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| Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community | 
 enlarge | Authors: Margo Demello, Margo Demello
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $14.89
You Save: $7.06 (32%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 295131
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 222
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0822324679
Dewey Decimal Number: 391.65
EAN: 9780822324676
ASIN: 0822324679
Publication Date: December 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
Since the 1980s, tattooing has emerged anew in the United States as a widely appealing cultural, artistic, and social form. In Bodies of Inscription Margo DeMello explains how elite tattooists, magazine editors, and leaders of tattoo organizations have downplayed the working-class roots of tattooing in order to make it more palatable for middle-class consumption. She shows how a completely new set of meanings derived primarily from non-Western cultures has been created to give tattoos an exotic, primitive flavor.
Community publications, tattoo conventions, articles in popular magazines, and DeMello’s numerous interviews illustrate the interplay between class, culture, and history that orchestrated a shift from traditional Americana and biker tattoos to new forms using Celtic, tribal, and Japanese images. DeMello’s extensive interviews reveal the divergent yet overlapping communities formed by this class-based, American-style repackaging of the tattoo. After describing how the tattoo has moved from a mark of patriotism or rebellion to a symbol of exploration and status, the author returns to the predominantly middle-class movement that celebrates its skin art as spiritual, poetic, and self-empowering. Recognizing that the term “community” cannot capture the variations and class conflict that continue to thrive within the larger tattoo culture, DeMello finds in the discourse of tattooed people and their artists a new and particular sense of community and explores the unexpected relationship between this discourse and that of other social movements.
This ethnography of tattooing in America makes a substantive contribution to the history of tattooing in addition to relating how communities form around particular traditions and how the traditions themselves change with the introduction of new participants. Bodies of Inscription will have broad appeal and will be enjoyed by readers interested in cultural studies, American studies, sociology, popular culture, and body art.
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| Customer Reviews:
not what I expected August 9, 2000
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
Tattoo books usually have a lot of pictures in them - at least the ones I've seen do. This book, while written very nicely, didn't have many pictures, and the ones it did have are grainy and in black-and-white. The history of the tattoo community is interesting, though I would have liked to see a bit more on how tattooing evolved from ancient times to now, instead of just from the 80's to now.
 A bit too elitist April 29, 2001
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
Ms. DeMello spends too much time acting as her own apologist as she explains how she acquired "insider" status in the tattoo community while still remaining an impartial observer. One thing I found particularly objectionable in her book was her apparent opinion, insinuated several times, that only women with "the body beautiful" should get tattoos (much less display them in public -- horrors!) As a woman (liberated, one assumes), Ms. DeMello should know better. This is one book which is going to end up in a used bookstore rather than in my collection.
tripe. March 15, 2004
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is a very dry book. Much like some waning boot camper's war stories, or the villagers who told stories in The Blair Witch Project, Margo DeMello quotes herself and tells fun facts she heard from here and there, then pasted this whole giant scrapbook together. It's just a bunch of her opinions and her point of views, written by her to be the "T"ruth.Not to say what she wrote does not have validity, but I'd imagine, if she doesn't repeat herself over the chapters so very often (I don't know how many times she had mentioned things like "people who endorse tattoos are mostly bikers, freaks and sailors", and the repetitive mentioning of the "mom" tattoos with not much further analogy of the culture), maybe it'll be more readable. It's taking me almost a month, and I can only read less than a dozen pages each time I breathe into it. In total, she is a half-baked, elitist, self-proclaimed "insider" of the tattoo "communitas" that claims she KNOWS the community like a mother would claim to know her son. She took it too far, thinking she can analyze the biology and sociology of the situation in a third person's point of view. It doesn't matter how many American tattoo conventions she went to and how many tattoo parlor stories she had heard, this book is written BY a groupie, and is only meant to be read by her groupies. Maybe she can write news article about tattoos like an enthusiast participant of a pride parade, but this article is [holy HELL] almost 200 pages. It's 175 pages too long.
 OK March 26, 2000
3 out of 19 found this review helpful
This book was ok! i was hoping for something more traditional in the designs the author gave her readers! i could have done i without the gang tattoes though!
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