Search results
Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851–1914, and around 1955 to the present). The collection reads tattoos and associated scarification, such as branding, as mimetic devices that mark and remark crime and detective narratives in complex ways. The chapters utilise a variety of critical perspectives drawn from posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies to read the tattoo as individual and community bodily narratives. The collection develops its focus from the first tattoo renaissance and considers the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. This book has a broad appeal and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars and, in particular, those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.
INTRODUCTION Writing in 2006 , Mary Kosut asserts: ‘America has become a tattooed nation. If you turn on your television, open a magazine or go see a movie, you will likely encounter a tattooed body’ (1035). The much cited ‘tattoo renaissance’ – a term coined by Arnold Rubin in 1988 – has seen what was previously considered largely as a mark of psycho-sexual deviance and social marginality make steady progress into mainstream culture. Tattoos are no longer the province of the outlaw; as Mindy Fenske observes
, could be partly ascribed to their age and to the fact that they grew up before what Arnold Rubin has called the ‘tattoo renaissance’, when tattoos went from being marginal and even stigmatising to becoming commonplace and accepted in the Western world, starting in the 1980s (Rubin 1988 ). 5 However, that is not the only explanation; there is a critique embedded here of how men often tend to dismissively judge women by their looks. By choosing this way of presenting Salander, Larsson also demands some decent interpretative and critical
THE TATTOO SPEAKS Focusing specifically on two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851–1914, and c. 1955 to the present), 1 this collection establishes the tattoo as a key genre convention and mimetic device that marks and remarks crime and detective narratives in complex ways. In choosing the subtitle for this book, we were mindful of Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘re-marking’ ( 1992 ). 2 In his discussion of writing, Derrida uses the term to refer to a simultaneous act of difference and communality in writing
social scientists to investigate tattoos as a ‘nondeviant, mainstream phenomenon’, as if tattoos and the social practice of tattooing were ipso facto socially non-normative phenomena ( ibid. ). Although Matt Lodder has questioned the assumption that tattooing is inherently transgressive (Lodder 2011 : 104), contemporary mainstream culture has yet to fully claim tattoos, which Roberts found are still associated with ‘low cultural standing’ (Roberts 2012 : 158). He concluded that the so-called tattoo renaissance of recent decades has been characterised by gradual