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Cartographies of skin: Asian American adornment and the aesthetics of race

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Cartographies of skin: Asian American adornment and the aesthetics of race

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Content CARTOGRAPHIES OF SKIN:
ASIAN AMERICAN ADORNMENT AND THE AESTHETICS OF RACE
by
Todd Honma
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Todd Honma
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for all their guidance,
support, and mentorship: Dorinne Kondo, Ruthie Gilmore, Jack Halberstam, Karen
Tongson, and Akira Mizuta Lippit. I am truly grateful for their presence in my life. My
advisor and chair, Dorinne Kondo, deserves extra special thanks for all her support
throughout the past six years. Without her patience and generosity this dissertation would
not have been possible. I would also like to thank my cohort for creating a welcoming
and supportive intellectual community while at USC: Chrisshonna Grant, Mark
Padoongpatt, Abigail Rosas, Gretel Vera Rosas, Margaret Salazar, Terrion Williamson. I
am also extremely grateful to the entire staff and faculty at the Department of American
Studies and Ethnicity for all their help and support, including Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez,
Jujuana Preston, and Sandra Hopwood. In particular, I would like to thank Kitty Lai for
her tireless efforts in providing the guidance necessary to navigate through the many
corridors of the university.
I would also like to thank all the people whose voices can be heard throughout this
dissertation. In particular, I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to all the
artists who took the to time help in my research: Aleks Figueroa, Yutaro Sakai, Grime,
Marcus Pacheco, Horiyoshi III, Bling Bling Roxx, Scott Sylvia, Su'a Sulu'ape FreeWind,
C.W. Eldridge. I would also like to thank all the tattoo enthusiasts who allowed me into
their lives and provided interviews for this project, including Joshua David Reno, Mimi,
ii
Michael, Vikki and Alex, and the members of the Mark of the Four Waves Tribe. Thank
you so much for sharing your insights and experiences with me.
I would like to thank the following for their generous support in providing funding at
various stages of my research: the USC Graduate School, USC East Asian Studies Center,
Historical Society of Southern California. I also wish to thank Tomoko Bialock at the
East Asian Library for all her assistance.
I am extremely grateful to all the faculty I have had the pleasure of working with at USC,
including Jane Iwamura, Fred Moten, David Lloyd, Nancy Lutkehaus, Roberto Lint
Sagarena, and Janelle Wong.
Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family without whose help,
encouragement, support, and laughter none of this would have been possible. Thank you
to my parents and all my family members in Southern California. Thank you to my
friends who kept me laughing and kept me sane. Thank you to my friends at UCLA,
especially Christen Sasaki. To my swan compatriots, Sharon Luk and Jake Peters, I owe
an inexpressible amount of gratitude and ketchup. To my brother, Brock, I owe the
greatest thanks, for being the first person to really mark me in an indelible way.
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Chapter 1: Skinscriptions 1
1.1 Tattoo aesthetics 1
1.2 Literature review 4
1.3 Skinscriptions: toward a theory of tattooed skin 8
1.4 Methodology 16
1.5 Chapter outline 18
Chapter 2: Pushing Ink Across the Pacific 23
2.1 Introducing skin to ink 23
2.2 The Pacific OceAnus and the audiospatiality of inscription 24
2.3 1848: becoming, by way of (rear-)ending 30
2.4 2005: aural aesthetics of ink 34
2.5 Artists of the floating world 41
2.6 Suiting the body in skin and ink 47
Chapter 3: Phantastic Formations of Skin 55
3.1 Baliktad: a diasporic aesthetic 56
3.2 (Sub)Urban warriors: theorizing automimesis 63
3.3 The Dream Jungle saga 81
Chapter 4: Monstrous Skin, Monstrous Excess 86
4.1 Becoming monster 86
4.2 The archives and aesthetics of monstrosity 89
4.3 Performing the monstrous and the criminal 96
4.4 Making monstrosity work 100
Chapter 5: What Color is the Racial? 106
5.1 Beauty and color 106
5.2 The racial viscosity of blood and ink 110
5.3 The hurt and the hum 119
5.4 Towards a “strong” visuality 124
5.5 Forms of wounding 132
Bibliography 139
iv
List of Figures
List of Figures
Figure 3.1: Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon 56
Figure 3.2: Promotional image of the Tribe labeled as “Urban Warriors” 63
Figure 3.3: Promotional image of the Tribe posing in tribal costume 68
Figure 3.4: Archival photo displayed on the Tribe's website 69
Figure 3.5: Tribe member in front of the Banaue Rice Terraces 73
Figure 3.6: Promotional postcard of the Tribe 74
Figure 3.7: Tribe members practicing traditional tattooing techniques 77
Figure 4.1: Performance artist Faux Pas 86
Figure 4.2: Self-portrait of Joshua David Reno 89
Figure 4.3: Joshua David Reno's torso modifications 89
Figure 4.4: Faux Pas with cheek spear 96
Figure 5.1: An example of tattooed skin bloody and raw 111
Figure 5.2: An example of a bandage the morning after a tattoo session 113
Figure 5.3: An example of tattooed skin peeling during healing process 136
v
Abstract
Abstract
“Cartographies of Skin: Asian American Adornment and the Aesthetics of Race”
examines the construction and performance of tattooed bodies as sites of circulating
materialities: where art, labor, culture, and ideology converge to “color” our
understanding of race and the politics of visuality. Focusing on Asian and Asian
American tattoo practices in California and their relationship to the larger Asia-Pacific
region, I incorporate interdisciplinary research methods, including archival research,
ethnographic field work, visual and discursive analysis, and critical theory, to investigate
three case studies: the transnational movement of labor and aesthetics between tattoo
shops in San Francisco and Japan; the meanings of diaspora, temporality, masculinity,
and post-coloniality within the context of tribal tattooing among Filipinos in the suburbs
of Orange County; and the embodied ontologies and performative epistemologies of a
Korean American tattooed drag queen and her queer aesthetics of adornment. By
analyzing the body in relation to convergent ideologies and aesthetics of race, space, and
place, I locate skin as the site in which to rethink how knowledge is constructed and
transformed through corporeal perception.
I center my work in port cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach,
Honolulu, and Yokohama, areas that have allowed for cultural combinations and
convergences due to their readily available access to overseas contact. I also analyze how
tattoo practices have spread to non-coastal areas, such as the suburbs of Orange County
vi
and inland cities such as San Jose, California. By situating California as both the western
coast of the United States as well as the eastern edge of the Pacific World, I examine how
the circulation of bodies, labor, aesthetics, and ideologies redefine dominant
conceptualizations of race and its relationship to place. Some of the key questions that
my research seeks to address include: What are the intersections and transnational
dimensions of race and tattooing, particularly when complicated by issues of class,
gender, sexuality, and nationality? What type of (real or imagined) cultural heritage do
Americans of Asian ancestry try to reclaim through the modification of the body? How
do these meanings and symbols transform through the geographic, cultural,
technological, and temporal displacement of these customs? Ultimately, my dissertation
asks us to consider how all bodies are modified in some form or another, thereby
destabilizing normativized notions of what is considered “natural” and “normal” forms of
cultural and national belonging.
vii
Chapter 1: Skinscriptions
1.1 Tattoo aesthetics
“I don't think I have anything meaningful to say,” confesses Mimi, as we sit and talk
about tattoos in a newly opened vegan spot in Berkeley, California. Mimi and I met while
we were both getting some ink work done at the Sword and Skull tattoo studio in San
Francisco. While she agreed to take part in my study, she was skeptical about whether her
interview would provide anything of “value” for my dissertation. She self-consciously
noted that her tattoos do not hold any particular stories about her family or death or
overcoming a great obstacle—all familiar tropes that serve as narrative story arcs for
various reality tv shows about tattooing (LA Ink, Miami Ink, Tattoo Stories, et. al.).
Indeed, US tattooing in the 21
st
Century has become legitimized through various forms of
media, where everyone seems to have some deep “meaningful” story about their family,
ancestry, death, tragedy, illness, that somehow makes marking up your body a-ok. What’s
interesting for me is the lack of recognition that tattooing in and of itself is not seen as
meaningful (or as meaningful), unless accompanied by a sob story about personal
redemption. I think that the “non-meaningful” tattoo is just as meaningful as the
“meaningful” one precisely because it forces the very recognition of the structures of
feeling, or common-sense, that posits the marking of the body as important only in so far
as it legitimates forms of acceptable action dictated by social propriety. Fuck that!
Yet this is instructive since it points to exactly why aesthetics becomes a crucial and
contested realm central to my project on tattooing. In The Critique of Judgement,
1
Immanuel Kant writes, “A figure might be beautified with all manner of flourishes and
light but regular lines, as is done by the New Zealanders with their tattooing, were we
dealing with anything but the figure of a human being” (1972, 52). In order for Kant to
experience an aesthetic appreciation for tattoo designs he must first de-corporealize the
tattoo itself, which effectively evacuates said designs from being a tattoo at all. In his
failure to recognize the art of tattoo, or the tattoo as art, Kant shows us how certain forms
lie outside the realm of comprehension. In other words, meaning becomes legislated by
the legible, regimes of comprehensibility, or what Rancière (2004) calls the “distribution
of the sensible” that set the conditions of possibility for an understanding of aesthetic
judgment.
Following Rancière (2009), I use the word “aesthetics” in two senses: to designate both
“a general regime of the visibility and the intelligibility of art and a mode of the
interpretative discourse that itself belongs to the forms of this regime” (11, n6). In other
words, aesthetics names both the analysis of form and content operating within artistic
discourse as well as the sense of perception—or “corporeal sensorium” (Castronovo
2007, 10)—that allows us to recognize the form and content in the first place. To again
quote Rancière (2004):
aesthetics can be understood…as the system of a priori forms determining what
presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the
visible and invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place
and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is
seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent
to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (13)
2
Rather than a transcendental, transhistorical concept, aesthetics is deeply embedded
within time and space, contextually specific and historically contingent (Williams 1977).
Thus, temporal and geographic considerations play crucial roles in how we understand
aesthetics, in both senses of the term. At stake here is what Castronovo (2007) succinctly
identifies as the way “aesthetics can enable a questioning of the forms by which we
organize domains of politics and art in the first place” (12).
Thinking about tattoos and race, as conditions of existence and categories of analysis,
opens up the consideration of the “dialectic of identity and difference” (Smith 1992, 67)
that give these onto-epistemological categories meaning. This entails the production,
reproduction, and visualization of ideologies and forms located between and within
different physical and imaginary locations. In other words, my dissertation explores
cartographies of self-making that operate at different spatial scales of analysis that are
attentive to the relationship between material and metaphorical constructions of space
(Smith, 1992, 60-64). While the body, or more precisely, skin, is the primary site of
analysis in my dissertation, I also attempt to tease out, following Neil Smith (1992),
“bodily access as a means of jumping scales” (68). Smith writes that “the importance of
‘jumping scales’ lies precisely in this active social and political connectedness of
apparently different scales, their deliberate confusion and abrogation” (66). The body
circulates, and this circulation (whether physical, ideological, psychological) serves as
the condition of possibility for the onto-epistemological formations that I examine in this
dissertation. Cartographies of skin: skin as site (and sight) in which to understand the
3
articulation of tattoos, race, place, and aesthetics; cartographies as, quoting Felix Guattari
(1995), how “every individual and social group conveys its own system of modelising
subjectivity; that is, a certain cartography—composed of cognitive references as well as
mythical, ritual and symptomatological references—with which it positions itself in
relation to its affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage its inhibitions and drives”
(11).
1.2 Literature review
The study of contemporary tattooing in the North American context remains heavily
indebted to anthropologist Arnold Rubin’s (1988) collection, Marks of Civilization. In
this highly influential work, Rubin charts the development of tattoo culture and aesthetics
in the United States in what he has periodized as the “Tattoo Renaissance,” beginning in
the 1960s and continuing to the present day. Prior to Rubin’s work, North American body
modification scholarship had associated tattooing with criminality and pathologic
psychology (Grumet 1983; McKerracher and Watson 1969; Paine 1979; Favazza 1987).
In the years since Rubin’s work, studies of tattoos and other forms of body modification
have proliferated exponentially, with scholars in fields such as anthropology, sociology,
cultural studies, history, and literature seeking to understand the increasing popularity of
tattooing in the “West.”
The past ten years has been especially productive for tattoo scholarship. Histories of
tattooing have been published in both academic (Caplan 2000; Guth 2005) and popular
4
presses (Gilbert 2000; McCabe 2001; Hesselt van Dinter 2005; Mifflin 1997). Literary
and cultural studies scholars have analyzed tattoos as identity markers of resistance and
reclamation of socially stigmatized bodies (Beeler 2006; Sullivan 2001; Brauberger 2000;
Sweetman 1999 and 2000). Anthropologists and sociologists have used ethnographic
research to explore identity and community formation in North America (Pitts 2003;
Langellier 2001; Phillips 2001; DeMello 2000; Atkinson 2003; Sanders 1991 and 1989).
The paradigmatic way of understanding North American tattooing has been within a
framework of subculture (Gelder 2005; Pitts 2003; DeMello 2000). However, such a
designation reifies the U.S. nation-state and obscures a larger geo-historical context
within which to understand tattooing, histories that pre-date capitalism and the
development of the modern nation-state.
Renewed scholarly attention to tattoo cultures outside North America provides a
counterbalance to the selective myopia of the North American tattoo scholarship. In
particular, recent studies of Pacific tattooing, within both pre- and post-colonial contexts
(Thomas 2005; Kuwahara 2005; Ellis 2008) provide crucial inroads into our
understanding of cultural exchange that precedes what is now commonly referred to as
the transnational (Hau’ofa 2008).While I situate my work within the field of Asian
American Studies, I hope to create a “productive engagement” with the field of Pacific
Studies (Kauanui 2004). I contextualize Asian American tattooing in California within a
broader geography of the Pacific to understand “Asia/Pacific as a space of cultural
production” (Wilson and Dirlik 1995) to look at how the Pacific occupies a spectral
5
presence in all discussions of tattooing and racialization.. However, my work is attentive
to the various criticism about the place of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders under the
rubric of “Asian/Pacific Islander,” specifically within the field of Asian American Studies
(Diaz 2004; Kauanui 2004). My project takes careful heed against treating the Pacific as
an undifferentiated zone of engagement, but rather recognizes it as a site consisting of its
own complex (and, at times, contested) space of (pan-)ethnoracial formation (Teaiwa
2006; Kauanui 2004; Diaz and Kauanui 2001; Dirlik 1998).
While North American-focused scholarship on body modification has addressed the uses
of tattoos by groups marginalized along axes such as gender and sexuality (Pitts 2003;
Atkinson 2003; Langellier 2001) and class (DeMello 2000; Sanders 1991), the issue of
race has received scant attention despite the influx of new research. Race is most
commonly invoked when discussing the Primitivist and Orientalist discourses
surrounding the racialized spectral Other (Clifford 1988) in the “Modern Primitive”
movement (Pitts 2003; Eubanks 1996; Rosenblatt 1997). Tattoos in Chicano culture is
one of the few areas of research that has been explored by academics in relation to people
of color and their involvement in U.S. tattooing (Govenar 1988; Phillips 2001; Perez
2000). Tattoos in Asian American culture have yet to receive any in-depth scholarly
attention despite the popularity of the topic of Asian tattoos in the popular press
(Kitamura 2004; Kitamura and Kitamura 2000; McCabe 2005; Mullowney 2005). My
project fills this gap by looking at the twin tropes of aesthetics and race and their
relationship to the processes of tattooing among Asian Americans. I draw upon key works
6
in Asian American Studies that look at the relationship between race and aesthetics,
including studies on fashion and theater (Kondo 1997), fine art (Kim, et. al. 2005) and
literary production (Lowe 1996; Lye 2005). I approach racial formation as an “aesthetic
phenomenon” (Roelofs 2005) situated within the complex matrices of gender, sexuality,
labor, commodification, citizenship, transnationalism, and globalization (Tsing 2000;
Appadurai 1996 and 2001; Ong 1999). My analysis of the aesthetic dimension of race
draws from theories of the aesthetic found in continental philosophy (Kant 1952) and its
various critics (Lloyd 1990; Moten 2003; Roelofs 2005).
In addition to the tattoo scholarship, my work has been informed by the anthropological
literature on the body, particularly the discourses about skin by Leenhardt (1979) and
Turner (1993). In thinking through ideas of inscription, I am indebted to various schools
of critical theory, including Marxian theories of bodily inscriptions (Marx 1972 and 1976;
Lowe 1995; Hennessy 2000) and post-structuralist theories of the body (Foucault 1977,
1978 and 1985; Derrida 1995 and 1998; Deleuze and Guattari 1983 and 1987; Butler
1990, 1993 and 2004; Lippit 2006). I also situate my work in relation to the fields of
cultural studies (Benthien 2002; Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Connor 2003) and queer
studies (Prosser 1998; Halberstam 1995) that looks specifically at skin. Finally,
scholarship on the body in the field of Ethnic Studies is crucial to my understanding of
the racialized body (Brooks 2006; Hartman 1997; Spillers 2003).
