Table Of Content427839
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Article
Youth & Society
Becoming a Heavily 2014, Vol. 46(3) 303 –337
© The Author(s) 2011
Tattooed Young Body: Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0044118X11427839
From a Bodily Experience
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to a Body Project
Vitor Sérgio Ferreira1
Abstract
Why some young people start to tattoo their bodies? And why some of them
keep going on with this practice, until having all body tattooed? What doing so
means to them? These are some of the questions that underlie a qualitative
research project carried out in Portugal on heavily tattooed young people.
In this article, the author discusses their embodied trajectory from the first
experiences to their involvement in a body project, and explains the meanings
involved in this extreme corporeality. The analysis takes into consideration the
structural dynamics that define how young people live their transitions and
their identity construction nowadays to contextualize what appears as indi-
vidual experiences and projects without reifying the individual as a privileged
site of knowledge. Based on in-deph comprehensive interviews, the author
demonstrates that the engagement of young people in this permanent body
modification project represents an embodied struggle for the maintenance
of a desired subjectivity. In an increasingly liquid and uncertain society, some
young people ink larges extensions of their bodies searching for social recog-
nition as different, authentic, and autonomous individuals and trying to main-
tain their core identity during transitional turning points.
1Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL), Portugal
Corresponding Author:
Vitor Sérgio Ferreira, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Av. Professor Aníbal de
Bettencourt, n.º 9, 1600—189 Lisbon, Portugal.
Email: [email protected]
304 Youth & Society 46(3)
Keywords
tattoos, body project, identity, biography, transitions to adulthood
Introduction
The body has become a material resource increasingly invested in contempo-
rary culture, evident in the growing of services, techniques, and technologies
called for its modification and/or maintenance. The value of the physical
capital (Shilling, 1991) is particularly high among the younger generations
(Ferreira, 2009). They increasingly communicate through their bodies,
socially expressing the sense of who they are, or who they want to be, through
investments on the appearance, movements, and senses of the body. The
young people of the present times are part of a cultural world where the sense
of self is not separated from the feeling of embodiment. On the opposite, the
self is revealed through the body. The body is a medium of expression, of
self-experience and of social recognition. A medium that can and should be
malleable, to someone become somebody.
Among many body investments recently disposable, some authors have
documented the popularity of tattooing and body piercing practices in the
last two decades (Atkinson, 2003; DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001; Pitts, 2003;
Tiggemann & Golder 2006; Turner, 1999; Vail, 1999). As practices included
in an expanding body design industry—an industry that offers an increas-
ingly complex and sophisticated variety of commodities, techniques, tech-
nologies, and services focusing on the modification and maintenance of the
human body as a whole or in its most insignificant fragments–, tattoos and
body piercing have been increasingly globalized and commodified across
the occidental world (Bengtsson, Ostberg & Kjeldgaard, 2005; Kosut,
2006b).
Yet, certain kind of tattooing and body piercing are far from being socially
accepted as common practices of body modification, even among new gen-
erations. Not only genital piercings or facial tattoos are still conceived as
nonmainstream, nonnormative, deviant, or extreme forms of body modifica-
tion practices, among others as branding, burning or cutting the skin (Goode
& Vail 2008; Klesse, 1999; Myers, 1992). Also the heavily tattooed and
pierced bodies’ remains socially perceived as bizarre and anomalous, as more
extreme and unusual—namely, when they are evaluated in relation to that
kind of corporeal modification procedures that serves to adapt the bodies to
the institutionalized and celebrated image of “young body”—niveal, smooth,
healthy, and discreet.
Ferreira 305
As a matter of fact, the recent renaissance of ancestral practices of exten-
sively ink and pierce the body (Fleming, 2000; Rubin, 1988) has led to the
revival of some old moral stereotypes and social panics on their users, namely,
via an exoticized and sensationalist public mediatization of these body modifi-
cation practices (Pitts, 1999). Frequently media accounts interpret these prac-
tices keeping their anthropological and historical connotation with “marginal”
and “uncivilized” individuals, as well as with “barbarism,” “mutilation,” and
“psychiatric” or “deviant” disorders.
