist. They have been firmly forced into the category of other, not-viewer, not-creator. Moving into the realm of tattooing, and specifically focusing on tattooed women and how they are presented in the magazines of the tattooing subculture, we find that the gaze involved is still primarily masculine.
The three popular magazines with which I have chosen to work are exemplary of this tendency. For example, during the period of one year that I collected issues, none of the magazines I studied featured men on the covers. Each issue had instead for its cover layout one or more women, usually in provocative or seductive display poses. Often these women were not particularly heavily or well tattooed. The intent was clearly to provide a female image for male consumption and to entice the consumer (assumed male) to purchase the magazine rather than to display effective or interesting tattoo work. In the interior layouts, approximately twice as many articles featured women as men, and photo spreads tended to concentrate on women, usually lightly clad. Heavy women or women with body types that deviate from the Western fantasy ideal of a thin body with large breasts were not featured, although they did appear in the convention-oriented layouts in background or candid shots.
The orientation of these magazines toward male consumption of female images is made still clearer by the text content accompanying the photo layouts. For example, in Tattoo, accompanying two photos of a woman in french-cut bikini underwear with a small tattoo on her upper left shoulder, is a feature titled Shawn Lee -- the elusive one, reproduced here in its entirety:
Don't ask us too much about Shawn Lee -- most of what we know is based on the flicks on this page. Don't get us wrong, either; we'd like to know her better, but our reputation obviously precedes us (Shawn apparently knows to not return our calls). Of course, our intentions are only honorable, and we'd only be interested in Shawn's opinions on world hunger, ICBMs in the former Soviet Union, immigration in the U.S. and its effect on race relations, the hole in the ozone/South Pole tourism, revisionist historians, aperitifs for the nineties, gays in the military, whether children should be allowed to sue their parents, Amy Fisher, the breakup of the royal family, Oprah's latest diet, high-caliber weaponry in elementary schools, whether Mickey's Big Mouth goes better with microwave burritos than Olde English 800, and, naturally, performance art. We have no interests whatsoever in Shawn's tastes in lingerie, men, cars, movies, aesthetics, religion, or sexual positions. All this academic curiosity aside , our shoddy detective work did reveal Shawn's favorite tattooist -- Doc Dog at the Las Vegas Tattoo Company in, believe it or not, Las Vegas. But Doc's hours are weirder than ours (his life probably is, too), so we're flying by the seat of our pants and relying on hearsay, but we hope that the two will link up for more good ink down the road. Naturally, we wouldn't mind seeing more of Shawn, or, rather, her future tattoos, because, you see, we're only interested in her for professional reasons. Honestly. (Tattoo 1993)
It is clear from the text that this feature is not about the tattoo, or even the woman with the tattoo, but that it is creating an image aimed toward heterosexual men for their sexual excitement and consumption. The woman is an object for their gaze; her possession of a tattoo is the reason for this feature appearing in this magazine as opposed to some other form of soft core pornography. Tattoo is the magazine with the clearest position in this respect: it is usually sold shrink wrapped with a sticker indicating adult content, and it is accompanied each month by a pullout pinup poster of one of the women featured in the magazine. It is ironic that the magazine with the most specific title is the least concerned with actually tattooing. While Tattoo is certainly the most extreme in this regard, Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue and its subsidiaries are also slanted in this direction. Because Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review and Tattoo are primarily oriented towards heterosexual "biker" men, who are stereotypically a cat egory of men who consider women among the class of property or objects (Steward 1990), these stereotyped attitudes continue to be promulgated by the magazines. Theoretically, a magazine coming from a different background would be less biased and tend to treat women in a less objectifying fashion; in reality, this may or may not be the case. The male gaze here continues to be normative and pervasive as is found in other forms of art and literature (Gamman and Marshment 1989).
Tattooing as a means of decorating the body has a long history among both men and women. Many discussions in the past have dealt with the symbolism of tattooing. Early works described it as a practice of 'primitive' people and detailed the social and ritual significance of its various manifestations. (Handy 1965) Later works (Sanders 1989, Vale and Juno 1989, Krakow 1984) recognize that tattooing is a meaningful practice in contemporary society as well.