7
1.3 Skinscriptions: toward a theory of tattooed skin
In his oft-cited passage from “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault (1977) explains
the important work of genealogy in understanding the constructedness of the body within
society. He writes:
The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by
ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity),
and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is
thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a
body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the
body. (148)
Many feminist theorists have challenged Foucault’s formulation, critiquing his
assumption of the existence of a pre-inscriptive body. (For a summary of such debates,
see Brush 1998.) In contesting the existence of a “pre-inscriptive body,” Elizabeth Grosz
(1997) writes,
If the writing or inscription metaphor is to be of any use to feminism—and I
believe that it can be extremely useful—the specific modes of materiality of the
“page”/body must be taken into account: one and the same message, inscribed on a
male or female body does not always or even usually mean the same thing or result
in the same text. The elision of the question of sexual (and racial) specificity of the
inscribed surface occurs throughout the history of accounts of the body. (156)
A number of unusual, and inter-related, issues are at work in this quote. Grosz’s argument
against Foucault’s “pre-inscriptive body” is motivated by a feminist political project,
which she identifies as an attempt “to provide an autonomous notion of female
subjectivity, sexuality, and corporeality” (155). While I am sympathetic to her concerns
and respect her critique regarding Foucault’s selective myopia in not discussing the
female body in his work, I am also troubled by the foundational opposition that
undergirds Grosz’s work: that her understanding of the “always already” sexed body
8
demands recognition and representation within the same discursive structures that
Foucault offers up to genealogical scrutiny. In some ways, Grosz’s arguments are
predicated on an almost conservative entrenchment within an identitarian politics that
refuses to think beyond the historical categories that Foucault is precisely trying to
critique. In other words, in believing in the pre-inscriptive body, Foucault is pointing to
the possibility of relating to the body in ways other than those governed by, among other
things, heteronormative patriarchy. That he doesn’t concern himself with the specific
experiences of the female should not in itself negate his own political project, one that
can be alternately conceptualized as a necessary deterritorialization of the body. Grosz
seems to be advocating for an ontological reterritorialization (an always already reductive
materiality) by which she decidedly insists on the immutable material differences
between male and female (for example, her critique of circumcision vs. clitoridectomy).
But why should such biological differences be overdetermined categories of
differentiation? In other words, her critique of Foucault, and by extension her taking for
granted the fixity of categories of male and female, has the unintended effect of reifying
what Stuart Hall calls the “fatal couplings of power and difference” (Hall, quoted in
Gilmore 2002).
Ironically, I think that Grosz is actually arguing the same point as Foucault, despite her
insistence otherwise. She concludes her essay as follows: “That does not mean that the
metaphor of the social inscription of corporeal surfaces must be abandoned by feminists
but that these metaphors must be refigured, their history in and complicity with the
9
patriarchal effacement of women made clear, if there is to remain something of insight or
strategic value in these texts” (159). Foucault’s exclusion of females bodies from the
history of male-defined and male-dominated concepts such as “ethics” cannot be
interpreted solely as a failure of historicization, but rather a concerted attempt not to
reduce the female experience to the Procrustean bed of a totalizing masculinist logic. In
other words, Foucault does leave open the possibilities of “refiguring” the metaphors that
Grosz asks others to do.
Yet my concern here is not so much whether or not Grosz and Foucault would make
belligerent bedfellows. Instead, I am interested in what can be interpreted as Grosz’s own
myopic tendencies in the previously block-quoted text in which she problematizes the
concept of “the body” but does not produce a similar critique of either the metaphor of
inscription or to her dismissive parenthetical usage of the term “race.” Hers is a curious
lack of interest toward precisely what the metaphor of inscription should be making clear:
an insistent visuality of socially constructed bodies. Grosz privileges the avisual in
looking at metaphors rather than materialities of inscription, which allows her to evade
the visuality of something like an inscription and the inscriptive substrate, that of skin
itself.
Judith Butler (1990) levels yet another critique on Foucault’s interest in the pre-
inscriptive body, this time challenging his inconsistencies in thinking about the pre-
discursive, pre-juridical constructed “body” throughout his various works. Butler makes
10
an important point when she writes, “If the presumption of some kind of precategorial
source of disruption is refused, is it still possible to give a genealogical account of the
demarcation of the body as such as a signifying practice?” She goes on to state:
This demarcation is not initiated by a reified history or by a subject. This marking
is the result of a diffuse and active structuring of the social field. This signifying
practice effects a social space for and of the body within certain regulatory grids of
intelligibility. (166)
If we think more specifically about the social space of the body, such a line of inquiry
will lead to a necessary consideration of skin. This is a strategic side-stepping of the
“anatomical” “differences” between “men” and “women” (just playing it safe with all the
scare quotes!) and posits the skin as space/substrate that doesn’t necessarily display
specific visual differentiations between what has been labeled male and female, gay or
straight.
1
Yet at the same time, this focus on skin then brings to the forefront the
differences between color—the problematic parenthetical, or parenthetical problematic,
in Grosz’s formulation—and the types of pigmentocratic regulatory regimes that has
become a shorthand characteristic of the racial state.
Within this complex metaphoric and material field of signification, tattooed skin
confounds a strict separation between these two discourses. Yet, in order to highlight the
specificity of inscription on skin (rather than a generic “body”), I propose the term
skinscription. Skinscription: a neologism that combines the terms skin and inscription,
the shared commonality between the two being the “in”, the “in” existing in an in-
1
Dermatological research on the issue of morphological skin variation between men and
women offer contradictory and inconclusive results. For example, see Azzi, et.al.(2005),
Jacobia, et.al. (2005), and Muhammed, et.al. (2003). For the purposes of this paper, I am more
concerned with the “external” visualities of skin rather than its biochemical make-up.
11
betweenness, the space that belongs to neither and both (the inability of possession),
confounding binary distinctions in such a way that I hope parallels the blurred boundaries
(internalities/externalities, metaphoric/material) of tattooed skin. “The surface on which
both scripts are formed—the human skin—is a tissue that erases the boundaries between
inside and outside,” writes Akira Mizuta Lippit (2006). “Everything that happens on the
skin’s surfaces represents an unresolved encounter between interior and exterior
elements” (109-110).
At the same time, the blurred distinctions between the material and symbolic inscriptions
of ink lay bare the contradictory discourses regarding the legibility and illegibility of the
body within the panoptical sphere of the U.S. nation-state. Tattooed bodies enact this by
way of what Agamben (2000) calls ”the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions
regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-
state” (19). The tattooed body has the potential to increase this ambiguity (just as it has
the potential to decrease ambiguities), and foregrounds the de-naturalized coloration that
is inscribed on the palette of skin, an attempt to move outside the normative
pigmentocratic legibilities of the U.S. nation-state. The tattooed body, then, creates a type
of hypervisibility of skin: “it makes the invisibile visible, or rather it makes visibility
visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or
aesthetic of visuality” (Lippit 2006, 106). This insistent visuality is a critique of racial
discourse. The multiplicitious melanogendered body is involved in what Peggy Phelan
(1993) calls a “visibility politics,” how “these variations underline the psychic, political,
12
and philosophical impoverishment of linked the color of the physical body with the
ideology of race. Race-identity involves recognizing something other than skin and
physical inscriptions” (8).
Foucault’s reading of the pre-inscriptive body seems to recognize this
incommensurability between visuality and identity, which is not accounted for in Grosz’s
dismissal of the visual. As Peggy Phelan notes, “Identity cannot, then, reside in the name
you can say or the body you can see…Identity emerges in the failure of the body to
express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly” (13). This
leads to the question of what are the limits of thinking in terms of metaphors? And how
do metaphorical inscriptions affect material practices? For example, Derrida (1995) refers
to circumcision as an archive, the “writing, the trace, inscription, on an exterior substrate
or on the so-called body proper, as for example, and this is not just any example for me,
that singular and immemorial archive called circumcision, and which, thought never
leaving you, nonetheless has come about, and is no less exterior, exterior right on your
body proper” (26).
Lack of a visibility (or a desired form of visibility) can induce material practices of
marking, inscribing, tattooing. Victoria Pitts (2003) calls such tattoo practices a
“politicized aesthetics of deviance, where overt bodily display is seen as a powerful
affront to essentializing norms.” She goes on to state, “The stylization of the queer body
involves not simply the fixing of homosexual identity onto the body, but rather the
13
creation of a body that is always in the process of becoming sexual, erotic, and
pleasured” (91).

“Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-
recognition or for understanding other men,” states Foucault in “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History” (153). The instability of the body, as Foucault suggests, is both a source of
subjection and subjectification, rendering it possible for the collective force of history to
inscribe upon it the regulatory mechanisms of power and control. More precisely, the
interpellating power of the nation-state and its state apparatuses seek to harness this
inherent instability and construct a body, the body, that is at once legible and docile. “The
construction of stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability
and impermeability,” writes Butler (1990), in her analysis of sexed and sexualized
bodies, noting how certain bodily orifices “presuppose a heterosexual construction of
gendered exchange, positions, and erotic possibilities” (169). She continues, “The
deregulation of such exchanges accordingly disrupts the very boundaries that determine
what it is to be a body at all” (169). Tattoos presuppose a body that is endlessly subject to
penetration, the skin, a punctum, that disrupts what is considered external and internal.
Tattoos create the entire stretch of the body, the stretches of skin, as a possible orifice.
Tattoos are visible marks of unstable boundaries, the body’s vulnerability and resilience,
and the potential for a new approach to radical openness.
2
2
A more detailed account of the genealogy of thinking about the body as boundary is necessary
here. Benthien (2002) provides a useful starting point in her analysis of the “epistemological
moments and cultural practices that led to the symbolic recoding of the skin as a final body
boundary” (37). See specifically Chapter 3 of her book.
14
In the History of Sexuality, Vol.1, Foucault (1978) writes, “It is not that life has been
totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes
them” (143). How does life constantly escape the techniques of governmentality? A key
word here is “constantly.” If something constantly escapes, why is it that we are not more
aware of these constant lines of flight (to use a Deleuzian phrase) within our midst that
evade the disciplinary mechanisms of the state? In other words, why are they not visible?
Could it be that just as ideologies of power have been naturalized into our every day
existence, so too have the constant escape routes? Or perhaps our inability to recognize
these flight patterns is precisely because they have been rendered illegible not only to the
state and their interpellating apparatuses, but also illegible to our very selves. What this
requires, then, is a new form of recognition, an alternate aesthetics of visuality, in the
form of the willful inhabitation of a failed legibility outside the bounds of state power.
“The individual is the product of power,” Foucault writes in the introduction remarks to
Anti-Oedipus, “What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and
displacement, diverse combinations” (xiv).
Skinscriptions, formed through diverse combinations of melanin and ink, can be thought
of as material processes that collide, collude, and contradict in various ways the
discursive formations adhering to the body. Tattoos, as skinscriptive marks, hold the
capacity for both the “conservative reterritorialization of subjectivity” (Guattari 1995)
and also possibilities of escape, the “radical defamiliarization of the body” (Brooks 2006)
15
that breaks with history, ideology, normativity. Insofar as skin has become coterminous
with the discursive production of the body, skinscriptions attempt to divorce these
conflations and posit the corporeal deterritorialization of body vis-à-vis a differentially
articulated re-inscription of skin. In other words, skin—in its so-called “natural” form—
has been so deeply codified within the cultural/capitalist logics of the state and its
oppressive hierarchies that skinscriptions allow for alternative onto-epistemological
uncertainties, slippages, possibilities…“a counterinvestment that creates its own interest
in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social
syntheses” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 344).
1.4 Methodology
My dissertation incorporates mixed methods, including archival research, ethnographic
fieldwork, and critical theoretical analysis. My research has been divided into two phases.
Phase one consists of archival research at the two of the world’s foremost tattoo historical
collections, the Tattoo Archive located in Berkeley, California and the Tattoo Museum in
Yokohama, Japan. Phases two consists of ethnographic research at two different field
sites: San Francisco and Los Angeles.
For phase one, I spent four months (during the summers of 2006 and 2007) investigating
the histories of tattooing in California and its relation to Asia/Pacific by using the
documents and resources housed at the Tattoo Archive and the Tattoo Museum. Although
much has been published about the history of tattooing in the West, no in-depth study of
16
the transnational dimensions of California tattooing has been undertaken. Thus, in order
to firmly situate my project within this framework, I explored these two collections to
uncover previously unexamined primary documents and reread canonical texts to inform
my research.
For phase two, I engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in both San Francisco and Los
Angeles. These two cities occupy important sites for both global body modification
cultures as well as Asian American community formations. Since 2005, I have attended
annual tattoo conventions and researched various tattoo studios in San Francisco and Los
Angeles as a participant observer in order to experience first-hand the social interactions
among different members of the tattoo community: the tattooers, the tattooed, managers,
merchandisers, etc.; I was also able to observe the performance, on and off stage, of
tattooed bodies at these conventions. During this time, I identified and contacted
individuals who I would like to interview for my project. Beginning in Spring 2006 and
continuing until Fall 2009, I have conducted unstructured interviews with various
members of the Asian American tattoo community. These interviewed have been captured
on videotape, and I have also compiled photographic documentation of my interview
subjects’ tattooed bodies and, when/where appropriate, the processes of getting tattooed.
Throughout this phase of my research, I had been processing, transcribing, and analyzing
my field notes so as to allow for follow-up inquiries and clarifications as needed.
17
1.5 Chapter outline
Chapter two, “Pushing Ink Across the Pacific,” examines the historical and contemporary
iterations of overseas exchanges of aesthetics and labor between Asia and the United
States. Looking at the relationship between the United States and Japan as a particular
case study, I look at the shifting multiple migrations of tattoo artists and enthusiasts, such
as Takahiro Kitayama (Horitaka), Junii Salmon, and Maron Hasegawa to explore how
transnational movement has not only allowed for specific forms of artistic development
but also played a crucial role in the individual’s own particular subjectivity and
ethnoracial identity formation. In doing so, I investigate and (re)theorize current
understandings of global tattoo circuits to suggest a more complex linkage between the
racialized exchanges that take place between U.S. and various regions of the Pacific Rim.
Legendary American tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy, one of the first “Westerners” to be
apprenticed in Japan, has referred to the cultures of tattooing as “borderless.” While the
term “borderless” often connotes a naïve understanding of the mechanics of world
geopolitics under the auspices of neoliberalism, within the context of tattooing, this
statement may not simply signal a reductive characterization of tattoos as transcending
the politico-economic circumstances of the nation-state. Instead, “borderless” implies a
rich and nuanced history of global exchange that perhaps precedes the origins of the
modern nation-state, that globality/global culture has always already constituted a crucial
part of the cultures of inscription. Such a formulation asks us to reconsider the very terms
that we use in describing patterns and trajectories of movement, and whether narrations
18
of migration and movement are adequately served by the terms such as the
“transnational.”
Chapter three, “Phantastic Formations of Skin,” examines Filipino tattooing in Southern
California. In particular, I look at the Mark of the Four Waves Tribe (Tatak Ng Apat Na
Alon), a self-identified “tribe” of Filipino Americans based in the Los Angeles/Southern
California region whose mission is to revive traditional Filipino tattoo arts. Homi Bhabha
has famously noted that the colonized mimicry of the colonizer is always already “not
quite, not white.” However, the auto-mimicry of Filipinos in the diaspora does not share
the same type of racial discontinuity that marks their corporeal otherness. Rather, the
diasporic subject’s auto-mimicry of an “indigenous” image veers uncomfortably close to
autoexoticization (Savigliano 1995), self-Orientalizing (Kondo 1997), and imperialist
nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989). Building on theories of mimesis by such scholars as Michael
Taussig, Homi Bhabha, and Robert Cantwell, I plan to explain and develop a theory of
“automimesis” in order to complicate previous theories of mimesis by placing at the
center the lives and perspectives of the post-colonial diasporic subject. This
“automimetic” faculty can be explained as an identificatory process that is the result of
post-colonial dispersal, strategic nostalgia, and the willful corporeal self-othering that
(attempts to) disrupt colonial teleologies of modernity and the static boundaries of the
nation-state.
19
By examining as a particular case study Filipino American tribal tattooing, I will explore
how symbols and meanings of such embodied aesthetics transform through the
geographical, cultural, technological, and temporal displacement of these customs. I also
plan to address such question as: In what ways can such practices be read as acts of
resistance to histories of U.S. colonialism and (re)articulations of cultural pride and self-
determination? What are the trappings of these forms of self-imposed exoticizing marks
and idealized constructions of an “authentic” tribal culture/community? How is the
commodification and packaging of culture by “native” descendents similar and/or
different from white populations who appropriate the markings of the so-called
“primitive’ Other?
Chapter four, “Monstrous Skin, Monstrous Excess,” focuses on the idea of becoming-
monstrous, the morphological transformation of the body that not only identifies and
challenges various racial, gendered, and sexual normativities of the U.S. nation-state, but
also opens up alternative possibilities of inhabitation and corporealization. In considering
the ontological and epistemological positions of the non-normative body, more
specifically, the queer mixed race modified body, I will focus exclusively on one
particular body, the body of Joshua David Reno: first in his everyday, quotidian
presentation, and then within the context of drag performance as his alter-ego Faux Pas. I
take up the theme of the monstrous as a way to look at the corporeal processes of
recombination and reconfigurement, thematics of embodiment (i.e., racial, gendered,
20
sexualized, modified) reflected through the idea of the Derridean supplement and Deleuze
and Guattari’s theories of inhabiting multiplicities.
Thinking about the body within this critical theoretical apparatus leads to a consideration
of the concept of excess: racial, sexual, corporeal. Framed in this way, an analysis of
mixed race bodies allows us to challenge dominant racial categories by refusing to accede
to a reductive singularity. Similarly, the proliferation of modern discourses of sexuality,
as Foucault (1978) outlines in his discussion of the repressive hypothesis, stems from an
excess beyond those inscribed as normatively heterosexual. Finally, tattoos represent an
excess pigmentation of skin that hypervisibilizes the skin in which we live. I approach the
subject of Josh/Faux Pas as an investigation on how “more than fullness”—a productive
rather than debilitative excess—can be a place of radical possibility. In other words, I am
asking the question: What are the ways in which the recombinatory, multiplicitous, “non-
full” subject challenges normativized notions of ontology and epistemology? By
attempting to think about both Josh and his alter-ego Faux Pas in all their complexity or
multiplicity, I will examine the body as a site of embodied ontologies and performative
epistemologies.
