The majority of my friends and acquaintances are also tattooed, and many are tattoo artists. Tattooing still has the power to shock. My interest in this tattooing as a phenomenon stems from feminist thinking about gender and its social construction. Appearance norms ensure that there are two separate, distinct genders, each fitting into specific societal power dynamics. This control plays out on an economic level, also bolstering the status quo.
Anthropology provides a way to examine the personal, individual and social roles of tattooing.
This is a visual topic about images, tattoos, bodies. Therefore it is important to have a visual component as a central piece of the text, not simply as illustration. Photographic representations are important in this society. The visual element satisfies the demand for another level of information that verbal description does not provide. No working models exist currently for doing anthropology and photography as a single project.