Introduction: Picturing Tattoos

Notes Introduction: Picturing Tattoos 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 86. 2. In this way, the “trouble” that my image causes is related to, albeit slightly different than, the way in which Judith Butler mobilizes the term trouble. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). 3. Joseph Roach, “Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 48. 4. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 11. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. It is important to note here that I am not necessarily referring to linear notion of history. “Prior” is a construction or fiction that is enabled through the process of surrogation and the actual citational links between and among cultural events occur along multiple pathways and in multiple directions. A rhizomatic distribution, if you will. 8. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3. 9. Chapter One provides an extended discussion of the association between tattoos and deviant behavior. 10. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 27. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 27–28. 15. W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiii. 16. See, for example, Paul DuGay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 1997). 158 Notes Chapter One Vital Images: The Performance of Performativity 1. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107. 2. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 139. 3. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 4. William DeMichele, The Illustrated Woman (New York: Proteus Press, 1992), 73. 5. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. 6. Citationality refers to the ways in which representations and/or performances explicitly or implicitly refer to or depend upon prior and concurrent representations for their meaning. Jennifer’s picture, for example, could be argued to cite the conventions of wanted posters with the close-up shot of the face centered in the frame. Alternately, the image also arguably refers to other pop- ular cultural images of women with shaved heads. For instance, the photo was taken and the book published in the early 1990s, when Sine´ad O’Connor was at the height of her popularity after the release of I Do Not Want What IHaven’t Got. O’Connor’s famously shaved head and her subsequent politi- cal protest—such as tearing apart the image of the Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live (October 3, 1992) in protest of Catholic priest sexual misconduct—are consequently part of the citational story of Jennifer’s image. 7. Ott has recently suggested, for example, that the search for representational resistance and normative reproduction has become predictable and boring. Brian Ott, “(Re)Locating Pleasure in Media Studies: Toward an Erotics of Reading,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1 (2004): 194–212. Wiley also indicates that despite Lawrence Grossberg’s call for an alternative approach to issues of politics and agency in cultural studies, that there is a continued modernist assumption behind cultural critiques of representation. Stephen Crofts Wiley, “Spatial Materialism: Grossberg’s Deleuzian Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies, 19 (January 2005): 63–99. 8. Wiley, 65. I do not mean to say, however, that there are not critiques of this type of representational economy. Clearly, the reliance on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in this book indicates that the epistemology of representation has been long under fire. 9. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1. 10. Lawrence Grossberg, “The Victory of Culture: Part One,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 3.3 (1998): 12, 16. 11. Wiley describes this as the logical structure of identity politics: “which con- flates identity, subjectivity, and agency and assumes that all three coincide in individual or collective actors defined by logics of difference” (65). 12. In a recent essay, Kosut suggests that there will not soon be an end to the association between tattooing and deviance and that this has relatively permanently Notes 159 marked tattooing as a fringe art practice associated with, in Kosut’s argument, asylum art. Mary Kosut, “Mad Artists and Tattooed Perverts: Deviant Discourse and the Social Construction of Cultural Categories,” Deviant Behavior, 27 (2006): 73–95. 13. Mark Gustafson, “Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Charles W. MacQuarrie, “Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth and Metaphor,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 44. 16. Ibid., 33. 17. Hamish Maxwell-Stuart and Ian Duffield, “Skin Deep Devotions: Religious Tattoos and Convict Transportation in Australia,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–135. 18. Abby M. Schrader, “Branding the Other/Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription among Convicts in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 175. Anderson’s discussion of the use of tattoos as punishment in Indian penal colonies indicates, however, that this practice was not always appropri- ated as a means of resistance as Indian colonist sought to cover or erase the tattoos. Clare Anderson, “Godna: Inscribing Indian Convicts in the Nineteenth Century,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 102–117. 19. Jane Caplan, “‘National Tattooing’: Traditions of Tattooing in Nineteenth- Century Europe,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 156–173. 20. James Bradley, “Body Commodification? Class and Tattoos in Victorian Britain,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 139. 21. Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural history of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Samuel Steward, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (New York: Haworth Press, 1990); Clinton Sanders, Customizing the Body (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Seaton, “Profaned Bodies and Purloined Looks: The Prisoner’s Tattoo and the Researcher’s Gaze,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 11.2 (1987): 17–25. 22. Alan B. Govenar, “Introduction,” in Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist, ed. Leonard St. Clair and Alan B. Govenar (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1981), xx. 23. Govenar, “Introduction,” xx, xxi. 24. Ibid., xxi. 25. Although not always directly mentioned, it should come as no surprise that much of the theorization of the social inscription and resistance dynamic owes a debt to Foucault’s famous work in Discipline and Punish. The 160 Notes language of disciplinary power circulates though many of the arguments regarding the act of tattooing slaves and conflicts and their acts of resisting that inscriptive imposition. See Gustafson and Maxwell-Stewart and Duffield particularly. Also, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979). 26. See Gustav Newman, “The Implications of Tattooing in Prisoners,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43 (1982): 231–234; Norman Goldstein, “Psychological Implications of Tattoos,” Journal of Dermatologic Surgery and Oncology, 5 (1979): 883–888; A.J.W. Taylor, “Tattooing among Male and Female Offenders at Different Ages in Different Types of Institutions,” Genetic Psychology Monographs 81 (1970): 81–119; J. Briggs, “Tattooing,” Medical Times 87 (1958): 1030–1039. 27. Nikki Sullivan, Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 21. 28. Arnold Rubin, “The Tattoo Renaissance,” in Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1988): 233–264; Jane Caplan, “Introduction,” in Written on the Body, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xi; DeMello, Bodies of Inscription; Sanders, Customizing the Body, 18–20. 29. DeMello, Bodies of Inscription, 143–151. 30. Victoria Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 34. 31. Ibid., 35. 32. Ibid., 40. 33. TV.com, “Meet Chris Nuñez,” Miami Ink Video Gallery (accessed July 28, 2005). http://www.tv.com/tracking/viewer.html?tidϭ13497& ref_idϭ37627&ref_typeϭ101&om_actϭconvert&om_clkϭheadlinessh& tagϭheadlines;title;3. 34. Katherine Irwin, “Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants,” Sociological Spectrum, 23 (2003): 27–57. 35. Irwin, 38–41. 36. For the idea about the fertility of reproduction, I am indebted to W.J.T. Mitchell. 37. Hariman and Lucaites use this sense of the term in their analyses of iconic photographic images, for example. See Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph

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