My dissertation concludes with an interrogation of intertwined discourses surrounding
race, color, beauty, and the tattooed body. By examining the distinct bodily processes
involved in tattooing, in which the skin is injected, bled, peeled, cared for, and healed, I
theorize about the ways in which corporeal forms of knowledge are inhabited, modified,
21
and rearticulated. In doing so, I argue for the need for a “strong visuality,” a transformed
logic of the senses, to acknowledge how the senses are imbricated within networks of
power and privilege, but at the same time recognizing the potential and possibility of
(re)imaging both our selves and the world around us.
22
Chapter 2: Pushing Ink Across the Pacific
2.1 Introducing skin to ink
The intersections between the subjects of race and tattoos have remained relatively
untouched in the realm of scholarly inquiry. Considering the formative relationship
between American and Japanese tattoo traditions, the intersectionality between
identitarian studies centered around the body in terms of race and in terms of tattooing
holds a great deal of promise for furthering studies of transnationalism. Recent
scholarship in the field of Asian American Studies has stressed the need for a more
transnational approach to studying the subject, one that is not bound by static conceptions
of the nation-state (Chuh and Shimakawa 2001). So, too, do the transnational dimensions
of the tattoo subculture need to be incorporated into contemporary studies of body
modification. (For example, see recent works by Pitts (2003) and Atkinson (2003), whose
research are limited to the United States and Canada, respectively). In her work on the
cultural politics of body modification in the U.S., Pitts (2003) points out
The body, then, is positioned in multiple ways, including as a site for establishing
identity that is read by the self and others; as a space of social control and social
investment; and as an ever-emerging, unfinished materiality that gains meaning
through various forms of symbolic representation and material practice. (29)
The “site and space” of the body that Pitts interrogates also requires the consideration of
the geographic and temporal placements of the corporeal, especially when considering
the roles and meanings of tattoos inked onto the bodies already “of color” in the United
States. In order to make such an intervention, the first half of this chapter considers the
role of the Pacific in the production and reproduction of transnational tattooing; the
23
second half of the chapter examines the specific movements between California and
Japan as a particular iteration of transnational ontologies and epistemologies.
2.2 The Pacific OceAnus and the audiospatiality of inscription
The Wood Skin Ink conference held in 2005 on Maui was billed as a historic meeting
between Japanese and American aesthetic traditions, noteworthy not just for the
contextualization of tattoos and woodblock prints within shared histories in and beyond
Japanese national contexts, but also for the increasing recognition that tattoos have come
to occupy within both the academy and the “high art” world. In its advertising pamphlets,
promoters excitedly marked the conference as a site where “tattoo enthusiasts, Ukiyo-e
experts, woodblock Print Masters and icons of American tattooing will converge on the
Hui for two days and two nights of talks, panel discussions and demonstrations.” While
many different borders seem to be functioning here (high vs. low art, US vs. Japanese
aesthetics, woodblock prints vs. tattoos, etc.) the binary that I am most interested in is the
promotion of the conference within the standard “East meets West” trope of cultural
mixing. More specifically, I am interested in the types of borders that cohere, culturally
and geographically, within and around such a construction. In so doing, my strategy here
is to juxtapose the East/West distinction undergirding the conference with the similarly
“/-ized” term Asian/American to look at the geospatial logics that inform the non-phonic
“/”. This non-phonic “/” exists as a type of Derridean différance (to both defer and to
differentiate), one that hints at a distinction always already there between the pre- and
post-“/”, a binary binational-bicontinental formulation that reinscribes the nation-state but
24
also posits the boundary, the border, the geospatial separation between these two terms.
Audibility here proves key when considering formations of lexical, geographical, and
corporeal inscription, and it is precisely the audible yet inaudible mode of listening that
will transition this schematic into the consideration of tattoos as a type of embodied
border aesthetic. Tattoo is a word that for many conjures immediate visuality of the flesh,
an optical materiality, yet also—for many who are tattooed—also performs, to use Fred
Moten’s elegant phrasing, a “sonic materiality,” an audible corporeality, existing not
unlike the materiality of the “/.”
But first, let me back up a bit by way of some context. In his theorization of the formation
of the multiply constitutive identitarian subject, David Palumbo-Liu (1999) posits the
term “Asian / American” as a way to critique successive temporalities implied by terms
such as “Asian American” or “Asian-American” and its relation to modernity, particularly
an American modernity that advances a very specific procedural becoming, a becoming
that emphasizes the eventual emergence of the American citizen-subject in the
nominative. Within such a rubric, the ethnic (“Asian”) is thus relegated to a purely
descriptive function, all the while reinscribing the centrality of the U.S. nation-state.
Implicit within this “/”-theorization is also the critique of the Hegelian teleological view
of history (see also Walter Mignolo 1998 in his analysis of globalization and
civilizational processes). However, what is left un(re)marked in Palumbo-Liu’s
formulation is the imperial underpinnings of this phrase, one that casts the terms of
relational identity solely within the framework of politico-economic super-powers. In
25
other words, what is striking about the phrase Asian/American is how such a linguistic
mapping is in effect a performative way of setting up both the phonic and material
invisibility of the Pacific. Or stated more directly, language functions here as a spatial
mapping: the signifer Asian/American (or similarly, East/West) directly invokes quite
literally a cartographic representation of its signified, namely [Asian continent]/
[American, here, of course, coded as U.S.]. What’s more, if we take the specific
directional orientation of this phrase, the signification “East/West” is represented, much
like on a Eurocentric map, in reverse: East is on the left while West is on the right. Of
course, this is only in “reverse” as someone looking straightforward from in front of the
page directing her/his vision onto the page. It wouldn’t be the case if, perhaps, we
literally inhabited the phrase, or were viewing it from the other side of the paper.
The externality of text, or the viewer’s viewing of the text, then, gives rise to another
important point regarding this debate on the transnational and diasporic in relation to
Asian/American, Asian American, Asian-American, etc. subjectivities. Palumbo-Liu
states, “Diaspora always takes place after a border crossing” (346). But what border? He
never explicitly specifies the border to which he refers. Perhaps because we all assume he
is talking about the border between Asia and the U.S. But no one ever verbalizes this.
Again, it remains the unpronouncabale, phonically-absent “/.” The Pacific, or more
specifically, the Pacific Ocean as a border remains the unspoken, the implicitly
understood, the outside always already inside. What accounts for this lack of recognition?
One way of answering this, by way of another question, would be, what is the mode of
26
mobility that allows for the migratory movement of the diasporic or transnational
Asian/American subject? To quote the other Tattoo, the homophonic Tattoo that people
sometimes think (or wish) that I were studying: “De plane! De plane!” Aeriality. The
preferred vehicle of transport in these days of so-called “transnationality” is the flight.
Flights allow travel in the air, above the surface, above the Pacific, so that the ocean
below loses its very materiality, and instead appears to the viewer as a canvas of water, an
indistinct emptiness, or a selective myopic nothingness. Perec (1974) writes: “How does
one think of nothing? How to think of nothing without automatically putting something
round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something,
an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus…?” (33) We are always
already putting something around this Pacific “nothing,” for Palumbo-Liu, as with most
Asian Americian scholars, this something around the nothing is that which is said to
construct our identity, an identity that sidesteps consideration of the space in-between.
The /, coded here as the Pacific, becomes the borderline, nay, borderspace, that needs
perhaps a better theorization for understanding its relation to the bookending of its
adjacent imperial powers.
I say all this, perhaps longwindedly, in order to emphasize the point of the discursive, the
importance of words, images, and visions, the lexicon and logos that inscribe our society,
our bodies, and our earth. If we think about the aerial in relation to the signified
“Asian/American,” aeriality exists on a plane above, not just the vehicular plane, but a
spatial plane, a plane that allows the vision directed below from which to inscribe the
27
surface. This similarly parallels how we view the writing on this page, the method of
viewing print on paper, the eyes that must hover above the paper surface in order to see,
read, think. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call these kinds of interconnections modes of
becoming, becoming-paper, becoming-print. The things seen (and unseen)—bodies,
society, earth—are always already in modification, always already inscriptively marked,
in processes of emergence and becoming. Derrida (1998) likens this emergence, this
language, this birth and inscription, as “not necessarily an infant but a tattoo, a splendid
form, concealed under garments in which blood mixes with ink to reveal all its colors to
the sight” (52). Again, the notion of the visuality of the sign, the visuality of border, a
visuality that is constantly being erased despite its very materiality, hidden within the
rubric of Asian/American or East/West. This looking away, this refusal to see, this
blindness, reveals something else, something more on the meta level, that is, what Fred
Moten (2003) calls an “ocularcentrism.” He writes: “Does the blindness held in the
aversion of the eye create an insight that is manifest as a kind of magnification or
intensification of the object—as if memory as affect and the affect that forges distorted or
intensified memory cascade off one another, each multiplying the other’s force? I think
this kind of blindness makes music” (199).
What is the music that the border creates? What is the music of the border itself? If we
take Derrida at his word—and I am inclined to take Derrida at his word (for as he states
in Monolingualism of the Other, what other words do we have?)—then what is the sound
of this tattoo which he speaks? Would it be an overstatement, for me speaking for the
28
tattooed, as one tattooed (but not as Tattoo), that tattoos do indeed give off a sound? It’s
not a structured musical sonority, not something that can necessarily be placed on staff
lines or tablature. If I had to represent it visually, it might be something like this:
BrrrZZzzZRmzzRrrrrmmMZZMRMmrzzzzrrrrrmMMRz
The tonalities depend on the thickness of line, the depth engraved into receptive flesh, the
size and strength of the needles that reverberate in and out, puncturing the skin. This is
the music of the tattooed, the sound of immediate recognition for the initiated, the smirk
and the smile that crosses people’s lips when they hear “it.” And at a tattoo convention,
when you hear a multiplicity of “its” sing in unison, it is song.
3
In the following sections,
then, we will be maneuvering around the ocularcentrism that characterizes most tattoo
research and think about the music of tattoo, the music that was created at the Wood Skin
Ink conference, and what that sounds like, looks like, as border music. Josh Kun (2005)
writes: “by calling for a renewed attention to music’s spatialization, to its cartographies
and mappings, I not only want to draw direct links between music and the formulation
and policing of national spaces—through audible borders and boundaries—but also to
suggest that audiospatiality also involves the production of identities in sound” (22). Add
to that, Moten’s discussion on the aesthetic, “that aural aesthetic is not the simple
reemergence of the voice of presence, the visible and graphic word…Something is
remembered and repeated in such complications” (201). Sight and sound, visions and
voices, of the border. That’s where we’ll eventually be heading. But first, let’s talk more
about the Pacific.
3
Like music, the sound of tattooing elicits affective responses. For example, once while doing
research at a tattoo studio, a patron came into the shop and upon hearing the sound of the
electric needle, exclaimed, “That sound is so therapeutic!”
29
2.3 1848: becoming, by way of (rear-)ending
“Liquid is always the problem element,” writes Christopher Connery (1996), “shapeless
but not abstract; temporal; changeable” (290). More specifically he writes, “The Pacific
Rim was the geoimaginary of the postoriginary…pure flow” (284). The mythos of the
Pacific Ocean is smooth; that is, it is what Delueze and Guattari (1987) would call a
smooth space, an open space, in perpetual movement, unrestricted, undefined, and open
to possibilities (480-81). The smooth space (the opposite of the striated) is a space of
multiplicity, a stratum of intensities, a field of anuses. Deleuze and Guattari write:
A field of anuses, just like a pack of wolves. Does not the child, on the periphery,
hold onto the wolves by your jaw and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it’s not
that simple; jaw and wolf form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and
world, anus and wolf, as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other
multiplicities, between thresholds. Lines of flight or deterritorialization, becoming-
wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is.
(32, emphasis in original)
Let me explain by way of an example closer to our consideration of borders, space, and
sound. In The Sound of Music, vexed nun Maria finds refuge in the mountains, the non-
striated spaces, the smooth spaces, where she feels free, unencumbered by the rules of the
nunnery, where she can find her line of flight that allows her to navigate between
boundaries, between the binary divide of being inside or outside the cloth. It is here that
she sings, arms outstretched in deterritorialized jouissance, that “the hills are alive with
the sound of music.” Maria, in a sense, is inhabiting the sonic materiality, the
audiospatiality of the smooth. She is becoming-sound, becoming-earth. Maria is
becoming-anus. The hills, the curvaceous interpenetrability, represent, in Deleuzo-
30
Guattarian terms, the “field of anuses,” which force Maria’s disciplinarian nunnery
colleagues to ponder the imponderable: How do you solve a problem like Maria, if Maria
isn’t the problem? By analogy, how do you solve a problem like the border? That is, how
do you solve a problem if the problem isn’t the problem that needs to be problematized?
According to the global capital logic, by imposing a restrictive space, by striating it, by
tracing onto an artificial border (rather than, say, a “natural” geographical divide) to
construct and maintain separation between nation-states. According to Deleuze and
Guattari, this border drawing is a tracing, not a mapping,
4
in the sense that it readily
accepts a pre-envisioned naturalization of the natural. While US colonial expansion
across the Pacific may seem to be an attempt at mapping, what it really amounts to is an
attempt to striate a smooth space. Or as Herzog (1990) writes, “The political act of
drawing a boundary imposes an artificial line on a landscape whose physical and social
geography may overshadow it” (16).
Roland Barthes says that ocean resists signification, but America (i.e., the United States)
thinks overwise. As Connery (1996) writes, “The Pacific Ocean as a temporal destiny is
an American idea…America’s Pacific is an extension, temporally and geographically, of
the ‘American West’” (299). Connery continues: “The terrestrializing of the Pacific thus
had as its obverse a Pacification of Asia and the Pacific Islands: a borderless proto-rim
where free access reigned” (301, my emphasis). Connery agrees with scholars such as
Gary Okihiro (1994) who believe that in light of American desires for imperialist
4
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), a tracing is an “overcoding structure” whereas a map “is
entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (12). See their
explanatory principles of cartography and decalcomania in A Thousand Plateaus.
31
expansion into Asia in the 19
th
century, Pacific wasn’t looked at as a border so much as an
entryway into a transpacific expansion into Asia: “Reflecting on the second period of
America’s manifest destiny, after the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii in 1898
and after Secretary of State John Hay’s pronouncement of an ‘Open Door’ with China,
Theodore Roosevelt declared: ‘Of course our whole national history has been one of
expansion…’” (27)
5
While I appreciate their historical acumen, I think they are forgetting
to visualize with their ears, to listen to the ideological underpinnings of the racialized
U.S. nation-state. Listen to the “Pacific,” the homophonic levels of Derridean differance
that Connery likewise recognizes in the word “Pacific,” as in Pacification, as in
domestication, but also as in Pacifier (the nominal subject of Westward expansion), and
with it the infantilization of the peoples of the Pacific. This is a racialized discourse, a
hierarchy of human scale, whose very essence relies upon the border, a border between
the “civilized” and “uncivilized,” the white and non-white, a teleological tracing that
seeks to justify Manifest DestiNation. Palumbo-Liu (1999) astutely characterizes this
border as the “racial frontier”: “the edge of the Pacific marks the limit of America’s
ability to extend the European race (and, by implication, European culture and
civilization) beyond its own geographic limits” (31). More specifically, Eiichiro Azuma
(2005) analyzes the Pacific as borderland, where competing imperialisms, U.S. and
Japanese, meet head on:
5
On the foundations of the U.S. as an expansionist state, Frederick Jackson Turner states,“Since
the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has
been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone
from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon
them” (37).
32
The American West constituted a borderland where America’s westward
expansionism met Japanese imperialism around the question of immigration from
the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It was also where different national
ideals and ideologies clashed, became intertwined, and fused through the interplay
of the nativist push for racial exclusion and the immigrant struggle against it…Not
only did the geopolitical context of the borderland fashion the form of exclusionist
and assimilationist politics there, but it also promoted the appropriation of
Japanese and American colonial thinking by many Issei, as they fought the
Orientalist charges of unassimilability and justified their rightful place in the
frontier land. (10)
Legal scholar Neil Gotanda (1999) convincingly writes about “borders and geographical
exclusion” as means to police racialized U.S. immigration policies. Underlying these
laws is an implicit understanding that appealing to a geographic logic avoids the overt
mention of race since the border of the Pacific is always already characterized by racial
division. In his analysis of the exclusion laws introduced in the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone
and reproduced in the 1952 Asian Pacific Triangle as part of the 1952 Immigration and
Nationality Act (commonly known as the McCarran-Walter Act), Gotanda writes:
This use of a geographical area, inscribed upon the South, East, and West Asian
subcontinents, is notable for the absence of national, racial, and ethnic conditions.
Congress’s choice of a set of [latitudinal and longitudinal] lines on the Earth’s
surface can be seen, in modern terms, as a set of conditions that do not
discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin. This pre-figuration
of modern antidiscrimination considerations is not an accident. Immigration law
reflects congressional experimentation with these color-blind forms of
categorization and exclusion. (137)
Gotanda employs the multisensorial to both listen and visualize the racial articulations at
the border. Alejandro Lugo (1997) makes an important observation, that “the border
region and border theory can erode the hegemony of the privileged center by
denationalizing and deterritorializing the nation/state and culture theory” (45). Let’s take
up this challenge and discuss more about the line, the “/” at the center of this debate.
