Revolting Bodies: The Monster Beauty of Tattooed Women

Abstract

A woman who works at my favorite bookstore recently told me about her boyfriend's reaction to large intricate tattoos adorning her shoul- ders. He said they make him think of prostitutes and I've never even been on a motorcycle. So I said, 'but this is me. You know me.' But he says he needs time to get over connection. My bookseller's struggle with disjunctive identification occasioned by her tattoos is not unusual. Tattooed women register on many people's radar screens for first time either as circus side-show acts, the tattooed lady, hippies, prostitutes, or biker chicks. The rebellious politics and performances of these types of women seem easily identifiable: they are physically transgressive, rootless, loose, troublemakers. Less discernible has been discomfort caused by their speaking bodies that exceed protocols of simple body language. As symbols demanding to be read, tattoos on women produce anxieties of misrecognition. Masculine tattoo connota- tions—brave, heroic, macho—slip off skin of women. The stories behind sailors' tattoos are not women's stories. In a culture built on women's silence and bent on maintaining silence as a primary part of relationship between women's bodies and cultural writing, rules have been simple. The written body may only speak from a patriarchal script that tries to limit women's voices and bodies to supporting roles and scenery. So on a woman's body any tattoo becomes symbol of bodily excess. When a woman's body is a sex object, a tattooed woman's body is a lascivious sex object; when a woman's body is nature, a tattooed woman's