Tattoos, in Western culture at present, are primarily coded as masculine. The evidence for this occurs in the numerous books and articles about tattooing which discuss (men's) tattooing in a general manner, then include an addendum regarding women's tattoos (for example, Burg 1995, Fellman 1986, Handy 1965, Scutt and Gotch 1986). Books which deal primarily with women's tattooing are clearly labeled as such (for example De Michelle 1992, Webb 1976, Wroblewski 1991). Tattooing is a cultural process, a civilizing process. No animals tattoo themselves, so to become tattooed is to become publicly inscribed as human. Tattooing has been used to symbolize rank and lineage (Taylor 1981). Given how culture has been opposed philosophically to nature, and the linkage of the concept of male with the concept of culture and the concept of female with the concept of nature, it becomes apparent how women's tattoo practices engender the conflicting reports that they do. Women who become tattooed are engaging in behavior tha t has a coding as male, crossing the boundaries of accepted Western prescriptions for behavior into ambiguity. The conflict between the expectations that are part of the Western contemporary framework and the actuality of women's behavior in becoming tattooed results in the contradictory reports of that behavior in the literature as well as the expectation that women would choose tattoos that were exemplary of the category of feminine.
The body of literature on tattooing in the past has focused mainly on the tattooing practices of men. With the exception of two or three books, women's tattooing practices have been skimmed over or ignored, meriting one or two paragraphs sometimes out of entire books. This thesis has been conducted in an effort to partially remedy that lack.
By conducting a statistical analysis of the patterns of women's image and site choices for their tattoos, I hoped to counteract the male bias in previous works on tattooing. After I obtained my data, from looking at photographs of women with tattoos in the popular magazines devoted to the subculture in the United States, I found that the evidence I collected did not match what the tattooing literature and conversations with other scholars had led me to believe. Rather than choosing designs coded in the popular culture as feminine, images such as hearts or flowers, of a small size and discreet location, as the literature or "common sense" overwhelming tended to predict, I found that women choose a variety of designs, sizes and image sites. The actuality of women's choices included all types and styles of tattoos, in a pattern closely related to the patterns already studied in men (Sanders 1989).
This discovery easily leads to philosophical speculation as to why these differences should be the case. Why would the literature on tattooing be so contradictory, both internally (as Scutt and Gotch 1986) and externally (Sanders 1989), when the subject of women and tattoos is under discussion? An examination of feminist body politics literature pointed to some possible answers: the categorization of tattoos as a masculine activity, related to culture and status (Steiner 1990), and the Western philosophical opposition of men and women, culture and nature in hierarchical dyads with masculine valued over feminine. Should women participate in this male-coded activity, to retain their status as female/other, this philosophical viewpoint predicts that women would do so in a manner that could still be coded as female, not just feminine but hyper-feminine. Hence the predictive prescription in the tattooing literature and among people unfamiliar with the tattooing subculture that women choose delicate decorative d esigns (Sanders 1989) and place them on sites that only intimates would see. Should a woman be heavily tattooed (Webb 1976) she becomes categorized in this philosophical schema as a freak, associated with circus sideshows, and written off as an amusement (Scutt and Gotch 1986), taken less seriously even than other women in Western culture.
Fortunately, with the advent in the 1990s of more women authoring books on tattooing practices (of both men and women) in popular culture, and with the continuing focus of a portion of feminist theory on body politics and the perceptions of bodies in Western culture, the future holds some possibilities for exploration of theses issues in a less biased (or at least differently biased) fashion. The ideas of fluidity and the possibility of visioning the body as a network of interrelations as discussed in Chapter One present some new perspectives on a set of philosophical foundations that are not wedded to hierarchical dualism (Grosz 1994). By the application of these different philosophical positions to the study of popular cultural practices such as tattooing and the perceptions held about them, an understanding may be developed of how seemingly contradictory positions about women and tattoos have been reached in the past. In addition, an avenue of study for the future has been indicated. Because the literat ure on women and tattooing and tattooing as a current practice in general is still a very small portion of anthropological and other literature, further studies of women's tattooing practices cross-culturally (from both the emic and etic perspectives) would be interesting and useful in determining if my conclusions are correct. A more in-depth, ethnographic approach with interviews and detailed demographic data would also aid in answering some of the questions raised during the process of this project.
In any case, tattooing will continue to be a subject of interest. The fascination with the permanent alteration of the body for personal reasons has a long history, as do the practices themselves. The preparation of this thesis has been an opportunity to step outside myself and analyze the internal motivations and external perceptions of women (including myself) who have chosen to become tattooed. The surface changes, and the exterior interactions between philosophy and reality that are inscribed outwardly can engender interesting philosophical discussions. However, speaking as a tattooed woman, the interiority of the matter regarding why anyone would choose to become tattooed reduces itself quite simply to unexplained desire. Further research may illuminate this area, but until it does the knowledge that in contrast to received Western cultural and philosophical beliefs, women do choose to become tattooed, and these beginning explorations of the manner in which they do so must suffice.