33

2.4 2005: aural aesthetics of ink
As the previous discussion indicated, the Pacific Ocean as a border space can be
interpreted as different things to different people, a multiplicity, a Foucauldian (1967)
heterotopia, what Canclini (2003) calls “the instability of referents at geographic borders”
(283). It can be a zone of inhabitability or uninhabitalibity, a site of paradisical
ethnotourism or indigenous genocide, a smooth space of uncharted waters or a striated
space of colonial occupation. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, if we revisit the concept of
the field of anuses, the Pacific OceAnus, this formulation will help us think of this space
in its different forms. The anus is a site of many possibilities, all of which I won’t go into
detail here, but for example, I am thinking of the dialectics between life and death,
pleasure and pain, the forms of embodiment that Leo Bersani (1988) acknowledges
within the context of the AIDS pandemic in his provocatively titled essay, “Is the Rectum
a Grave?” The field of anuses metaphor allows for the thinking of space as a site of
penetration. This is particularly useful in the consideration of inscription in general,
tattooing in particular. Let me first put forth an analogy vis-à-vis Herzog (1990) in which
he writes: “On the subject of nation-state boundaries, Ratzel offered the analogy of the
state as a living organism. The boundary, like the epidermis of animals and plants, was
the ‘skin’ of the living state” (19). Let’s consider the border as skin alongside Deluze and
Guattari’s (1983) view of the earth as a type of skin, as “the surface on which the whole
process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labor are recorded,
and the agents and the products are distributed” (141). Further still, let’s add to that what
34
Perec says, “the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we
had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors” (79, emphasis original). What these
authors are all concerned about is the inscriptive surface of the geospatial landscape. I am
interested in considering the inscriptive penetrability of this landscape in tandem, or co-
constitutive with, with the penetrative processes that lead to inscribing the surface of the
human body.
6
But what of the sonic materiality that I mentioned at the outset of this paper? Can we
really think of tattoos within the frame of an aural aesthetic? Going back to Moten’s
quote: “that aural aesthetic is not the simple reemergence of the voice of presence, the
visible and graphic word…Something is remembered and repeated in such
complications.” What is the remembered and repeated that constructs the aural aesthetic?
Before attempting to answer that, let’s look first at the idea of the “non-simple
reemergence”: of the voice and the visible. What seems to be happening here is the
wresting away of the simple linear correspondence of the self to language, “I think
therefore I am,” or perhaps more accurately “I speak therefore I am.” Rather than just an
ontological uncertainty, then, is also an epistemological one: can the voice really emerge
from the visible, from the graphic language? Or the visible from the voice? If so, what is
it saying, what forms of knowledge production, cultural production, is occurring when
sonic materiality is not one and the same as the lexical materiality?
7
This uneasy
6
I use the term “the body” mindful of the warnings that Adrienne Rich (1984) puts forth
regarding conceptualizing the body as a totalizing unitary experience, that is, non-reducible to
“grandiose assertions” (67).
7
The (re)consideration of the ontological and epistemological, particularly in relationship to
tattoos, can be restated as a debate of ontoepistemology, by way of the work of William Haver
35
correspondence, an incommensurate correspondence that moves away from the
Saussurian signifier/signified binary, is exactly what Derrida is referring to, in the
supplement and différance. “Something is remembered and repeated in such
complications.” Yet the refusal to name that something is precisely the space of
possibility. The sonic is irreducible to the written representation, in the endless chain of
deferring and differentiating, it cannot be so easily contained. It is within such a
formulation that we can hear the sonic in the tattoo, and likewise the sonic in the Ocean,
both inscriptive surfaces of “skin,” interlinked, or as Stuart Hall would say, “articulated,”
in their audiospatiality.
So what precisely is this aural aesthetic? Realizing the aforementioned limitations in any
linguistic recapitulation of a non-reducible phenomenon, the best I can put forth here are
a few examples, culled from personal experience (autoethnography!) or from tales told to
me by fellow tattoo enthusiasts. At the outset I mentioned the
ZzzrrmZZmmrRrrrzzzzzzrrRRzZZZM of the tattoo machine, a sound that evinces an
immediate bodily recognition of the pain/pleasure of ink work. I also hear this same
sound when I see other people’s tattoos. It is a sonic (non-)correspondence to the visual,
one that is also an affective one. When I hear Slayer, Danzig, High on Fire and Flipper, I
think of my back, the long draining (emotionally and corporeally) multi-hour sessions,
sitting still while the needles injected ink into my flesh; and when I think of my back I
(1996); however, not necessarily governed by the same instantiations of contagion illustrated
within his readings of seropositivity, or for that matter the blood-born pathogenic spread
antiquatedly, though not necessarily inaccurately, equated with modifications, particularly
tattooing in its various forms. This is a zone of inquiry, though no doubt fruitful, lies outside
the scope of this chapter.
36
also think of my own personal histories that made me initiate a large backpiece in the first
place. When I see my brother’s Mister Cartoon tattoos, I can hear the movies playing on
Cartoon’s large screen tv in the foyer, hear the buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz of the needle, the smell
of the brewing Starbucks coffee in the waiting area, and the voices of Esteban Oriole and
Juan Puente as they chat up Cartoon during the ink session. I also hear the music of Crass
and the Misfits, both of whom are alluded to in the tattoo designs themselves, and my
brother’s relation to these bands as part of his experiences through life. These are
relational sounds and affectivities, chains of referentiality that accompany the sonic,
visual, and spatial. Finally, a friend of mine says that his ability to withstand long painful
tattoo sessions is all about breathing technique. The concentration on breathing alerts you
to the particularities and materialities of your own body, the sound of breathing and the
control of your respiratory faculties, a Foucauldian “aesthetic of existence and technique
of the self” that renders the tattoo more than just visual.
It is within this formulation that I seek to explore the problematic at the center of the
Wood Skin Ink convention. Converging at a site presumably at the border between the
U.S. and Japan, in its East/West binariness, it erases the presence of the Pacific, the vexed
colonial relationship of Hawaii in relation to the imperial focus of the conference, Japan
and the United States. This erasure is dually ironic especially considering the crucial
locus that Hawaii represents to the historical development of modern tattoo aesthetics. As
a space of cultural production between Japan and the United States, Hawaii was the site
where artists such as Sailor Jerry Collins and Don Ed Hardy first came into contact with
37
Japanese artists Horihide, Horiyoshi II, and Horisada. (For more on this history, see
DeMello 1999.) It is most likely this legacy that the Wood Skin Ink conference is trying to
invoke, but not without certain costs. Pacific Island activists and scholars have long
protested their non-inclusion within the debates around the Asian/American rubric (see
Diaz 2004; Trask 2000; Dirlik 1998 and 1998), their voices form an aural aesthetic. And
so too do their tattoo practices.
I focus on the aurality not to avoid speaking about the visuality of tattoos, but rather to
highlight what Kuwahara has called the “discontinuity and displacement’ of tattooing in
the colonized Pacific. In her ethnographic study of contemporary Tahitian tattoo
practices, Kuwahara examines a variety of tattoos designs, styles, and motifs, a culturally
hybrid form that can be considered its own type of border aesthetic: a combination of le
style local, le style polynesien, le style europeen, le style americain, le style japonais, etc.
Developed through convergent histories of French colonialism, Pacific Rim circuits of
trade, and international tourism, this polyglot of styles has distinctive geospatial and
temporal specificities. They inscribe not only bodies but space and time. The aural
aesthetics of discontinuous and displaced tattoo practices is sonically embodied in the
polyvocality of the Polynesian border region. Kuwahara’s elaborate study allows us entry
into spaces of tattoo production where “artists [act] as witnesses who see the world
without a definite atlas or cartography, who adopt several points of view simultaneously,
and show how they can be interchanged” (Canclini 2003, 284). Looking at the images in
the book, one can hear the processes of inscription, the signs of colonialism, and the
38
markers of global culture. (For example, the tattoo machines, the infusion of French
language, and the death metal Deicide beanie in the photographs, respectively.) The
hybridity of the Tahitian tattooing practices serves as an example of the possibilities of a
Pacific Ocean border culture, a deterritorialization of various imposed and selected
engagements of inscription. Lugo (1997) writes, “‘Deterritorializing’ from ‘within’ is a
multilinear process and a complicated political project. It is multilinear because there are
several fronts of struggle: the nation-state, contested communities, theory itself, and the
individual subject, among many others” (62, n2). Indeed, Kuwahara’s research carefully
attends to these productions of scale, and points the way to the very possibilities of
collaboration and cultural contact that could have occurred if the Wood Skin Ink
conference had been mindful of the unacknowledged “/” foundationally at play in their
referential treatment of tattoo history and community. In other words, instead of an
American and Japanese aesthetic trade on a post-colonial border landscape, the
conference could have been a site of a more complex interarticulation of border region
aesthetics and politics, a Japan-Hawaii-American Pacific Rim network of cultural
production.
Audiospatiality in its Pacific context is necessarily discontinuous and displaced, not
simply because of histories of conquest and colonialism, but also because of the very
multiplicitous nature of the Pacific region. The region is one that is ontologically forged
in multisingularities, in regional différance, contestation, and collaboration. When Don
Ed Hardy writes in the Wood Skin Ink catalog that tattooing is “borderless,” perhaps he is
39
not simply trying to say (in what could be interpreted as a rather uncritical postulation)
that the aesthetics of tattoos transcend the politico-economic circumstances of the nation-
state, but rather is implying that its history is one that precedes the modern origins of the
nation-state, that globality/global culture was always already a part of the cultures of
inscription. Certainly, this is not a new formulation (for example, see recent work in the
Nicholas Thomas 2005 anthology, Tattoo: Bodies , Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and
the West), but one that precisely needs repeating if we are to find what Foucault would
call, “the thought from the outside.” The dystopic vision that shapes Jameson’s anxiety,
the threat of “worldwide Americanization or standardization of culture, the destruction of
local differences, the massification of all the peoples on the planet” (57), is not an
inevitable futurity. Things weren’t always this way, they have been constructed as such,
and because it is constructed, it can be dismantled, rethought, and rebuilt. Pacific
tattooing, then, is a zone of possibility. The “/” that at once seems like an erasure, an
elision, a marginality, becomes—in its refusal to be named, spoken, and signified—
instead a space of possibility. It is what Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract line, the
line of flight that refuses to be compartmentalized into one of the stagnant points of
categorization or submission. In other words, it refuses the dichotomy, the free/unfree
dialectic that only reinforces each another, and instead inhabits the multidirectional
vector of escape.
40
2.5 Artists of the floating world
As many tattoo scholars and historians have pointed out, the aesthetic and commercial
trade between the United States and Japan has evolved since the opening up of Japan in
the Meiji Era (1868-1912) (for example, see Kitamura 2001; DeMello 2000; and Caplan
2000). While Americans initially used this commodity exchange to collect trendy
Japanese curios, which included tattoos, the 20
th
Century ushered in a new relationship
between the United States and Japan centered around the trade between technological
innovation from the “West,” on one hand, and artistic influence from the “East,” on the
other. Often conceptualized as an “even” exchange of technological versus artistic know-
how, tattoos scholars have often overlooked the racialized, and oftentimes blatantly racist,
underpinnings of hegemonic Western superiority driving these interactions. The formal
introduction of Japanese tattoo aesthetics into American tattooing is often credited to
Sailor Jerry (Norman Keith) Collins starting in the 1950s and 60s. However laudatory
such cultural “borrowing” and hybridity may be considered today, accounts of Collins’
attitudes toward the Japanese were strikingly racist and point to the predatory nature of
his cultural appropriation. DeMello (2000) has noted that “[w]hile Collins developed a
close business friendship with tattooists Horihide, Horiyoshi II, and Horisada, he also
never forgave the Japanese for attacking Pearl Harbor and for what he saw as their
economic takeover of Hawaii…In fact, by his own admission, Collins wanted to ‘beat
them at their own game’: to create an American style that was based on what he called
the ‘Jap style of tattoo,’ yet one that reflected imagery from the United States” (75).
While Collins and his hugely influential body of work helped to usher in the “Tattoo
41
Renaissance” that tattoo scholar Arnold Rubin (1988) charts as beginning in the 1960s
and continuing up to the present day, Collins’ personal prejudices and use of tattooing as
an ideological and artistic weapon to defend his nativist, anti-Japanese sentiments have
seldom been analyzed in either popular and academic tattoo scholarship.
While I admit that a historical (and historiographical) analysis and critique of the racial
discourse found within American tattoo communities would greatly enhance the scope of
this chapter, I mention this issue not to embark on such a voyage, but rather to point out
that global tattoo circuits have always held a racialized dimension, both historically and
in the present, which requires further investigation if we are to better understand the role
that embodied aesthetics plays in the construction and maintenance of the racialized
citizenry and hegemonic logics of the U.S. nation-state. By examining the relocation of
Takahiro Kitayama (Horitaka) from the United States to Japan and Junii Salmon from
Japan to the United States, this section will explore contemporary iterations of migration
that underscore how the transnational movement of two particular Asian/Asian American
tattoo artists not only allowed for artistic development but also played a crucial role in the
individual’s own identity formation. In doing so, I will recast the terms of the
aforementioned global tattoo circuits to suggest a more complex linkage between the
racialized exchanges that take place between U.S. and Japan.
Historically, very few “outsiders” have been able to gain educational access to the
traditional tattooing methods used in Japan. One of the first “Westerners” to be
42
apprenticed in the traditional Japanese style was Don Ed Hardy, a massively influential
tattoo artist who has been instrumental in the ongoing dialogue between Japan and U.S.
tattoo cultures. Since then, Japanese apprenticeships, while certainly not easy to come by,
have become much more accessible. Born and raised in California, Takahiro Kitamura
(rechristened “Horitaka upon completion of his apprenticeship) places himself within this
historical legacy, evolving from a Japanese American tattoo artist working in the
American style to an artist trained by the master Horiyoshi III in the art of the traditional
Japanese tattoo. His journey began through a desire to reconnect to his ethnic roots.
Horitaka (Kitamura 2001) writes, “What began as a stereotypically teenage, angst-ridden
search for the culture of the ‘motherland’ has been redirected and transformed into what I
hope is a fruitful awareness of the traditions of past generations” (133).
After apprenticing with Horiyoshi III, Horitaka considered permanently moving to Japan
to continue his tattoo practice, but instead was persuaded by Horiyoshi to “spread
Japanese culture” in the United States—a task Horitaka has taken to heart, opening up his
own tattoo studio in San Jose, CA (which includes a space to conduct traditional non-
electric Japanese, or tebori, style tattooing) and publishing two books on the art of the
Japanese tattoo. He states, “In general I believe there are people all over the world into
body suits and Japanese culture (even without really understanding what it means) and as
an American Japanese I am very proud of this” (15). While Horitaka expresses his joy
and commitment as an educator to Western audiences on the art of Japanese tattoos, what
I find most striking about this passage is his self-identification as “American Japanese”—
43
a reversal of the more common identity marker of Japanese American. In making such a
switch, Horitaka seems to foregrounding his Japanese identity, where American here is
used as a modifier instead of as the nominative. It is a move that echoes E. San Juan’s
formulation of “U.S. Asian,” which he coins in order account for the consequences of
U.S. empire, privileging the subjecthood of a diasporic Asian identity as opposed to
second-class citizenship into the U.S./American polity. Since I was not able to interview
Horitaka for this project, one can only guess as to what extent his experiences in Japan
contributed to this identificatory movement into the subject position of American
Japanese, despite the somewhat precarious relationship he admits to having to Japan. As
he explains, his awareness about Japanese culture “comes from the fact that I inherit
Japanese culture but was born and live in America, in California, so American culture is
part of me and I’m certainly not turning my back on it. I go to Japan as often as I can but
there is not my home. I feel my life is flowing in between two different cultures”
(Vialetto 2004, 11). As his movement back and forth across nations and cultures suggests,
Horitaka’s in-betweenness embodies what David Palumbo-Liu (2001) cites as the
“Asian/Asian American split”—“a vacillating, multidirectional attempt at predication,
rather than a teleologically predetermined and irreversible phenomenon” (213).
The challenges to an insistently Eurocentric teleological development of subjectivity and
modernity is also reflected in the experiences of Junii Salmon, a Japanese born tattoo
artist now working in San Francisco. Junii’s experiences underscore the highly gendered
aspects of the tattoo community, not just in Japan but in the United States as well. In an
44
interview published in a popular tattoo magazine, she notes that tattoos have always held
a certain fascination for her since childhood, but her attempts at apprenticing were met
with a slew of rejections, often being told that “tattooing was not woman’s work”
(Coleman 2004). While traveling to the United States with artist Horitoshi as a model for
his work, Junii met Bill Salmon who encouraged her to not give up her dreams. As a
result of his encouragement, Junii decided to move to the United States to pursue her
goals of becoming a tattoo artist. In deciding to immigrate to the United States, Junii’s
story reinscribes hegemonic notions of Western modernity, whereby the United States
represents a liberatory space of sexual/gendered freedom. Ironically, this “modernist
teleology of evolution” (Puar 2001, 171) contradicts the juxtaposition of Japan and the
“West” within the telos of tattooing and modernity. DeMello (2000) notes that one of the
major reasons why Japanese tattooing has been so influential in the United States is
because “[u]nlike traditional American tattooing, which is seen as folksy and primitive,
Japanese tattooing is thought to be more modern, sophisticated, and linked to the more
spritiual and refined East” (75). Within this contradictory conceptualization, the “East,”
or more specifically Japan, is defined in Western terms as being both backward- and
forward-thinking, a hegemonic formulation more indicative of Euro-American ideologies
fixated on establishing neo-imperialist social hierarchies while paving the way for
unfettered artistic (and economic) exploitation.