Historically taken more as mental patients rather than social agents, the
collectors of tattoo and body piercing have had more attention and interest
from psychology or psychiatry than from sociology. Sociology just started to
pay attention to tattoo and body piercing users when their practices begun to
integrate the consumer culture and its body design industry (Craik, 1994;
Demello, 1995; Featherstone, 1999), being chosen by a larger (quantitatively
and qualitatively) social spectrum of clientele than before. In this context, it
has being the main task of sociology to deconstruct the pathological, indi-
vidual, and subcultural images of tattooed and body-pierced people, taking
into account the process of commodification of body marks and its collective
sociosymbolic consequences on a macro level.
Following that perspective, the aim of this article is the sociological com-
prehension of the embodied subjectivities embedded in and constituted by
skin-extensive body marking practices among young people. Yet done on a
basis of a microscale and qualitative study, the article puts in relation the
construction of these young bodies with social conditions and cultural dynam-
ics that crosses the contemporary world of young people, considering their
transitions to adulthood and processes of identity construction.
Historical and Theoretical Background
When tattoos were imported by the West from exotic and distant colonized
territories, they gradually became used by some of the lowest social class
fringes (Caplan, 2000). In the second half of the 19th century, the presence of
extensively tattooed brown or white-skinned individuals was regular at circus
freak shows and traveling fairs, alongside with dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins,
bearded women and other “monsters” and/or “primitive” curiosities (Bogdan,
1994; Oettermann, 2000). In the beginning of the 20th century, tattoos became
widespread in neighborhoods of dubious reputation, among social figures
associated with vagrancy and criminality: sailors, dockers, prostitutes, ex-
convicts, laborers, gang members, and other type of scoundrel (DeMello,
1993; Fisher, 2002; Le Breton, 2002; Mifflin, 1997; Peixoto, 1990).
306 Youth & Society 46(3)
At a later stage, these resources were included in the “uniforms” of
some youth subcultures that emerged throughout the second half of the
20th century, as symbols of resistance against “mainstream society” and its
forms of domination and homogenization of the “young body”
(Camphausen, 1997; DeMello, 2000; Govenar, 1988, 2000; Le Breton,
2002; Phillips, 2001; Sanders, 1989; Steward, 1990). At the same time,
since the earlier that the law and the medicine fields worked hard to clas-
sify and to institutionalize collectors of tattoos and other body marks as
social deviants and psychological patients, in need for criminal (e.g.,
Lombroso, 1895) and medical care (e.g., Lacassagne, 1881). Even today,
when these practices are much more visible and widespread, there are
legal and medical discourses that keep trying to pathologize them as poten-
tial indicator of deviance, delinquency, personality troubles, or self-harm
or addictive behavior (Favazza, 1987/1996; Fried, 1983; Hewitt, 1997;
Koch et. al., 2009; Kosut, 2006a; Putnins, 2002, Winchel & Stanley, 1991).
Locating body marks outside the traditional marginal and subcultural
fringes, some sociologist have enthusiastically argued (Mendes de Almeida,
2000; Sweetman, 1999; Turner, 1999) that these resources have turned into
fashionable and beautification accessories included in body design industry,
and depleted of their traditional subcultural and/or anthropological meanings.
Body marks were transformed into nothing more than sign-commodities of
contemporary consumerism, hyper-cool accessories conform to current trend
fashions, ironic and playful clichés borrowed from geographically and histori-
cally distant cultures.
It is not my intention to contradict this fact. This indeed has happened.
Nevertheless, it is just a partial vision on the phenomenon, that do not take into
consideration the complexity and plurality of ways of consuming body marks
in the contemporary world. Although tattoo and body piercing had become
trendier among new publics—namely, among young females (Atkinson, 2002;
Hardin, 1999; Maccormack, 2006; Mifflin, 1997; Pitts, 1998; Riley & Cahill,
2005; Sanders, 1991; Wroblewsky, 1992) and middle class young people (see
Benson, 2000; Blanchard, 1991; DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001; Mendes de
Almeida, 2000; Sweetman, 1999)—this just has happening in its shorter skin
version. There are ways of consuming tattoos and body piercings that are
beyond the more mundane, acceptable and (socially and physically) safe but-
terfly ankle tattoo or eye brown piercing.
To have or plan to have a heavily tattooed body is still taken as an
“extreme” decision, only carried out by an ultra-minority social universe of
young people. As some research has pointed out, to have large portions of
skin inked keeps evoking a social world of “madness,” “perversion,”
Ferreira 307
“deviation,” and “marginality” (Ferreira, 2003, 2008). The extensive use of
tattoos and body piercings is still socially perceived as an abuse of the body,
as an unnecessary excess that places its practitioners under social suspicion.
