Masters Thesis

Impure bodies: body modification within a settler colonial state

Within the United States, attitudes towards tattooing have always been intimately tied with perceptions of gender, race and class. While most historical and sociological texts acknowledge that modem tattoo culture in the West can be traced back to the onset of colonialism in the South Pacific in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, few recognize colonialism as an ongoing process that continues to shape life on a global scale. In juxtaposing histories of tattooing in the United States with an intersectional feminist lens and the work of postcolonial theorists such as Ann Laura Stoler, bell hooks, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, the gendered and racialized underpinnings of the modem tattoo industry become more clear. In the contemporary moment, the practice of tattooing is being increasingly recruited into neoliberal modes of feminist activism and identity formation, often still relying on iterations of the colonial discourses that characterized tattooing in the seventeenth century. In tracing this non-linear history of tattooing in the West, the patterns of gendered and racialized disciplinary practices of settler colonialism become apparent, as well as the stakes for the of future feminist activism.

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