Ironically, upon returning to Japan, Junii met artist Horiwaka, who offered her an
apprenticeship to learn traditional Japanese tattooing practices. Upon completion of her
45
apprenticeship, Junii persisted in her move to the United States, because of her love affair
with Bill Salmon (as well as, perhaps, by an anticipated difficulty in finding work in
Japan). Junii’s Asian/American subject position, as defined though her Japanese ancestry
and artistic training, has both enabling and disabling characteristics in the context of the
United States. Her expertise in the art of the Japanese tattoo has allowed her entry into
the highly competitive Bay Area tattoo community, but at the same time such entry has
been predicated on a gendered and racialized exotic Otherness, most notably exemplified
by such exoticizing labels found in various tattoo trade magazines that refer to her as
“The Mistress of Oriental Art.”
The individual narratives of artists Horitaka and Junii Salmon reiterate in tattooed terms
the point that Lisa Lowe (1996) makes in her seminal work Immigrant Acts: “The making
of Asian American culture includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as
well as partly invented; Asian American culture also includes the practices that emerge in
relation to the dominant representations that deny or subordinate Asian and Asian
American cultures as ‘other’” (65). In fact, tattoos represent the very embodiment of such
a formulation at the most corporeal level. In other words, Lowe’s formulation not only
describes the Asian American tattoo culture but also, in the case of the tattooer/tattooed,
references the Asian American body itself: a corporeal identity construction that is “partly
inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” based on natural and self-inflicted
skin pigmentations that display particular ethnoracial meanings that are at once tied to,
yet distinct from, their so-called originary locations, characterized by Deleuzo-Guattarian
46
“deterritorializations.” By analyzing the position of the tattooed Asian American subject,
the next section explores the potentialities implied by the deterritorialization of tattoos in
the construction of one’s racialized self-identity.
2.6 Suiting the body in skin and ink
Just as the overseas movement of artistic talent enact historical patterns between and
within the Pacific Rim, so too does the practice of tattoo collecting remain firmly situated
within a history of global commodity exchange. As Christine Guth (2004) notes:
Tattoos provide an especially resonant metaphor for the complex, subtle
transformations in attitudes toward Japanese culture brought on with the advent of
global tourism. Tourists were fascinated by these exotic manifestations of the
“artistic nature” of Japanese people. Some men even “went native” by having
themselves tattooed. In so doing, they celebrated the natural life, freedom from
convention, and aestheticization of the male body they had discovered in Japan.
The costumes Longfellow had made for himself and tattoos he “collected” on his
back and chest dramatically illuminate the process through which Euro-American
visitors claimed Japanese heritage to fashion their self-identity. (xviii)
The question that I seek to explore in this section revolves around the use of Japanese
tattoo aesthetics in the (re)fashioning of an American identity, but one that is complicated
by the insertion of the Asian American body in place of the Euro-American citizen-
subject. Guth makes the point that while tattoos in Japan evolved as emblems of working
class occupational identity and criminality, for the Euro-American global tourist, they
became artistic souvenirs of “aestheticized leisure travel and play” (158). She further
notes that “positive evaluations of the practice [of Japanese tattooing] tended to focus on
the tattoo’s decorative qualities rather than on the body it served simultaneously to
conceal and reveal” (33). Yet the oversight in Guth’s argument is that the recognition of
47
the “decorative” is precisely predicated upon the aesthetic legibility of the racialized
white body, an ironic nod that “simultaneously conceals and reveals” the racial discourse
within her own argument.
Guth’s historical analysis of white men using Japanese tattoos as decorative fashion
rather than markers of social standing resonate quite strongly within the tattoo subculture
even to this day. Scholars in the field of tattoos have noted the use of non-Western
symbols and motifs as ways for white people to appropriate an idealized identity through
ink. Rubin (1988) notes how such adornment “provides an expanded, alternative,
volitional identity: one can come to terms with the psychic constraints of the slot(s) one
occupies in society. One can escape to a simpler time and more straightforward values by
putting on the marks of a…Japanese samurai” (255). However, more recently, scholars
have become increasingly skeptical of such appropriative displays, noting how the
discourse surrounding the body as a blank canvas onto which one can project a self-
determined identity reeks of Western/white privilege, and fails to account for the multiple
ways in which certain bodies (people of color, women, queers, etc.) are always already
marked as Other. As Eubanks (1996) notes, “To assume that all bodies are unmarked…is
to deny the systems of patriarchy and racism that exist in our culture and, therefore, to
shut down the possibility of reforming those systems” (76). In addressing the concern
about the double marking of tattooed people of color—or more specifically inked
Japanese Americans—this section investigates how identity is reformulated through the
48
use of tattoos as a type of racial signifier in the construction of an Asian American
subjectivity.
Maron Hasegawa, a Japanese American tattoo enthusiast living in San Francisco, chose to
spend an entire year living in Japan in order to complete his traditional Japanese body
suit. Maron states that he chose world-reknowned artist Horiyoshi III because “his
artwork is the best. His style represents Japanese tattooing for me” (McCabe 2005, 60).
His desire to endure the long and costly procedure was inspired by the “cultural
connection and cultural commitment” that Japanese tattoo represented (ibid). While it is
certainly difficult to critique his choice of artist—after all, Horiyoshi III is considered a
living legend and is one of the most recognized and respected artists working today—
Maron’s choice does open up certain important considerations in light of the other
alternatives that were available to him. Since Maron lives in San Francisco, he certainly
has access to artists like Junii Salmon and Horitaka, both trained in the traditions of the
Japanese tattoo and now working in the SF Bay Area. Instead of choosing to patronize
these artists, he spent upwards of $40,000 and rearranged his entire lifestyle to
accommodate a year-long residency in Japan in order to complete his body project.
Obviously, his travels to Japan resonate within the conditions of material privileges
afforded to the global tourist. However, instead of representing “aestheticized leisure
travel and play” that function as decorative souvenirs, Maron’s use of traditional Japanese
tattoos instead are meant to draw specific attention to the racialized body, the double
marking of Japanese art on Japanese skin, the processual re-creation of racial identity.
49
Similarly, others Asian American tattoo enthusiasts echo these same motivations,
although not necessarily going to the same extremes, either of body coverage or
geographic displacement. For example, the recent popularity of kanji (Chinese lettering)
tattoos among Japanese Americans (as well as other Asian Americans) has become a way
for individuals to express their pride in their ethnoracial heritage. In a recent article, one
journalist has observed, “Ken Arata, 25, is planning to get his family name tattooed down
his spine in kanji to show that his Japanese heritage is the backbone of his existence even
though he does not speak the language” (Lyn n.d.). The examples presented above
illustrate the use of tattoos as ethnoracial signifiers, markers of both an individual’s pride
and an understanding of the body’s placement in the racialized matrix of U.S. society. To
reiterate, such a strategy relies upon real and/or imagined transnational linkages to
cultures that position the Asian American subject as existing both within and outside of
dominant U.S. racial social structures, a challenge to any unitary conceptualization of a
state-sanctioned U.S. citizen-subject.
In her discussion of various Asian American literary texts, Kandice Chuh (2001) argues
for the recognition of an epistemological transnational subject rather than a national one.
Drawing on the work of Lisa Lowe, she writes
“immigrant,” rather than citizen, most insightfully describes the epistemologies
inhering in Asian American social subjectivities…The immigrant descriptor
rhetorically references that position of being both of and not of—that transnational
space that cannot be singly located in space or time. By anchoring American
cultural studies with the figure of the immigrant rather than that of the assimilated
citizen, the orientation of such studies, while remaining specific to the U.S.
50
cultural and political context, is reconfigured to accept axiomatically difference
and mutability rather than identity and fixity as the default quality of the national
character. Transnationalism in this sense becomes a strategy for recognizing the
incompleteness of national identity formation. (292)
What may be so fascinating about considering this formulation in relation to the use of
traditional Asian tattoo motifs is the way that they are used in order to help achieve, from
the perspective of the tattooed subjects presented here, a processual formation leading
towards a completeness of the self identity. In other words, transnationalism is the
“strategy” that allows Asian Americans to enact both a literal and symbolic “return” to
their cultures of “origin” in order to corporealize ethnic and racial ideologies of being.
Such processes out-maneuver the artificial binary cultural allegiances (i.e., Asian vs.
American) oftentimes mandated by the US nation-state, instead highlighting the inherent
mutability and flexibility of this identificatory positionality. As the aforementioned
examples suggest, through the use of tattoos, a claim to Asianness is displayed literally in
the flesh, while at the same time reiterates a symbolic reinvestment/reclamation of a
particular racial form. Body modification, in these terms, can be thought of as functioning
on multiple levels: both the physical alteration of tattooification and the psychic alteration
linked to (an acceptance of) one’s racialization.
However, as previously noted, the formation of a racial(ized) self is never solely a
volitional formation of individuation. Rather, bodies exist within particular systems of
ideologies and power that create and act upon the material self, both individually and
collectively. To put it another way, in her critique of Modern Primitive discourses, Pitts
(2003) points out the fallacy of the post-modernist myth of freedom of choice in
51
determining one’s own identity/body/cultural affiliations, noting how such myths obscure
“the many ways we are privileged and constrained according to systems of power—
through what are often deeply entrenched categories of race, sexuality, gender, and
citizenship” (148). So while the voluntary articulation of one’s own cultural/ethnic/racial
heritage through tattoos can be viewed as a form of reclamation of one’s own body, it still
functions within an overarching gaze of those in the dominant hegemonic positions of
power. For example, going back to the example of Maron’s body, while his traditional-
style Japanese tattoos are a celebration of his Japanese ancestry, they also contribute to
his own externally imposed racial formation. More specifically, under the surveillance of
mainstream white America, his tattoos aid in the creation of his body being cast as the
foreign “Other,” allowing the spectatorial public to essentialize his identity based on his
racial attributes. Furthermore, his phenotypical “Asian” features coupled with his
traditional Japanese tattoos serve to perpetuate various assumptions about the
“naturalness” of an Asian aesthetic projected onto an Asian(-looking) body, American or
otherwise, thereby reinscribing normative codes of race and nation.
These examples point to the complexity in how we interpret the use of tattoos as the
individual expression of the self. As Dorinne Kondo (1997) points out in her study of race
and fashion, what we choose to wear “can have a political edge as signifiers of
subcultural style and as components of ethnic/racial pride,” but we must also be mindful
of the ways that such articulations perform us (16). Or to put it another way, “Body
projects do not simply display the inner self in a language that only experts—or,
52
alternatively, members of a subculture—can read. …[T]he meanings of marked body-
selves cannot be severed from the intersubjective processes of the body’s reading and
writing, including those offered up by both marginal and institutional discourses” (Pitts
2003, 84). By looking at how multiple forms of displacement intertwine in terms of both
physical bodies and aesthetics of meaning, the transnational configurations of art and
migration that ultimately converge onto the Asian American body allow us insight into
how the very category of Asian American is constantly renegotiated and in flux.
Rather than bemoan the instability of such an identity formation, it is important to
consider this ambiguity as one of epistemological possibility, especially when coupled
with the potentially transformative conditions of the modified form. This transformative,
or deterritorialized, effect of tattooing is possible, according to Nicholas Thomas (2005),
precisely “because tattoo practices and tattoos have possessed cross-cultural efficacy and
salience as well as culturally specific meaning. That cross-cultural efficacy has entailed
the potential for their interested recognition and misrecognition, the possibility that they
may be adopted or appropriated rather than ignored” (225). Like processes of
racialization, processes of tattooing are contextually specific, a product of the individual’s
choices as well as the social milieu that mediates its acquisition. As such, tattoos can both
resist and perpetuate individual and social categorization, for “different modes of
tattooing may be fundamentally distinct in their predicates, in the notions of the person,
the body, and society, that underlie them” (226). The Asian American tattoo artists and
enthusiasts discussed in this section seem to have instinctively understood this
53
formulation, remapping cartographies of skin and ink that navigate the complex meanings
of their identities as functioning between and among the variegated borders of race and
nation. As Stuart Hall (1994) notes, cultural and ethnoracial identities are a matter of
becoming as well as being, belonging as much to the future as to the past (393). By
looking at mutually constitutive effects of race and ink, the creation and articulation of
tattooed subjectivities reiterate Chuh’s (2001) challenge to “defy the conventions of U.S.
hegemonic epistemology…to amplify purposefully the cross-geographic, cross-historical,
and cross-discursive dynamics between Asianness and Asian Americanness in the critical
methods of knowledge production” (293). The multiple “crossings” presented here
between the body and its various social markers of pigmentation illustrates a cultural
politics fashioned out of conditions once previously considered criminal, freakish, and
outcast—conditions that insist an aesthetic re-evalution rife with possibilities of
subversion, resistance, and transformation, yet ultimately, as Hall would say, without
guarantees.
54
Chapter 3: Phantastic Formations of Skin
My concern with mimesis, then, is with the prospects for a sensuous knowledge in
our time, a knowledge that in adhering to the skin of things through realist copying
disconcerts and entrances by spinning off into fantastic formations—in part
because of the colonial trade in wildness that the history of the senses involves.
- Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity
This brief quote from Taussig’s study of mimesis identifies several key concepts that
inform my study of Filipino tribal tattooing in the United States. In borrowing his idea of
skin as a site of “fantastic formations,” I slightly alter his conceptualization through an
intentional substitution of “f” with a “ph.” While on one hand such an act can be
interpreted as a politically-inspired linguistic move to subvert the imposition of the letter
“F,” which does not exist in pre-colonial linguistic systems, this was not my intention.
8
Instead, I am more interested in the strategic conflation of the words “fantastic” with
“phantasmic” in order to describe tattoo practices based on fantasy and phantasm. In
other words, I consider the inter-related processes through which Filipino tribal tattooing
functions as a type of (re)invented tradition, as well as a contemporary instantiation of a
spectral pre-colonial presence that forms around the fetishization of skin. I am interested
in how skin becomes the medium through which an affective “history of the present”
(Foucault, 1989) becomes refigured in Filipino American lives, exemplified by the Mark
8
While the F vs. P debate alludes to the importance of self-representation and the politics of
naming, it remains outside the particular scope of this chapter. In order to most accurately
represent the Tribe and its members, I make it a point to use the self-referential terms they
themselves use on their own website (i.e., they use “Filipino” not “Pilipino”).
55
of the Four Waves Tribe (henceforth simply referred to as “the Tribe”), a group of tattoo
enthusiasts based in Southern California whose mission is to revive Filipino tattooing.
The first section of the chapter deals specifically with the Tribe and the development of
what I call the baliktad aesthetic, a Tagalog term meaning “backwards” or “inside-out.”
Then I situate the execution of this aesthetic within a theory of what I term automimesis
in order to tease out the complexities and contradictions of (post-)diasporic cultural
production as a form of postcolonial mimicry. Finally, I end the chapter with another
perspective on Filipino tattooing put forth by a Filipino American tattoo artist whose
ideas run counter to the Tribe and its purported mission. By examining tattoos as
contested sites of identity/social formation, I challenge facile notions of agency and
representation currently at play in certain areas of tattoo scholarship.
3.1 Baliktad: a diasporic aesthetic
Figure 3.1: Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon
56
According to their website, Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon, or Mark of the Four Waves is
an organization dedicated to reviving the traditional cultures and tattoos of the
Philippine Islands. Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon translates to Mark of the Four Waves, a
reference to the “waves” of immigrants who came to the Philippines over many
millennia. The influence, both good and bad, of each of these waves has combined
to create the islands’ culture. Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon intends to resurrect the
positive, repair the negative, and move into the future while keeping their roots
firmly planted in the past.
During the weekend of the Annual Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture in San Pedro, I
was able to conduct a group interview with members of the Tribe as they convened at the
house of one of the group’s founders, which also functions as the Tribe’s headquarters,
located in Buena Park, a city located in the northwest part of Orange County, California.
According to Elle, one of the founders of the group, he and a group of friends traveled to
Hawaii and were struck by the local tattoo practices there. He and his friends wanted to
get Hawaiian style tattoos but one of the artists there told him to search out his own
ethnic history instead of appropriating someone else’s culture. As a result, Elle and his
friends began to do their own research on Filipino tattoo customs, most of which had
been wiped out during the centuries of Spanish colonialism. (For a discussion of the lack
of extant materials on pre-colonial Filipino tattooing, see Ricafrente 2008; Salvador
2002). “We wanted to be like selfish and get our own tattoos,” says Elle. “We thought we
were supercool cuz we had recently invented something.” His devotion to seeking out the
hidden history of Filipino tattooing led to the purchase whatever materials he could find
that would give him clues to tattoo patterns and design: books, carvings, weapons,
57
textiles, artifacts—anything that had designs ingraved on them. Elle notes that his mom
started telling him, “You’re baliktad”—going backwards.
The concept of baliktad, or backwardness, functions along different aesthetic registers.
Baliktad, used as a derogatory marker, signals Elle’s mother’s perception of a naturalized
“forwardness”—a Eurocentric teleological narrative characterized by the temporal and
geographic movement from a primitive past towards a civilized future. On the other hand,
for the tribe, baliktad becomes a way to challenge said narratives in its attempt to resist
incorporation within such a diasporic evolutionary schema. Part of their strategy is how
they choose to represent themselves in the media. On their website and in articles in the
popular press such as Tattoo, Skin and Ink, and Filipinas, the tribe are always depicted
wearing tribal costume, such as the banig and head dresses. “We need to educate how our
culture was looking other than the barong,” states Elle. “A lot of the older Filipinos try to
dress us up not looking indigenous, to not scare the white man. They think to look
indigenous is too scary. To put us in the magazine, it looks beautiful to look like a savage.
