Tattoos in American Visual Culture

by Fenske, Mindy

• ISBN13: 9780230600270
• ISBN10: 0230600271
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Since the rise of the dime museum in the 19th century, tattooed bodies have been parading across stages both live and mediated. This book takes a close look at images of tattooed bodies in live performance, advertising, and photography. In so doing, the book combines the craft of cultural analysis with theories of performance while also generating a largely untold history of the tattooed body on display in the United States.Because of this unique combination, the book is truly interdisciplinary and appeals to multiple audiences. At the same time, it sustains a deep theoretical engagement with the central concepts of social and visual agency and the disruption of restrictive social norms. In the end, this study of the visual argues that the agency of images is located within, and not only in opposition to, cultural discourses such as gender, class, and exoticism.

Author Biography

Mindy Fenske is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. She is the winner of the 2005 National Communication Association’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award for her 2004 essay: “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance.” Recent publications have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. 

Table of Contents

Vital Images: The Performance of Performativity

Modern Day Sideshows: Class, Classification, and Tattoo Conventions

Rosie Gets a Tattoo: Gender, Fragmentation, and Advertising

Modern Primitives: Exoticism, Hybridity, and Photography

Imag(e)ining Agency and Criticism

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