Representation of Tattooing: Differentiation and Assimilation
Tattoos, it would seem, are as old as humankind. Although they were mainly used and displayed by members of deviant subcultures throughout most of the nineteenth century, the 1980’s and 1990’s have given way to a rise in body modifications in general, and tattoos in particular. The question arises as to how we can begin to explain this craze for tattoos in the Western world. In this paper, we suggest that this newly constructed infatuation is the product of an episteme which is built on four century-defining, distinct, all the while interrelated, phenomena: the Space Odyssey, the rise of Superheroes and Comic Books, the sexual revolution and the emergence of the internet in general and of social networks in particular. We also argue that the act of getting tattooed is necessarily both individual and collective: by differentiating oneself through the use of tattoos, one joins a collective or community. This reminds us that human societies are paradoxical in nature, their components constantly evolving between homogeneity and differentiation. Through the study of a Franco-Canadian sample divided into three separate groups – not tattooed, somewhat tattooed, very tattooed – we show that tattoos evoke arts, esthetics and health as well as the transgression of social norms and the extension of physical and psychological limits in all groups within both countries, although the French sample is more defined by art and the Canadian sample, by symbols. The marking of the body with ink thus appears as a collectively inscribed individual process in which the collective is either outside of, secondary to, or implicitly part of oneself, depending on the category with which we identify.