(Monstrous) Beauty (Myths): The commodification of women's bodies and the potential for tattooed subversions

Abstract

abstract Women's bodies are often treated as sites of containment, control and oppression (Grosz, 1994). In contemporary contexts of tattooing, women's bodies, and their relationships to their bodies could be challenged and perhaps even shifted, as there is potential to engage embodiment and its subversive power to elevate female subjects from ‘object’ to active ‘participant’ within the consumerist-art-financial-embodied-identity exchange. This is of course contested terrain (Atkinson, 2002) as tattoos and their meanings, and variety of reasons that women decide on becoming tattooed, vary enormously, however the potential for subversion through tattooing does nevertheless exist. Within consumerist cultures, the body becomes a great commodity-bodies are used to sell almost everything, and the use and representation of bodies in this context is always gendered (Wolf, 1990). Braunberger (2000) engages what she labels ‘monster beauty’ - basically an alternative ‘female aesthetic’ in the context of women who are tattooed, she offers this in relation to existing conventions of feminine beauty which arguably render female bodies as consumer objects. To this end, Naomi Wolf provides a core consideration for this Perspective when she argues that beauty is a currency system - in short both embodied, and commodified - but proceeds to advocate this: “In response, we must now ask the question about our place in our bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society” (1990:270).