Naked is looking good still… Looking indigenous is not bad.”
Leny, one of the newest tribe members, located in Canada and visiting Los Angeles for
the tribal get-together, agrees, “it actually says a lot to ourselves, that we can hold an
unpopular idea. To look aesthetically unpopular. Nakedness is beautiful in our culture.
Savage is unclean, indecent, but to us it’s beautiful… This is our roots, this is beautiful
58
too.” When I ask whether they may be inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes about
Filipinos as savage, Tina, another Tribe member, responds:
What we’re trying to do is perpetuate indigenous culture as something beautiful,
that tattoos are something beautiful. I don’t think it perpetuates the stereotype of a
savage in a negative form. One of the reasons why we have the weapons, why we
have the clothing, is cuz people, Filipinos, don’t know that aspect of their culture.
It’s a way to make it interesting for them to see it that way.
Looking backwards, the search for one’s roots, had led the tribe to forge connections with
the tribal peoples of the Philippines. As stated on their website, “Tatak Ng Apat Na Alon
members stress that their tattoos are not a fad or a fashion statement. The tattoos are
intended to bridge the gap to their ancestors, and every pattern is sacred.”
“The kalinga community [people of the cordilleras region in Luzon, Philippines], they are
members of our tribe,” states Elle. “The Kalinga were ashamed of their tattoos. But when
they saw the article that was about our group they were proud.” Elle then explained how
he tattooed the mayor and elders of the Kalinga. According to the Tribe, fostering
awareness about the beauty of tattooing has helped the Kalinga, and other tribal groups in
the Philippines, re-evaluate their relationship to their tattoo customs, social practices that
had been denigrated under centuries of colonialism and that often put tattooed people
under the threat of execution.
“A lot of them were almost ashamed about showing off their tattoos because a lot of the
Filipinos back home think it’s a negative aspect of it, like they killed someone back
then,” explains Riazel. “But last year we had the opportunity to go back and what we told
59
them was that back then what they were trying to do was protect their family and their
land, not really something to be ashamed of. But what we’re trying to do is collecting
heads to educate, and seeing how we’re doing that and reviving it that way was when
they said, ‘oh ok’ and wanted to show off their tattoos. [They] felt more at ease showing
their tattoos rather than having to cover it up all the time.” The process of “uncovering”
enacts a second meaning of baliktad: “inside-out.” Thinking about baliktad as both
“backwards” and “inside-out” highlights the simultaneity of movement: temporal,
geographic, corporeal, that attempts to negate the imposed restrictions of colonial
propriety.
In a more symbolic sense, members of the Tribe corporealize this “inside-out” movement
through the invention of their own tattoo traditions. Tina explains:
I’d been searching for something that was significant to me culturally, and I didn’t
have a whole lot of info on Filipino tattoos…Once I have met up with the with the
Tribe and got my tattoo, I felt it had always been there, like it had always been on
my skin, but just underneath my skin and it just needed someone’s help to bring it
out so that it was visible. But now that I have it, I kinda felt like I’ve always had it.
For Tina, tattoos function as a form of writing that excribes the latent visibility of
ethnicity located just beneath her skin, bringing her Filipinoness to the surface despite it
being always already there. Akira Lippit (2005) writes that the human skin “is a tissue
that erases the boundaries between inside and outside. Everything that happens on the
skin’s surface represents an unresolved encounter between interior and exterior elements”
(110). This unresolvability, this incommensurability, between different forms of marking
60
—racialization and tattooing—presents itself when Tina describes how she is seen by
other Filipinos:
The interesting thing for me about seeing other Filipinos that have tattoos that
aren’t necessarily like my tattoos, is that I like to see how long it takes for them to
come ask me about my tattoos because they can kind of tell by looking at me that
I’m probably Filipino. And so then they see the markings, their first assumption is
that I’m Hawaiian or Samoan or Tongan, or somewhere along those lines, until
they ask me about my tattoos.
Tina’s narrative illustrates the unreliability of visual cues to orchestrate knowledge of the
racial. In other words, the ideological field does not have neat correspondence in the
visual field. As this story points out, tattoos and race cannot be read simply as visual
markers from which to present an easily readable identity. And yet if skin serves as the
site to express something that is intrinsically inside of you, as Tina’s experiences suggest,
how do you go about determining what design is appropriate for you? Jay explains that
each person who comes to the Tribe fills out a questionnaire form to determine their
tattoo design. “The form gets them to talk to the people, to their family. They are doing
research on their family.”
Tina says, “So when we see other people who have Filipino tattoos that don’t necessarily
look like tribal tattoos we don’t hate on that, it’s an opportunity for us to help them see
that there’s something more significant out there.” Jay, who recounts his tattoos going
from the American flag, baybayin script, and warrior marks, states that everybody who
gets a Filipino tattoo is on a journey. Ironically, the Tribe members’ idea of a journey of
identity reincribes a narrative of “proper” development, and presupposes tattoos as
something that must signify a natural correspondence between your body and your
61
identity. Their reliance on so-called family genealogy assumes a link between your
identity, your body, and the geographic region where your family supposedly comes from
—something that may not always be the most “accurate” in the context of the multiple
colonizations that have occurred throughout Filipino history (see Rafael 2000).
Yet there is a certain insistent authenticity that the Tribe seeks to establish through their
practices, an essentialism between one’s body and one’s ethnic identity. “Your skin is
basically your temple, don’t waste your skin for unproperly researched tattoos,” states
Elle. “If you’re gonna spend money on some tattoo, try to do real research on it.” Tina
agrees, “If you google Filipino tattoos, one of the first things you come across is
alibata….alibata is not really indigenous Filipino. What we’re trying to help people
understand that there’s more to Filipino tattoos than just getting alibata or the Filipino
sun…. We have a lot of people come to us who that have existing tattoos of Japanese
tattoos like dragons and koi fish and things like that because that’s what they liked before
they found out that there was something more significant to their Filipino culture than
copying another culture’s tattoos.”
When Elle speaks of the recent trend in alibata (or baybayin, a form of pre-Spanish script
that developed from Sanskrit) tattoos, he becomes visibly agitated. “Instead of getting
kanji, instead of getting Chinese and Asian writing, we’re getting Indian writing. This
was 15 years ago when I got this [alibata tattoo]. So now everyone is getting alibata,
Indian writing…It’s not our language, bro. Isn’t that sad?” Elle’s sadness displays the
62
structure of feeling that underlies the Tribe’s reactionary cultural nationalism: a refusal of
Asian American pan-ethnic solidarity. In an interview in a local Los Angeles pop culture
magazine, Elle states, “I believe it’s quite sad to see some Filipino-Americans and even
Filipinos on the islands who lose their identity with the generalized label as ‘Asian,’ or
saying that they want to be what they are not” (ExGirl/Canoe 2005). How the Tribe
express who they are and how they come into being through their performance of
“tribalism” is explored in the next section.
3.2 (Sub)Urban warriors: theorizing automimesis
Figure 3.2: Promotional image of the Tribe labeled as “Urban Warriors”
While many in the mainstream tattoo community are quick to celebrate the Mark of the
Four Waves Tribe for their revitalization efforts, there are also those who criticize what
they do as a misguided attempt at advocating a pseudo-tribal experience from the safety
63
of their affluent suburban residencies. Indeed, the spatialized containment of the Tribe’s
headquarters in an Orange County gated community functions as an apt metaphor for the
similar type of gatekeeping and insularity that they seek to maintain through their
restrictive tattoo community. Part of this undertaking is a very controlled way of
presenting themselves in the visual culture they produce for their group. So while the
previous section explored what I call a baliktad aesthetic from the perspective of the tribe
members themselves, here I would like to analyze the performances they enact in their
promotional materials within a theoretical framework of what I term automimesis.
Before embarking on a more detailed analysis of the visual culture surrounding the Tribe,
I would first like to take a moment to tease out some of the themes that will be explored
in this section. My core concern is the question of how cultural forms are willfully
(re)inscribed within various modes of being, “being” taken here as both existence and its
living surfaces, the tattooed landscape of nature and flesh. The theories of
“deterritorialization and “reterritorialization” promulgated by Deleuze and Guattari play
an instructive role in exploring the ways that tattoos, wilderness, and the human body
multiply constitute each other in a complex interplay of insertion and interpellation.
Deleuze & Guattari (1987) write: “Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return
to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one
element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost
its territoriality as well” (174).
64
While the concept of deterritorialization and reterritorialization has been applied to
tattoos in previous scholarship (DeMello 2000), it has been mostly incorporated in a
unidirectional manner. In other words, scholars writing about tattoo cultures in the West
attempt to resignify tattoos severed from their geographic, temporal, and cultural
locations. Framed in such a way, tattoos act on the body, and not vice versa. This asserts a
type of appropriative rewriting of culture that glosses over histories of exchange, often
steeped in colonial/imperialist projects, in favor of individualistic agency that recast
bodily markings, in Western philosophical tradition, as symbols of one’s individual
essence, the externalization of an inherent internal selfhood (Rosenblatt 1997, 318). Nikki
Sullivan (2001) has taken this paradigmatic framework of North American tattoo
scholarship to task, asking us to “explore how the subject in/of tattooing exists in
contemporary Western culture; what it does” rather than what it means (3). While her
critique is certainly welcomed and warranted, ironically, it coincided with a particular
academic moment when scholarship on body modification erupted in the academy, in
which number of other tattoo scholars were undertaking precisely these same types of
inquiries (Pitts 2003; Caplan 2000; Atkinson 2003; Rosenblatt 1997).
Rosenblatt’s (1997) study of Modern Primitives in the US exemplifies this type of
contextual strategy. His study mirrors Hayden White’s use of the primitive in his
discourse surrounding the “noble savage” (i.e., it’s more about us than it is about them),
yet all but ignores how the tattooed subject always already exists within histories of
colonial abjection towards the primitive other. For Filipino Americans in the Mark of the
65
Four Waves Tribe, it is precisely this history that signals the rescripting of tattoos within
its contemporary moment. Like White and Rosenblatt, the Tribe seeks to critique
“modern” Western society, yet it pays particular heed to the colonial relationship at the
heart of this discourse. The histories of corporeal subjection and subjugation compel us to
not take the body for granted and instead scrutinize corporeality and forms of
embodiment as terrains of meanings and movement. In other words,
deterritorializing/reterritorializing processes occur not just with tattoo customs but with
bodies themselves—processes of disarticulation and reconstitution. The
reterritorialization of Filipino American bodies consists of both insertion of ink into skin
as well insertion of the bodies into the Philippine wilderness (vis-a-vis photoshop),
recombinant processes that strike from the micro-molecular level all the way to the
macro-social.
For the Tribe, then, the deterritorialization of place, practice, and skin allows for their
reterritorialization within an instinctively renaturalized order, a reconstitution of
particular associations between bodies of nature, bodies of aesthetics, and human bodies.
That is to say, the purposeful collage of flesh, art, and wilderness create a “system of
horizontal and complementary reterritorializations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 174),
whereby each of these elements mutually constitute, or perhaps more accurately,
mutually interpellate each other within particular cultural, temporal and geographic
locations. However, this is not to imply that this process is to be viewed as a simple
“return” to precoloniality or a reversal of evolutionary narratives of modernity (both of
66
which reinscribe dominant Western conceptualizations of spacio-temporal movement).
Rather, the “invented traditions” of the Tribe disrupt such teleological entrenchments and
instead highlight the unevenness of movement and mobility that occur as the direct
outcome of various forms of (post)colonial dispersal and exchange.
The collection and display of racialized Otherness has a long and varied history in the
United States. Filipino bodies, in particular, have been imported, objectified and
exhibited in a performance of primitive alterity and racial spectatorship, most notably at
the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (Vaughan 1996). Even today, the bodies of Filipinos
continue to be put on display and used for entertainment purposes, although in an entirely
different context. The “tribal” body is commonly used in Pilipino Culture Night (PCN)
dances as one sampling of Filipino culture. However, as Gonzalves (1997) has pointed
out, certain dances within the standard performance arc of college student-produced
PCNs adhere to “indigenized rather than indigenous” cultural formations and raises “a
question as to the authenticity of the presentations” (175) According to Gonzalves, “To
say that something is indigenized is to point to an active and complicated process of
editing. This is the process in which a vision of the Philippine life is manufactured whose
immediate origins may be located within Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s management of
cultural images through major exponents…” (ibid). While one can argue the meanings of
authenticity and the notion of “indigenized” versus “indigenous,” the point I am trying to
make here is with regards to the temporary scripting of primitive Filipino American
bodies as opposed to the relative permanence and commitment embodied by those
67
possessing tattooed skin. That is, the one-night stand, no-strings-attached tribalism
extrapolated for entertainment purposes needs to be contrasted to existing cultural tribal
formations such as those found in communities such as those in the Philippines as well as
the Mark of the Four Waves Tribe.
9
Just as the Philippine landscape has been constructed within the Filipino American tribe’s
imaginary, so too are Filipino American tribal bodies/images constructed according to an
idealized pre-contact nostalgic yearning. On the Tribe’s website, photographs of the
members are strategically juxtaposed against 19
th
Century photographs of “real” tribal
Filipinos. (See Figures 3.3 and 3.4.)
Figure 3.3: Promotional image of the Tribe posing in tribal costume
9
For a more sustained discussion about the performativity of post-colonial diasporic identities,
particularly in relation to indigenous/indigenized forms of culture such as dance, see Scull
(2005).
68

Figure 3.4: Archival photo displayed on the Tribe's website
What do we make of this pre-colonial mimicry? How do we explain the reorganization of
this diasporic community into a tribe? Previous theories of mimicry (Bhabha 1994) and
mimesis (Taussig 1993) detailing how the colonized copy the forms and practices of their
colonizers, while useful, are inadequate in fully explaining the specific processes that
occur when, as in the case of the Filipino American tribe, the post-colonial diasporic
subject tries to mimic one’s own “home” culture. Similarly, theories of “ethnomimesis”
(Cantwell 2003) that explain the white Westerner’s appropriation of non-Western culture
does not take into account the subjectivity of the non-white Western subject and the
strategies of racialized opposition that set these two groups apart. What is needed is a
new articulation, which I posit here as “automimesis,” that attempts to complicate these
equations by placing at the center the lives and perspectives of the post-colonial diasporic
subject. This “automimetic” faculty can be explained as an identificatory process that is
the result of post-colonial dispersal, strategic nostalgia, and the willful corporeal self-
othering that (attempts to) disrupt colonial teleologies of modernity/progress and the rigid
boundaries of the nation-state. The Tribe’s use of tattoos, indigenous costumes, and
wilderness relief signal a psychic and material desire to reclaim a lost heritage, governed
69
by a nostalgia “used to counter hegemonic narratives that erase or distort the experiences
of Asian Americans or of marginalized peoples in the United States” (Maira 2002, 193).
At the same time, this nostalgia takes on distinctively imperialist overtones, which
Rosaldo (1989) calls “imperialist nostalgia”: “nostalgia, often found under imperialism,
where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have destroyed,” “a process of
yearning for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.”
While Bhabha has famously noted that the colonized mimicry of the colonizer is always
already “not quite, not white,” the auto-mimicry of Filipinos in the diaspora do not share
this similar racial discontinuity that marks their corporeal otherness. Rather, the diasporic
subject’s auto-mimicry of an “indigenous” image veers uncomfortably close to
autoexoticization (Savigliano 1995) or self-Orientalizing (Kondo 1997), and in fact can
serve to “reify identities, freeze the past, and encourage the commodification of ethnicity
that situates Filipinos abroad in a touristic—that is to say, neocolonial—relationship with
the Filipinos at home” (Rafael 2000, 14). However, the overt discontinuities that mark
Bhabha’s colonial bodies are still expressed, albeit differently, in the racialized alterity of
the post-colonial diasporic subject. For example, the very artifice that is displayed in the
doctored photographs betray their constructedness. Whether intential or not, the
imprecise impersonation (perhaps read as an aesthetic marker) expressed in these
obviously digitally altered/enhanced images are themselves a form of modification. Here
Taussig’s conception of mimetic machines—i.e., machines (and their mechanical
reproductive abilities) that enable varying forms of mimesis—operate on multiple and
70
multiply-constitutive levels: the tattoo machine/needle, the photography camera, the
photoshop computer software, etc. These powerful representational devices enable such
mimicry/modification and allows for the visual articulation of what Ketu Katrak calls the
“simultaneity of geography”; the reterritorialization of automimetic selves engage in “the
possibility of living here in body and elsewhere in mind and imagination” (quoted in
Espiritu 2003, 11).
