The essays collected in Tattooed Bodies draw on a range of theoretical paradigms and empirical knowledge to investigate tattoos, tattooing, and our complex relations with marks on skin. Engaging with diverse disciplinary perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the sheer diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos throughout history and across cultures. Essays explore conceptualizations of tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while utilizing theoretical perspectives to interpret tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others. Tattooed Bodies prompts readers to explore a few significant questions: Are tattoos unique phenomena or an art medium in need of special theoretical exploration? If so, what conceptual paradigms and theories might best shape our understanding of tattoos and their complex ubiquity in world cultures and histories?

This book explores how we understand tattooed women’s bodies in the UK – through the lens of gender and class. Unpacking themes which focus on how femininity is embodied, and how unwritten rules are broken or followed, Charlotte Dann demonstrates how meaning is key to our understanding of female body art.

Cultural sensibilities about tattooing are discussed within historical context and in relation to broader trends in body modification, such as cosmetic surgery, dieting, and piercing.

In recent decades, tattoos have gone from being a subculture curiosity in Western culture to mainstream and commonplace. This two-volume set provides broad coverage of tattooing and body art in the United States today as well as around the world and throughout human history. In the 1960s, tattooing was illegal in many parts of the United States. Today, tattooing is fully ingrained in mainstream culture and is estimated to be a multi-billion-dollar industry. This exhaustive work contains approximately 400 entries on tattooing, providing historical information that enables readers to fully understand the methods employed, the meanings of, and the motivations behind tattooing—one of the most ancient ways humans mark themselves. The encyclopedia covers all important aspects of the topic of tattooing: the major types of tattooing, the cultural groups associated with tattooing, the regions of the world where tattooing has been performed, the origins of modern tattooing in prehistory, and the meaning of each society's use of tattoos. Major historical and contemporary figures associated with tattooing—including tattooists, tattooed people, and tattoo promoters—receive due attention for their contributions. The entries and sidebars also address the sociological movements involved with tattooing; the organizations; the media dedicated to tattooing, such as television shows, movies, magazines, websites, and books; and the popular conventions, carnivals, and fairs that have showcased tattooing.

In analyses of tattoo contests, advertising, and modern primitive photographs, the book shows how images of tattooed bodies communicate and disrupt notions of gender, class, and exoticism through their discursive performances. Fenske suggests working within dominant discourse to represent and subvert oppressive gender and class evaluations.

Globalization is often thought of as an abstract process that happens "out there" in the world. But people are ultimately the driving force of global change, and people have bodies that are absent from current conversations about globalization. The original scholarly research and first-person accounts of embodiment in this volume explore the role of bodies in the flows of people, money, commodities, and ideas across borders. From Zumba fitness classes to martial arts to fashion blogs and the meanings of tattooing, the contributors examine migrating body practices and ideals that stretch across national boundaries.

This edited collection provides sociological and cultural research that expands our understanding of the alternative, liminal or transgressive; theorizing the status of the alternative in contemporary culture and society.

An ethnography of the tattoo community, tracing the practice's transformation from a mostly male, working-class phenomenon to one adapted and propagated by a more middle-class movement in the period from the 1970s to the present.

In the 1830s, missionaries in French Polynesia sought to suppress the traditional art of tattooing, because they believed it to be a barbaric practice. More than 150 years later, tattooing is once again thriving in French Polynesia. This engrossing book documents the meaning of tattooing in contemporary French Polynesian society. As a permanent inscription, a tattoo makes a powerful statement about identity and culture. In this case, its resurgence is part of a vibrant cultural revival movement. Kuwahara examines the complex significance of the art, including its relationship to gender, youth culture, ethnicity and prison life. She also provides unique photographic evidence of the sophisticated techniques and varied forms that characterize French Polynesian tattooing today.Winner of The Japanese Society for Oceanic Studies Award 2005.

Drawing on interviews with women and queer tattoo artists from across the US, UK and Australia, this book explores their experiences in what has historically been a male-dominated industry to reveal how tattooing has undergone a ‘gender turn’ and a subsequent shift in gender relations.