Bodies of Subversion:
A Secret History of Women and Tattoos

by Margot Mifflin
Juno Books, New York 1997
ISBN: 1-890451-00-2
$23.95 paper

Reviewed by Mike Mosher


Women as artists. Women as art galleries. Women as artworks. These are topics all covered in Margot Mifflin's richly illustrated book on women and tattoos, from the nineteenth century to the present. At its most sociological, tattoo parlor workplace discrimination and contest nudity issues are explored, and many artists and tattooed women are interviewed in the United States, Spain and Argentina (a study might also be done on Japan). Yet it is the book's pictures that indelibly etch themselves upon the reader's memory.

Early sideshow attractions claimed forcible tattooing, rarely the case but all the more enticing to the fantasies of male spectators. Betty Broadbent entered a beauty contest (the world's first televised one!) at the 1939 World's Fair with legs and arms covered in cowgirls, flags and foliage. There are personal histories here, of women who married the male tattoo artists who decorated them and then took up the trade, of circus fat women who grew skilled in the electric pen. Today a tattoo is sometimes obtained as a breast cancer survivors' mark of pride, calling attention to the woman who survived and the courage she found within.

The book's subjects show us their skin's rich gamut of imagery, including a bee-dance, dual portraits of Malcolm X, abstract zig-zags and "automatic writing" to illusionistic zippers and bones. Imagery from northwest Native American cultures has been adapted to women's tattoos, as have been figures from the paintings of Klimt and by illustrators Tenniel and Beardsley. Sometimes -- but not always -- the motifs put on the skin are less violent, and Mifflin doesn't neglect mention of the heartbreaking "Property of ..." tattoos often found on outlaw bikers' girlfriends. For all the sexual stereotypes of tattooed sailor men wearing nude or hula-dancing women, inkwork now gracing women's bodies include graphic testaments of lesbian committment, spiritualized Yoni-goddesses, and the curiously inarticulate Stephanie Farinelli's hundred mechanical penises. Margot Mifflin has found much variety in what Barbar Kruger has called "skin as signage" -- but what does all this skin really say?

I treasure junior highschool memories (from the days of hippie "body paint") of drawing Peter Max-like stars,planets and flowers with watercolor markers the on arms and legs of female classmates. Nowdays, in the classroom I'll sometimes look upon particularly inked or pierced students and wonder how they'll look as senior citizens. The series of full-body photographs of Elisabeth Wienzirl in her forties, sixties and eighties show a smiling person quite comfortable with herself and time's effects on her intricately embellished flesh. In almost every photograph in _Bodies of Subversion_ these painted people who are so used to being gazed upon proudly gaze back.

The visual relationship of tattoos to the medium of the comics may deserve its own book, but imagery of the wicked Queen from Disney's animated "Sleeping Beauty" and even the "%*?#@" that signifies profanity in the cartoons both appear on bodies shown here. Among the individualistic women tattoo artists interviewed is Jacqui Gresham of New Orleans, whose female African-American patrons especially relish the Black Betty Boop figures she's developed. Even drawn with devilish horns, batwings, tail and pitchfork, this visual meme (both babylike and very sexual) from the 1930s has been newly re-ethnicized to be taken up by a new community, cultural fluidity in the tradition of the bootleg Black Bart Simpson t-shirts appearing on the streets of New York a decade ago. _Bodies of Subversions_ inspires and exposes the reader to see new connections in cultural studies, women studies, art and design...while introducing us to a gallery of illustrated people who would be interesting to meet.