The dislocations between psychic and corporeal inhabitations mimic the uneven dispersal
of bodies and aesthetics that ultimately converge in circuitous pathways onto the post-
colonial diasporic body. In this way, the automimetic subject disrupts predictable linear
outcomes of global movement/migration. Nicholas Thomas (2005) has pointed out that
certain forms of Pacific tattooing are “always already a cross-cultural, historically shaped
adaptation” (225). Automimetic adaptations, such as those within the Filipino American
Tribe, debunk erroneous notions regarding the fixity of culture (see, for example, the
incorporation of traditional vs. modern tattoo machines, deterritorialized aesthetics,
mimicry based on mechanical reproduced images rather than direct contact,
transnationally-imbued consciousness, invented nostalgia, etc.) and challenge, disrupt,
and destabilize teleological narratives of modernity. Yet in considering this vacillation
between here and there, between the United States and Philippines, between primitivity
and modernity, between the natural and the constructed, rather than a “postmodern
pastiche” of identities and identity formations that freely move in a neo-liberal globalized
world, these cultural forms must be contextualized as specific outcomes of world
71
historical processes always already overladen with issues of power, the consequence of
imperialist ventures, and the diasporic subject’s refusal to accept his/her subordinate
status. This entails a reclamation of the body that challenges the constructs of colonial
victimhood/victimization, one which Sarita See (2002) has discussed in terms of the
aestheticized Filipino/American bodies and bodily inscriptions/modifications framed
within discourses of victimization/mutilation based on colonial/Catholic legacies of the
“Passion/Pasyon.” In interpellating the Filipino/American body within the context of the
tribal, the Tribe rematerializes the body outside these Catholic/colonial paradigms, so that
the modified body embraces community/genealogy rather than victimhood/subjugation.
10
Another important consideration is the Tribe’s specific focus on the Philippines as the
focal point of identity/culture, instead of viewing their work within a broader field of
diasporic cultural production. The notion of “4 waves” flows unidirectionally into the
archipelago, in contrast to the outward waves of immigration from the Philippines into
the United States. Given the centrality of the Philippines as the location of culture, then,
how does this diasporic homeland function in the tribe’s collective imagination? The
production of the Philippines as an idyllic natural landscape is displayed in many of the
Tribe’s promotional materials. For example, in the merchandise section of the site, the
Tribe sells three different postcards in which tribe member photos have been
superimposed onto a background of “traditional” Filipino landscapes. In one such
postcard, tribe member Buggz squats with cigar in mouth, in front of the famous Banaue
10
I realize that the role of religion, colonialism, and tattoos/body modification requires much
more elaboration and theorization than what I can provide here.
72
rice terraces (Figure 3.5) while in another postcard, two tribe members stand in front of a
generic natural landscape (Figure 3.6). While the first photo of Buggz depicts him
wearing jeans thereby juxtaposing the modern with the traditional, the latter photo tries
harder at recreating an aura of verisimilitude, whereby nature is augmented by the
members adornment of both tattooed skin and traditional Filipino garments. The use of
black-and-white color schematic in both images reinforces a specific kind of strategic
nostalgia in a disaporic production of “home.” As Dorinne Kondo (1997) has pointed
out, the construction of “home” by those who inhabit marginalized spaces in society is a
political necessity in order to “create, produce, and assert [their] identities” (207).
Figure 3.5: Tribe member in front of the Banaue Rice Terraces
73
Figure 3.6: Promotional postcard of the Tribe
Home for these Filipino Americans rests within a paradisical landscape that signifies
freedom from the oppressive contours of US society. However, unlike paradise-seeking
vacationers and adventure tourists whose attraction to the Pacific come steeped in
colonial histories of conquest and exploitation, the visual construction of home in these
photos rely upon a reimag(in)ing of a land freed from its colonial contradictions. The pre-
contact Philippines exists as a fantastic and phantasmic symbol in the consciousness of
the Tribe; the photo-postcards try to re-imagine, or re-envision, the body naturalized
within these environs. Tattooed brown bodies, they seem to be saying, work naturally
within this particular “indigenous” landscape. The members of the tribe try to show the
body as not divorced from nature, the literally embodied construction of self in a home of
skin and wilderness. Reverting back to pre-colonial Philippines, no attempts need to be
made to tackle other social/societal pressures associated with “contemporary” Filipino
74
society.
11
The imagined homeland is free of the messiness of colonialism and insurgent
Third-world politics. As Espiritu (2003) explains:
The idealization of the home country, however, becomes problematic when it
elicits a nostalgia for a glorious past that never was, a nostalgia that elides
exclusion, power relations, and difference or when it elicits a desire to replicate
these inequities as a means to buttress lost status and identities in the adopted
country. (15)
How does the idealization of the Philippines and its tribal organization replicate these
exclusions and inequities of power? For example, while the Filipino American male’s
embrace of the “Urban Warrior” label can be interpreted as a reclamation of their
particular culture in the process of decolonization (Strobel 1997), it also re-enacts
specific forms of racialized hyper-masculinized identities/performativities that must also
be mindful against reinscribing heterosexist forms of power/patriachy. In other words, the
question that needs exploring is how are masculine and feminine identities being
(re-)assigned in this particular tribe? How does the Tribe try to subvert or transgress
gender and sexual hegemonic formations in opposition to those found in dominant US
society, if at all?
One particular visual marker of the site is the predominance of its male members.
Although women are indeed members of the tribe, they are not depicted as prominently
11
This is not to imply that cultural politics is somehow divorced from more overt forms of
politics. Indeed, these communities of culture can act as important social networks in
propagating political movements. For example, at 2005’s Pintadas photography exhibit of
tattooed Asian American women held in NYC, where the Tribe was a prominent presence, the
gathering of a concentrated group of Asian Americans, most notably Filipino Americans,
allowed for mobilizing tactics by groups such as Gabriela in helping to spread
literature/information about their particular political organization and ongoing stuggles in the
Philippines.
75
on the website or in media accounts of the tribe (Krutak 2006; Exgirl/Canoe 2005). As
half-naked male bodies come to stand in for the Tribe, implicit within this visual
formulation is a stark homosociality that invokes Western paradigms of “man vs. nature”
or “man in nature”—a masculinist discourse that emphasizes rugged individualism that
both contests and maintains the Tribe’s attempt at collectivity. This homosociality is on
display in the various pictures that adorn the website—fraternizing at tattoo conventions,
engaging in recreated indigenous tattoo “tapping” rituals, and photoshopped male
bonding amidst the natural landscape of the Philippines. The performance of primitivity,
gendered male, implores us to reconsider whose bodies become legible/illegible within
certain forms of (cultural) citizenship, nationalism, and state power. By examining the
traditional tattoo rituals associated with this tribe, I will analyze how homosocial male
contact is embedded in the very structures of the tribal relationships.
Photographs depicting the traditional tattoo ceremony (batek) involve a significant
amount of male-on-male touching, stretching, and needle penetration (Figure 3.7). In
considering the sexual overtones of tattooing practices, Alfred Gell (1993) writes that
“the technical schema of tattooing sets up a further series of analogies which tend
towards the same end. The sight of a tattoo evokes imagery of sexual subjection, piercing,
and flex, which are equally resonant seen from the perspective of either sex; these
resonances arise from the manner in which tattoos are made” (36). While both Euro-
American machine-based techniques and traditional Filipino tapping techniques involve
male-on-male touching, it is the latter that truly evokes a more communal homosocial
76
atmosphere. Whereas machine techniques usually involve two actors, the artist and the
recipient, the traditional technique requires at least three, usually four, persons to be
involved in the process: the tattoo artist, the recipient, and one or two skin stretchers. (See
illustrations.) As the artist rhythmically taps the needled instrument (usually a stick with
the tattoo needles—traditionally made of bone or horn—affixed to one end) into the skin,
the stretchers hold the skin in place, creating a taut surface for the needle to puncture.
Figure 3.7: Tribe members practicing traditional tattooing techniques
The process of tattooing requires the recipient to temporarily relinquish his individual
agency, lying submissively on the ground while the penetration of skin and injection of
ink takes place. This process results in what can be interpreted as a highly homoerotic
atmosphere, and requires countless hours of direct man-on-man contact, including the
skin stretchers’ hands on the receiver, as well as the stretchers’ overlapping hands on each
other. Despite the pain involved, all this touching creates a tactile atmosphere of
sensuality, if not sexuality. Thus, in order to achieve the type of power/agency over the
body that the tattoo comes to symbolize after the fact, it ironically entails the supplication
77
of the body in order to spend the hours getting penetrated, stretched, and groped by other
males.
12
Stated another way, the tattoo-aspiring tribe member is forced to be the
metaphorical “bottom” to the tattooist’s “top.” This openness to the phallic insertion of
the tattoo needle highlights how the traditionally “feminine” role of being penetrated (in
heteronormative terms) enters into the construction of the masculine body. As Evans
(2005) points out, “To be penetrated is to acknowledge one’s vulnerability to penetration,
an experience that conflicts with how masculinity is constituted within Western
discourses. Allowing oneself to be penetrated opens both the body and the psyche to
different meanings of masculinity.” In the context of the Filipino American tribe, they ask
that only the most dedicated members volunteer themselves to the traditional hand-held
methods of tattooing.
13
Thus, the spaces of tattooing can be interpreted as “an intensely homosocial context in
which the love of manliness must be reconciled with the desire to be manly” (Evans
12
While the relationship between the tattooer and tatttoed is often, quite accurately, portrayed as
one of collaboration within the context of aesthetic design and psychic understanding, during
the actual physical process itself, everything is pretty much under the control of the artist.
Particularly in traditional Pacific tattooing contexts, such as Samoan tatauing, verbal direction-
giving during the process is quite limited. Instead, the artist takes the liberty of physically
contorting the recipient’s body to his own whim, to the exaggerated effect of “you either move
or you lose your limb” (personal interview with traditional tatau artist Su’a Sulu’ape
Freewind, May 6, 2006).

13
While my focus is on the traditional (non-electric) forms of tattooing, this is not to imply that
the electric tattooing practices do not also create a atmosphere of male homosocial
relationships. For example, the Tribe collaborates with an African American tattoo artist
named Speezy, who says, “Although I am of African American descent, I understand what the
tribe’s missions about reviving lost traditions, I very much can relate to that, that is why I am
there, helping and tattooing….I am very much honored to help the Filipino BROTHERS
movement” (Tribe’s website, emphasis in original). This emphasis of “Filipino BROTHERS”
not only indiates the overtly masculinist/male-dominated composition of the tribe, but also
alludes to the homosocial kinship networks that are being forged in and through the tattoo.
78
2005). As a visual marker of one’s subjectivity and authority, tattoo culture is also
characterized by male-on-male spectatorship. In other words, it is not uncommon for
other men to look at each other’s tattoos, show them off, fraternize around them, as a
form of homosocial bonding, a recognition of the pain and dedication that each has
mutually endured for the sake of inscribing the skin. The (homo)erotics of the penetrating
gaze has been theorized by Gell (1993) in his study of Pacific tattoos:
The eye…enters the body of the other, because the peculiarity of tattooing is that it
is inside the skin rather than on its surface. Thus to view a tattoo is already to be in
a position of seduction; it provokes, not an aesthetic response but a kind of bodily
looking which is intrinsically sexualized, especially when the design is localized in
a way which reflects the erotic possibilities of the body. (36)
Although this may be a bit of an overstatement, it is true that within the tattoo
community, the habitual process of “show and tell” is quite characteristic of any tattoo
gathering/social event. However, I disagree with Gell in his pronouncement that this is
not an aesthetic response—I would say that this is based explicitly on an aesthetic
response: that is, the appreciation of the tattooed skin (or what Gell calls the “artefactual
body”), being both a sexualized and racialized gaze, is inherently based on an aesthetic
valuation of the body. Wallace (2003) makes this point quite clear in her analysis of
Russian contact with the inhabitants of the Marquesan Islands, where the aesthetic
response to the tattooed body intrinsically contained both overly racial and sexual
overtones. In her description of the moment of contact, the elaborate tattoo designs
“visually enhance[d] Marquesan flesh, accentuating the contours of the male form and
further defining its perfectly developed musculature and torso” (72). While Wallace
makes the point that such an aesthetic appraisal did not necessarily “avow an erotic
79
interest,” it did elicit a strong urge in the Russians to “stroke” the skin of the male
natives, and contributed to the devaluation of the native female as “degenerate
specimens” of femininity (72-75).
While the homoerotically charged atmosphere of the male-dominated tattoo space has
received limited scholarly attention,
14
there has been acknowledgement, particularly
within the context of the military studies, of how the “tattoo creates a safety valve for
expressing physical bonds of intimacy toward a community of men in a (homo)erotic but
communally sanctioned, and distinctly unofficial form” (Braunberger 2000). While both
situations seem to involve regimes of authority that dictate the role of men in their
respective community, the exact hierarchical arrangement of the Tribe is not clear based
on the information on its website.
15
What is common between these two societies is the
way in which tattoos are looked upon as markers of masculinity, a certain form of
initiation into manhood. This type of rite of passage is not at all uncommon in the tattoo
world and is particularly salient today within Modern Primitive communities (DeMello
2000; Klesse 1999; Pitts 2003), as well as in indigenous societies in the Philippines
(Salvador 2004). Judging from their visual depiction on the website, for the members of
the Tribe, the uses of tattoos as inscriptions of masculinity and cultural heritage are not
complete without an overall context for their tribalism.
14
Individual narratives of homoeroticism in the tattoo studio does appear in certain works. See
Zeeland (1996) and Steward (1990).
15
Indeed, when I interviewed the Tribe they admitted that although the tribal structure is in
place, that not many of the members are “serious” enough to actualize said structure.
80
3.3 The Dream Jungle saga
“I’m not trying to sell you the tribal experience,” says Aleks Figueroa, a Filipino
American tattoo artist based out of Long Beach. “I have tribal interests, I love tribal art.
But I’m not trying to sell you that…I’m not trying to sell you anything other than my
artistry.”
If the Mark of the Four Waves represent a narrowly cultural nationalist model for
tattooing, in particular, and ethnic formation in general, then Filipino American tattoo
artist Aleks Figueroa represents a flip side (no pun intended) to that: namely a view of
Filipinoness that isn’t essentializing or isolationist, but one that arises from a relational
conception of identity. “It has to do with relation,” says Aleks, when I ask him about his
views on ethnic and racial identity and how this plays out in the realm of tattoo.
“Somehow Filipinos have been able to accidentally say we’re Filipino without saying
we’re Asian… I think it is equally important to embrace Asian American as it is Filipino
American. If people want to identify as Pacific Islander/Polynesia, ok it is [that, too].”
Instead of trying to locate Filipinos as either a complete separate entity or within a
mutually exclusive paradigm of Asia or Pacific, Aleks challenges imperialist
cartographies that divided the Pacific into geopolitical zones of colonial acquisition
(Thomas 1989) and views the Filipinos as possessing commonalities with both
ethnoracial groupings.
81
As a former community health worker in Oakland’s Asian Health Center, Aleks brings to
tattooing his experience as an activist as well as cultural worker. He acknowledges that he
approaches tattoo from what he calls a “political” perspective, one that is tied to the
community. His experiences and awareness manifests itself as an inclusiveness towards
the changing internal diversity that makes up the heterogeneity encompassed by the term
“Filipino”:
I think it would be good to acknowledge that we [Filipinos] are of [different]
cultures as well….it is important because it is inclusive and not exclusive. And I
think Filipinos have been good at being exclusive. I think that’s the shit part of
nationalism because then you don’t know shit about anyone else.
From the onset of his career in the tattoo scene, Aleks says that he was aware of the racial
aspect of tattooing and became interested in Asian American tattooing as a distinct
aesthetic form. “I don’t let just anyone touch me,” he states. “With something as
symbolic as a tattoo, I was looking for someone of color.” He received his first tattoo in
1993 from legendary artist Pinky Yun, an alibata/baybayin tattoo—despite the fact that
Pinky Yun is from Hong Kong and does not specialize in what is now termed “black
work.” When Aleks expressed interest in apprenticing with Pinky, he declined the
suggestion and instead referred him to Leo Zulueta
16
, who “loosely guided me into the
direction I am now.”
16
Leo Zulueta is a highly influential tattoo artist who is credited for the introduction of “tribal
style” tattooing into the United States. Zulueta, who is Filipino American and born and raised
in Hawai’i, based his tribal style on Polynesian and Micronesian tattoo patterns. Ironically, he
is not known for doing any Filipino work. Thus, Ricafrente (2008), in his typology of Filipino
American tattooing assigns him into the category “non-traditionalist” (43).
82
Yet the development of his own aesthetic of Filipino tattooing proved to be difficult due
to the lack of information available. Aleks explains:
At the time, there was nothing on the internet, books were scarce…and then I
traveled to wherever I could when I could for maybe about five years, and I
unearthed what I could and what I found, and what I found was my job was to not
take those designs verbatim but expand on it. That’s what I think anyone would be
proud of, ancestors or an artist of yesteryear. They wouldn’t want to put that exact
same design on someone because that was reserved for someone else. My job is to
innovate and take it to somewhere else, in my own interpretation.
Ironically, while the Four Waves believe that misguided Filipinos who get “incorrect”
tattoos are on a journey that will eventually lead to their group, Aleks’ own personal
trajectory through Filipino tattooing was once characterized by what he acknowledges to
be a similar type of cultural nationalism, which he says he grew out of, partly due to his
views on the Four Waves.
“I used to be about Filipino tattoos by Filipinos for Filipinos, [that kind of] separatist
nationalism…[which I] grew out of by me now saying I’m a tattoo artist who happens to
be Filipino.” Part of this comes from his reaction to seeing what the Four Waves were
doing in the tattoo community. “I viewed them as pretentious wanna-be tribalists, modern
day primitives…‘You are not Filipino unless you have a Filipino tattoo’ kinda shit. That’s
when I lost my mind. No, I can’t be lumped with those guys, in any way, shape, or form.”
He continues:
It seemed like a mockery to me. I know they mean well, but I kept hearing one lie
after another…I thought it would be a disservice if I didn’t do anything…[I needed
to] make a change: telling history as it is, and not fabricating what design comes
from where and what it means…Art’s just art.
