Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community - Softcover

Margo DeMello

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822324679 ISBN 13: 9780822324676

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Since the 1980s, tattooing has emerged anew in the United States as a widely appealing cultural, artistic, and social form. In Bodies of Inscription Margo DeMello explains how elite tattooists, magazine editors, and leaders of tattoo organizations have downplayed the working-class roots of tattooing in order to make it more palatable for middle-class consumption. She shows how a completely new set of meanings derived primarily from non-Western cultures has been created to give tattoos an exotic, primitive flavor.
Community publications, tattoo conventions, articles in popular magazines, and DeMello’s numerous interviews illustrate the interplay between class, culture, and history that orchestrated a shift from traditional Americana and biker tattoos to new forms using Celtic, tribal, and Japanese images. DeMello’s extensive interviews reveal the divergent yet overlapping communities formed by this class-based, American-style repackaging of the tattoo. After describing how the tattoo has moved from a mark of patriotism or rebellion to a symbol of exploration and status, the author returns to the predominantly middle-class movement that celebrates its skin art as spiritual, poetic, and self-empowering. Recognizing that the term “community” cannot capture the variations and class conflict that continue to thrive within the larger tattoo culture, DeMello finds in the discourse of tattooed people and their artists a new and particular sense of community and explores the unexpected relationship between this discourse and that of other social movements.
This ethnography of tattooing in America makes a substantive contribution to the history of tattooing in addition to relating how communities form around particular traditions and how the traditions themselves change with the introduction of new participants. Bodies of Inscription will have broad appeal and will be enjoyed by readers interested in cultural studies, American studies, sociology, popular culture, and body art.

About this title

About the Author

Margo DeMello is a nonprofit fundraiser. She has taught at San Francisco State University, Sacramento City College, and the University of California, Davis.

From the Back Cover

"The histories of tattoo traditions presented in this book are fascinating and rich. DeMello has many insights into tattoos' complexity of meaning, brought out in precise ethnographic and historical fashion."--Kathleen Stewart, author of "A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America"

Reviews

DeMello (formerly with Univ. of California, Davis) presents an anthropological study of tattooing and tattoo communities in North America. Both a researcher and a "tattooed person" who is married to a tattooist--both "insider and outsider," that is--she describes the rigid hierarchies within tattoo communities (how tattooists jealously guard secrets from outsiders and newcomers) and engages in a broader analysis of tattoos as socioeconomic indicators. She looks at the meaning of tattoos among bikers, Chicano gangs, middle-class baby boomers, and Generation X. Modern, elite tattooists, she argues, downplay tattooing's lower-class roots in favor of new "middle-class consumption." And whereas baby boomers' traditional tattoo designs--which most now want to hide--featured lifestyle, patriotism, love, and memorable events, Generation X youth proudly display more "exotic" and "primitive" designs. An interesting, authentic account of tattoo communities; recommended for all libraries.
-Chogollah Maroufi, California State Univ., Los Angeles
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822324679
• ISBN 13: 9780822324676
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256