It is a social history rooted on deviation and pathology that feeds the distrust
and fear often felt toward heavily tattooed and pierced bodies; that socially
incriminates and discredits its young wearers; and that frames most of the
social situations in which they are daily protagonists.
That is why those who after having experimented, keep tattooing and
perforating their body, representing a statistically atypical and very marginal
case: considering the results of a survey in 2002, less than 0.5% of the
Portuguese young people between 15 and 29 years old made more than one
tattoo or one piercing (Ferreira, 2003). As my ethnographic fieldwork led me
know, this core of individuals is different from the young people who, in
greater numbers, limit themselves to tattooing a small mark in a relatively
discreet area of the body, or placing one or two piercings in places already
usual for perforation. The reasons given, the meanings invested in, and the
social backgrounds of the users of those same resources, but in different
quantities, are considerably different by ones and others.
As I will further demonstrate, who does tattoos and body piercing in
great skin extension does not make it only as a fashionable and meaningless
statement. In spite being symbolically ambiguous and arbitrary, tattoos
nowadays are not always necessarily “playful” and “ironic,” “decorative”
and “cool” in its content (Turner, 1999, pp. 41-42). Although being today a
“free-floating” sign-system (Sweetman, 1999, p. 65), body marks continue
to “signify”, that is, to be a practice invested of a high symbolic density and
of a high capacity for social commitment. The permanent nature of the skin
inscription, the physical pain and social sanctions that involves to have
them, as well as all the planning engaged in the decision-making process of
becoming heavily tattooed, are characteristics that hardly make one take the
process of collecting body marks as a simple trend that implies nothing but
to pick up a new product in the “supermarket of style.”
The recidivism of the process of being tattooed is neither a question of
pathology, nor like to “eat potato chips” as it was metaphorically stated by
Vail (1999). To understand the process of becoming heavily tattooed and body
pierced among contemporary youth, this article will focus on the bodily tra-
jectories followed by some young adults engaged in this kind of extreme body
modification practices since their adolescence, as well as on the subjective
dispositions embodied on those trajectories. I understand by subjectivity the
symbolic forms of meaning, such as beliefs, images, and values that give
308 Youth & Society 46(3)
shape to how people conceive themselves and cope with the word they live
and the body they inhabit.
How do young people involved in this kind of extreme body modification
practices experience and understand the course of their voluntarily form of
embodiment? Via ethnographic field work and comprehensive interviews, I
have followed the ongoing process through which a set of young people
constructed their heavily tattooed and pierced body and, simultaneously,
their sense of selfhood in the contemporary world. By knowing the subjec-
tive dispositions that guide the social action of this core of young people who
choose to defy the institutional bodily comfort zones, I pretend to understand
their radical carnal engagement on tattoos and body piercing, and the place
of the body in their relation with social world.
Method
The fieldwork of this research was carried out in Lisbon, capital of Portugal.
The testimonials presented in this article comes from individual in-depth
comprehensive interviews—a methodological approach developed by Jean-
Claude Kaufmann (1996)—with heavily tattooed and body pierced young
men and women. I soon realized the biographical richness of the life courses
of these young people, as longstanding consumers of tattoos and body pierc-
ing since their adolescence. Their biographic trajectories are exemplary of
the way these bodies go much further beyond the mere corporal manifesta-
tion of a certain “irreverence” traditionally attributed to the youth phase of
the life course and connected with more mainstream ways of using tattoos
and piercings.
Sampling Strategy
As a comprehensive approach demands, the selection of interviewees was
neither random nor opportunistic, merely as a result of the conveniences and
facilities of the researcher in accessing the participants of the research. As a
matter of fact, opposite to certain research trends on “niche” or underground
social worlds, I depart to the fieldwork as an outsider (Merton, 1972), as I did
not have any previous social connection or participation in the body modifica-
tion scene or other subcultural world. Actually, most of the researchers that
lately have been working about this phenomenon also have their skin marked.
This situation of insider research comes along with the tradition of “subcul-
tural studies,” where frequently the researchers used to have some participa-
tion within the youth scenes they are studying (Hodkinson, 2005).
Ferreira 309
To overtake the eventual disadvantages of my condition as outsider, I was
visited and stayed in two tattoo and body piercing studios for more than 3
years. There, I had the opportunity not only to observe the social and physi-
cal process of how to become tattooed and/or pierced, but also to talk infor-
mally with many young customers and body modification professionals.
