Reality for Whom? Deconstructing INK and the Contested "Tattooed Body"

Abstract

The extent to which tattoo culture has been pervasively corporatized within the mainstream over the past decade indicates a critical juncture in the history of Western tattooing, one that signals the transition of the tattoo from a signifier of stigma to one of status, and a turn from the tattoo community of the past to a tattoo industry. I argue that a seemingly accurate body of knowledge called “tattooed reality” is disseminated through this industry and must be analyzed because it conveys a particularly problematic way of knowing, organizing, producing, and representing tattooed bodies. Using data from a media analysis of Miami Ink and L.A. Ink to inform interviews with local tattoo artists, I highlight how the tattooed body has become a contested space as “tattooed reality” discourse fragments and divorces tattooing from its disreputable past, and reappropriates it as an aesthetic cultural commodity of the middle-class.