Among these informal conversations, a purposive corpus of 15 individuals
was selected for individual in-depth comprehensive interviews. As the epis-
temological point of view of this methodological approach is not to produce
large empirical generalizations and demonstrations but deep conceptual
propositions and interpretations, the preference in terms of interviewees was
given in choosing diversity of profiles, with narratives carefully collected
and treated in depth.
Considering the small size of the sample, which could be felt as a meth-
odological disadvantage, I purposely preferred not to use the “snowball
method” to find my interviewees, to avoid any effect of social homogeneity
due to the fact of people meet each other. A strategic and accurate sample of
interviewees was constructed, not with the intention of its statistical repre-
sentation but its sociological relevance for the research. The selection of the
interviewees was submitted to explicit intentions conceptually driven and
ethnographically relevant.
First, it was considered the exemplarity of the interviewees in terms of the
object of study (Ruquoy, 1995/1997, p. 103). The most important criteria for
the selection of the interviewees was being young people with the skin exten-
sively marked, which means, with at least more than one third of the body
tattooed, and planning to ink the skin yet virgin. Starting from that common
criteria, the sample of interviewees was diversified in terms of classic sociode-
mographic conditions such as gender (9 men and 6 women), academic qualifi-
cations (6 graduated or being at university, 3 with secondary school and 6 with
elementary school) or social origin (5 high social status, 5 middle social status
and 5 low social status). Concerning age breakdown, the interviewees were
mostly “young adults,” with ages between 20 and 34 years. One third of them
are still studying, other two thirds already have a job (one as tattooist, two as
body piercer), but yet not married or being a parent, situations that go along
with the extending of the youth condition among South European countries as
Portugal (Ferreira & Nunes, 2010).
Another strategic variable evinced during the ethnographic fieldwork,
and that I also took into consideration for the study, was the diversity of the
interviewees related to youth subcultures. Even if tattooed young people
largely exceed subcultural worlds nowadays, I could realize through my
ethnographic fieldwork that more tattooed young people are still connected
310 Youth & Society 46(3)
with these social clusters where underground music and spectacular visuals
are elected as main affinity references, with great powers of aggregation and
sharing (Ferreira, 2009). Taking this into account both as empirical question
and criteria, individuals who, during their trajectory, participated or are still
members of groups like rock’a’billies, heavy metal, black metal, punks,
skinheads, gothic, hardcore, straight edge and techno, were interviewed.
By the end, the sample considered young people who lived in extremely
unequal social conditions, with various social backgrounds and pathways:
from the young factory worker with a short school trajectory, also son or
daughter of a factory worker and residing on the periphery of Lisbon to the
young university student, son or daughter of the intellectual bourgeoisie and
highly educated, residing in privileged neighborhoods of Lisbon. During
their adolescence, all of them began living and constructing their identity in
proximity of some “alternative” music scenes, whose participants share the
taste for the stylization of bodily appearance, identity, and life under the aegis
of originality, excess, and extravagance.
Data Collection
Regarding data collection, intensity was chosen rather than extensity,
which means that rather than the luxury of numerous accounts to amplify
the homogeneity of the group of respondents, less observable units were
preferred to obtain longer and denser narratives (Harper, 1992). Data were
collected through in-depth, face-to-face comprehensive interviews. The
duration of the interviews was between 4 (the shorter one) and 8 hours (the
longer one), and some of the longer interviews were made in more than one
session. All the interviews were conducted by the researcher, a male in his
middle 30s, without any exterior sign of belonging to some kind of youth
(sub)culture.
To announce these characteristics is important because they are not neu-
tral within the interviewing interaction. Furthermore, the comprehensive
process of making questions, as Kaufmann (1996) point out, does not pre-
sume the interviewer to have a neutral and impersonal role within the inter-
viewing interaction but to fully assume a personal engagement that
stimulate equivalent commitment from the interviewee within the inter-
view situation. The discursive chain of the interviewee must be both fol-
lowed and conducted by the interviewer, which demands from this one a
permanent concentration on the come-and-go of answers and questions, an
attitude of attentive listening followed by an attitude of active questioning,
open and respectful toward the narrative chain of interviewee.
Ferreira 311
That implies to assume the interviewing guide as a methodological tool
required and useful, but not necessary standard, directive, and untouchable,
made once and for all in the beginning of the research. The comprehensive
interview supposes a certain degree of formalization within the interviewing
process but always in articulation with a know-how that has to be enough
flexible, plastic, and adaptable to be applied to each situation of interviewing,
regarding the person interviewed, his or her biography, conversation flow,
language competence, and social background.
Therefore, even if there was a guide previously prepared with the primarily
and most interesting topics for the research, the interviews’ situation took a
flexible outline (Bloor & Wood, 2006), always adapted, in its form and con-
tent, to the interviewee narrative flow and discursive skills. The interviews
took an informal and conversational arrangement, partly shaped by the inter-
viewer’s preexisting topic guide and by concerns that emerged from the inter-
view situation. In this kind of approach, a good question is not the one that we
have planned ahead of time, but that one found in time, demanded by the last
answer of the interviewee. And very easily those new questions can make
sense in the context of the next interview without any regrets of not being
asked on the previous interviews.
The interview protocol was designed to understand symbolic, social, and
biographical dynamics attached to the process of body modification through
tattooing and body piercing. The topics previously prepared for the interview
were to describe the context of first body mark (age, what, where, why, with
whom, how was it); to describe the trajectory of the other body marks; to
describe the future plans for the body, its limits and limitations; to identify
connections between body-marking process, life course, self-identity and life
style changes of the interviewee; to identify social impacts of body marks
among daily life worlds of the interviewees (school, work, family, friends
and other daily life sociabilities). Data on the respondents’ family, school,
and professional background was also collected.
Data Analysis
The interviews were all audio-recorded and entirely transcribed verbatim,
which is the first act of interpretation of the data. Like the actor as to make
a work of interpretation when one transforms a written text into oral dis-
course, also the transformation of oral discourse into a written text implies a
work of interpretation, all about punctuation, silences, emotions, voice into-
nations, and so on. After the transcriptions, the discourses were subjected to
protocols of qualitative content analysis (Maroy, 1995/1997, p. 117), which
312 Youth & Society 46(3)
involves a meticulous, continuous and careful reading, coding, and synthe-
sizing of all material. The first goal of my methodology, as the qualitative
“comprehensive” indicates, is to produce theoretical prepositions in close,
continuous, and creative articulation with data collection, a bottom-up pro-
cess of hypothesis formulation to build up a comprehensive model that
replies the depart questions, grounded on empirical work but without falling
into the empiricist flaw.
To achieve this goal, the first procedure of content analysis applied to each
interviewee’ speech was narrative analysis. Through this technique I was
searching the symbolic investments and the social circumstances attached to
the body marking process within the biography of each interviewee. After this
biographical protocol, I applied a thematic analysis transversal to all inter-
views, to search for regularities and singularities across biographies, and to
produce more refined understandings and more abstract propositions.
A codebook was established under a dialogue between theory and empiri-
cal fieldwork to find units of meaning expressed and linked by the social agent
and, at the same time, understandable through (new or established) sociologi-
cal concepts. The codebook applied on this transversal analysis emerged from
common themes crossing the interviews, considering relevant conceptual and
ethnographical (or “native”) categories: some codes were theoretically
grounded (like “body modification meanings,” “body modification feelings,”
“body modification plans,” “self-identity dispositions,” “social values,”
“social practices and tastes,” “biographic turning points,” “sociabilities,” or
“social reactions”); others emerged from the data itself (as “experience,”
“addiction,” “project,” “difference,” “authenticity,” or “life style,” for exam-
ple). From the continuous rereading of the narratives, more fine-grained codes
emerged and correlated to the basic ones.
One might say that the small number of interviews formally conducted is a
limitation of this study. I would say that was sufficient to state deep conclu-
sions in view of the effect of information saturation among the interviewees.
The content analysis procedures were able to show that the interviewees, hav-
ing very different social backgrounds, trajectories, and conditions, and not
constituting a proper “social group,” produced a very coherent and homoge-
neous discourse amongst them, referring to very similar symbolic frameworks
to justify the uses, meanings, and social effects of their bodies. In other words,
the existence of a socially convergent narrative (Abbott, 1992, p. 69) became
noticeable from the content analysis of their discourses.
This calls the attention for the powerful mechanisms of socialization of
tattooing and body piercing scene, surreptitiously effective in the social
production and reproduction of a structured mythology about the body,