83
While the Four Waves art is about a search for lost origins, Aleks’ art these days is about
finding interconnections. He explains that he is inspired by a lot of Filipino art, but also
art in general—art from Southeast Asia, Polynesian, Micronesian, as well as Aztec and
Puerto Rican art. He is inspired by an Oceanic aesthetic, and when asked why he chose to
set up shop in Long Beach he answers, that it was “the last city with the word ‘beach’ in
it that was still affordable.” At his location in Long Beach he comes in contact with a
clientele of various ethnic backgrounds: Filipinos, Latinos, African Americans. Although
Aleks mentioned earlier in our interview his concern for a specifically Asian American
aesthetic, it current work seems to point to towards something that might be considered
as a postcolonial aesthetic, as his location in Long Beach (as well as the other artists who
work at his shop) allows for new groupings and connections, leading to new aesthetic,
and perhaps racial, formations.
Despite the serious differences that Aleks has with the Four Waves, he is still quick to
point out that they all operate within what he calls the “Dream Jungle saga”—the ever-
changing contours and cartographies of the Filipino American diasporic community. On
his website, filipinotattoos.com, Aleks writes:
Dream Jungle is a book by the brilliant Filipina-American author, Jessica
Hagedorn. The book is an amazing read. The naming of his shop is an ode to her as
she has been a great inspiration of creativity in my life through her words, insight
and humor. The title is form fitting of the work that I share and of the people that I
represent. As much as I love and hate our politics, I am proud to be part of the
Dream Jungle saga.
When I ask him to elaborate on what he means by “our politics,” he states: “Politics of
identity: I love and I hate it. I love people able to call myself Filipino and being part of
84
the community…I hate it at the same tie because everyone wants the cookie cutter tattoo,
the cookie cutter experience, the cookie t-shirt to make them proud of being Filipino. It’s
like a really cheesy telenovela, I hate it but I love it, but I hate it but I love it…”
Aleks finds that through his tattooing, there’s what he calls a “spiritual” factor in his
work: he becomes a facilitator of experience in the process of people finding their
identity. He notes that “the people who get tattooed by me want to symbolize something
of their life, typically family, community, culture.” He relishes the exchange of time and
energy that tattooing provides:
I hope to continue to make people happy with what I share with them, exchange is
really important to me, and if I can continue to achieve that then I’m happy. The
exchange of energy the exchange of thought, perspectives, stories. That time
shared. If I can continue to get that, that’s cool with me.
Tattooing serves as an intimate practice that allows us to think about the proximities
between peoples, cultures, and possibilities of connections. “We’re all learning about
each other,” says Aleks, “and that’s what I like the best.”
85
Chapter 4: Monstrous Skin, Monstrous Excess
That is what we owe to monsters: the break with teleology and eugenics opens the
problem of what the source of creation is, how it is expressed, and where it will
lead.
- Hardt and Negri, Multitude
4.1 Becoming monster
Figure 4.1: Performance artist Faux Pas
In Bodies of Dissent, Daphne Brooks (2006) opens her discussion by seeking to
understand the ways in which “critically defamiliarizing” the body can yield “alternative
racial and gender epistemologies” (5). Hers is an elegant formulation, one that leads to
many productive lines of inquiry, particularly if we consider techniques through which
the body may not just discursively and ideologically be defamiliarized, but also
morphologically modified, deterritorialized and reimagined. Not just alternative
epistemologies, then, but alternative ontologies may result. Such is the potential of
thinking about monstrosities. Christine Braunberger (2000) adopts this theme of the
monstrous in her critical interpretive history of tattooed women as criminals, spectacle,
and freakshow from the late 19
th
century to the present day. “Monstrification” allows her
86
to locate the creation of “new possibilities for body aesthetics on the limitations of former
definitions” (3). The idea of the “monstrous”—both the subversively beautiful and
spectacularly threatening—provides a useful framework from which to approach the
tattooed body in contemporary society. As Rosi Braidotti (1994) has pointed out, the
construction of the “monster” has been used not only to identify the aberrant, but to
reinscribe what is considered the “correct” or “proper” body. Furthermore, Judith
Halberstam (1995) has argued, “The monster always represents the disruption of
categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need
monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities” (27). This
chapter focuses on this idea of becoming-monstrous,
17
the morphological transformation
of the body that not only identifies and challenges various racial, gendered, and sexual
normativities of the U.S. nation-state, but also opens up alternative possibilities of
inhabitation and corporealization.
In considering the ontological and epistemological positions of the non-normative body,
more specifically, the queer mixed race modified body, I will focus exclusively on one
particular body, the body of Joshua David Reno: first in his everyday, quotidian
presentation, and then, in the second half of this chapter, in the context of drag
performance as his alter-ego Faux Pas. I take up the theme of the monstrous as a way to
look at the corporeal processes of recombination and reconfigurement, thematics of
17
I use the concept of “becoming” in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, as a dynamic alliance of
creative “involution” that runs counter to teleological notions of progress/regress. Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) write: “to involve is to form a block that runs its own line ‘between’ the terms
in play and beneath assignable relations” (238).
87
embodiment reflected through the idea of the Derridean supplement and Deleuze and
Guattari’s theories of inhabiting multiplicities. Derrida refers to the supplement as a “non-
fullness,” a non-fullness that oftentimes gets interpreted as “less than full,” but a non-
fullness which can also be interpreted as “more than full.”
18
Thinking in terms of the
body, it raises the question of excess: racial, sexual, corporeal. For example, framed in
this way, an analysis of mixed race bodies allows us to challenge dominant racial
categories by refusing to accede to a reductive singularity.
19
Similarly, the proliferation of
modern discourses of sexuality, as Foucault (1978) outlines in his discussion of the
repressive hypothesis, stems from a type of excess beyond those inscribed as normatively
heterosexual. Finally, tattoos represent an excess pigmentation of skin that
hypervisibilizes the skin in which we live. As an ethnically mixed queer male, oftentimes
frustrated by friends, relatives, and strangers who have constantly looked upon the mixed
modified queer body as embodying that “less than fullness” (e.g. “not ___ enough”), I
approach the subject of Josh/Faux Pas as an investigation on how “more than fullness”—
a productive rather than debilitative excess—can be a place of radical possibility. In other
words, I am asking the question: What are the ways in which the recombinatory,
multiplicitous, “non-full” subject challenges normativized notions of ontology and
epistemology? By attempting to think about both my friend Josh and his alter-ego Faux
18
I owe this insight to Fred Moten and his discussion of the supplement in his English 501
course, Fall 2006, University of Southern California. See also his book, In the Break: The
Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
19
For example, those who occupy “mixed” ethnoracial heritages are not simply half this and half
that, but constitute two wholes, thereby being more than just a singularity, but as Deleuze and
Guattari call it, inhabiting multiplicities.
88
Pas in all their complexity or multiplicity, I will examine the body as a site of embodied
ontologies and performative epistemologies.
4.2 The archives and aesthetics of monstrosity

Figure 4.2: Self-portrait of Joshua David Reno

Figure 4.3: Joshua David Reno's torso modifications
Josh says, “My tattoos are the painting of my past, and of things I choose to recognize,
the story of me.” For Josh—as for many ink enthusiasts—tattoos represent a personal
archive of one’s self, an inscribed exscription to be read (or misread) by both the self and
89
society. In Archive Fever, Derrida (1995) meditates on the meaning such archival
inscriptions: “The foliaceous stratification, the pellicular superimposition of these
cutaneous marks seems to defy analysis. It accumulates so many sedimented archives,
some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body proper, others on the substrate
of an ‘exterior’ body” (20). On the other hand, as decorative ornamentation, tattoos also
function within a Foucauldian technique of the self used to achieve a corporeally
inhabited aesthetics of existence. Foucault (1985) defines the aesthetics of existence as
the “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of
conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular
20
being, and to make their life into an ouevre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets
certain stylistic criteria” (10-11). The body, or more specifically, the skin is a site/sight of
both the archive and the aesthetic, both a historical project and a disciplinary
performative of multiple individuations.
To see how such monstrous archives and monstrous aesthetics are achieved, let’s delve a
bit into the ethnographic: Josh’s involvement in body modification began at the age of 15
when he had his nipples pierced at a bikerfest he attended with his mother, which was
followed a year later by his first tattoo at 16.
21
He considers his first tattoo (which has
20
I must note here that I interpret the word “singular” in this sense as meaning “unique,
distinctive, and remarkable” instead of as a numerical signifier. This singularity, or
uniqueness, then, does not preclude, but rather is a necessary precondition of the kind of
individual “multiplicities” that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point out that we all inhabit.
21
This is below the age of consent in the state of California, which requires that individuals
under the age 18 obtain permission from their legal guardian before getting modified (pierced,
tattooed, etc.) in any way.
90
since been covered up) as a “Fuck you I’m being independent” tattoo, the result of his
history of physical abuse as a child and a reminder “not to look up to anybody who is an
adult and to protect myself.” This first tattoo can be interpreted as a violent example of
the type of subjectivation
22
that goes into these technologies of self. In the years that
followed, Josh’s adornments continued to accumulate. Currently he has two 00-gauge
nostril piercings, 7/16” conch piercings, 1/2” cartilage piercings in his upper ears, 1.5”
lobe stretchings, multiple septum and lip piercings, and a subdermal implant within a
small tattooed teardrop below his eye.
23
In terms of tattoos, he has an assortment of
inkwork including pieces on his chest, neck, abdomen, back, head, face, and sleeves.
Instead of going into detail about the story behind each and every tattoo on Josh’s body, I
would rather think about the differences in approach and design that his tattoos embody.
In other words, within tattoo culture, a distinction is often made between what is known
as “flash” and “custom” work. Flash is standardized pre-set designs, usually found on the
walls of tattoo shops or in tattoo books, that customers can choose to be stenciled onto
their skin. In contrast, custom work refers to tattoos that are specifically designed for the
individual, a process that often entails lengthy consultation appointments and a back-and-
22
In the Use of Pleasure, Foucault (1985) refers to various modes of subjectivation, the
dialectical processes through which one becomes both subject and subjectified, living under
prescribed social rules and codes while at the same time asserting one’s own sense of agency
as a desiring subject (28-29).
23
While tattooing and piercing, today, are commonly linked together under the umbrella term of
“body modification,” the two forms of corporeal alteration have quite distinct genealogies in
terms of their introduction and eventual acceptance into U.S society. Such a discussion lies
outside the scope of this chapter. See DeMello (2007).
91
forth discussion between the artist and client in order to come up with a design specific
for the person getting inked. When considering the flash versus custom designs as
aesthetics of the self, it might be useful to think of this distinction in terms of what
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pose as the map versus trace. They write that the tracing is
“an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” whereas
a map “is entirely oriented toward an experimentation with the real” (12). In other words,
the tracing upholds the arboreal structure of society, which casts individuals within
preordained sets of rules and thought, while the map is a space of possibility and agency,
where the individual can craft his or her own direction of movement. Not just an archive,
then, tattoos are mappings of the body, cartographies of skin, a technique or aesthetic that
“is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible
to constant modification….reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (12).

For Josh, body modification is a crucial component to his process of “becoming,” one
that is open to constant (re)negotiation. He considers his body as a work constantly in
progress, a continuous project, not ever finished. For him, he body is a malleable canvas
of reinvention. For example, he states that if he is not satisfied with any of his tattoos, he
plans on completely blacking them out, or undergoing more scarification and rubbing ink
over them. He reflects on his unprescribed process of becoming by saying: “I just don’t
know what I’ll end up looking like…except for old!”
24
When I ask Josh about his most
24
This “becoming old” points to the process of becoming that we are all on, modified or not.
Although in light of various anti-aging technologies—such as plastic surgery, botox, micro-
dermabrasion, etc—even that assertion is debatable.
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painful experience, he describes the scarification on ribs: three lines, 6 inches long, on
each side of his ribcage, acquired in 2000 when he was 20 years old. He states:
That was a lot about me bleeding out a lot of the negativity of my past and my
upbringing, another symbol of me turning 20, me making a personal decision to
not allow the drama of my past and all the pains and negativities that came from
my life where I grew up to affect my future. So that was my little tribute, my little
medallion for making it through.
Scars in this context are not simply an unintended trace of a past injury but a willful self-
infliction for a present reminder of multi-directionality, at once pointing to the past,
present, and future. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, it is an anti-stagnant line of flight
25
that
attempts to maneuver away from a particular normative telos of self-development.
After a childhood of being “given hell” because of his race, not being white enough, not
being Asian enough, Josh enacts a refusal of both those categories and instead focuses on
the smooth spaces.
26
“I don’t really identify as having a race,” he asserts, “I’m a mutt, I’m
a Heinz 57, I’m a hybrid. But it’s never really been an issue for me, I never really think
about it, unless I’m filling out some doctor paperwork, and then I’m baffled by it.” His
25
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain “lines of flight” as movements of possibility that enable
rhizomatic connections, deterritorializations, and multiplicities. In other words, they attempt to
conceptualize a multidirectional (non-)model of irreducible in-betweenness, “a transversal
movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end (25).
26
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss the dialectical tensions between what they term smooth
versus striated spaces, the former being a space of nonprescriptive becoming and the latter
being held captive by the structuralizing logics of hegemonic power. Applying such
distinctions to skin in this context, as a striated space, skin is subject to the regulatory
pronouncements of racialization, morpho-illogical assessments that seek to impose state-
sanctioned racial categories upon different gradations of pigmented skin. And yet, skin is also
a smooth space, where pigments can be willfully inserted by the subjectivized individual in a
non-predetermined, non-prescriptive process of coloration that challenges (but by no means
negates) the singular (as in number, non-multiple) vision of racialization.
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disavowal of race can be seen as a way in which he enacts a mode of individuation that
refuses to be rendered aberrant or abject, qualities that have long been associated with the
queer, the tattooed and the mixed-race body. In other words, Josh’s refusal of race, or
racial identification, is a refusal to accede to what he believes to be “unnatural,” namely
the monstrous labeling of such normativized identificatory markers as race, gender, and
sexuality—those hierarchically-determined, state-sponsored recombinatory processes of
limitation and control. Echoing Anna Tsing’s (2005) critique of the crippling categories
that impose a calcified framework around which to make sense of our ever-changing
material reality (175), Josh is likewise attempting to resist categorical hegemony to think
through what it means to inhabit gaps, in-betweenness, that which falls out of the
discursive imperatives of our pre-existing vocabulary. By flipping the script on what we
think of as normal versus monstrous, Josh insists upon a recognition of what body
modification scholar Victoria Pitts (2003) calls a “politicized aesthetics of deviance,
where overt bodily display is seen as a powerful affront to essentializing norms.” She
goes on the state, “The stylization of the queer body involves not simply the fixing of
homosexual identity onto the body, but rather the creation of a body that is always in the
process of becoming sexual, erotic, and pleasured” (91, my emphasis).
This aesthetics of deviance is another way to think through what Brooks (2006), after
Carla Peterson, calls an “empowering oddness” that can produce “new possibilities of
difference,” a mode of becoming that allows “a means to move more freely and to be
culturally ‘odd,’ to turn the tables on normativity and to employ their own bodies as
94
canvasses of dissent” (6). Thinking about the tattooed body as a kind of canvas of dissent
foregrounds the de-naturalized coloration that is inscribed on the palette of skin, an
attempt to move outside the normative pigmentocratic legibilities of the U.S. nation-state.
The tattooed body, then, creates a type of hypervisibility of skin: “it makes the invisibile
visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and
invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality” (Lippit 2006, 106). This
insistent visuality is a critique of racial discourse. The multiplicitious melanogendered
body of the mixed race tattooed queer is involved in what Peggy Phelan (1993) calls a
“visibility politics,” how “these variations underline the psychic, political, and
philosophical impoverishment of linking the color of the physical body with the ideology
of race. Race-identity involves recognizing something other than skin and physical
inscriptions” (8).
This critique of color becomes central to the performative aspect of identity that will be
explored in the second half of the chapter, where I consider one of Josh’s alter egos, the
drag personality Faux Pas, and the performances she uses to remake the body. Performing
the modified body (in all its guises) not only brings up avenues of possibility but at the
same time underscores and reinscribes the normative in order to attempt an escape from
those limitations. In the next section, I will move from embodied ontologies to
performative epistemologies, to uncover the insights that can be gleaned from the
performance of the smooth and striated body. same day, is becoming less of a realistic
option.
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4.3 Performing the monstrous and the criminal

Figure 4.4: Faux Pas with cheek spear
Faux Pas’ performance of Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” at the “Tres Chic!” fundraising party
on October 7, 2006 in San Francisco highlights the ways in which the coupling of body
modification and drag performance work together to enact an onto-epistemological
critique of social norms. Her performance can be considered what Jose Munoz (1999)
calls an act of disidentification, that which “resist[s] the social matrix of dominant
publicity by exposing the rhetorical/ideological context of state power” (168). Drag,
particularly the kind of drag found at Trannyshack where Faux Pas regularly performs
(while not specifically devoted to queers of color performance) enacts this type of social
critique. As David Hawkins remarks in the documentary Filthy Gorgeous: The
Trannyshack Story: “It’s all about taking our culture, dismantling it, making commentary
on it, and then reconstituting it as a drag show. And it’s an ode to the cleverness and
originality of the drag queens that they will take things that you’ve never seen in a drag
context, and they will do it and do it well, and show you why it fits into that aesthetic.”
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Hawkins implies that Trannyshack drag operates as a decisively politicized aesthetic
project, a project that critiques aesthetic propriety and generic boundedness, and provides
an alternative mode of inhabitation, if only for one night.
27
The cumulative weight of history—historical becoming and historical constraint—bears
down upon Faux Pas’ performance of the song “Criminal,” a performance that makes use
of a body where many forms of “criminality” converge: queerness, mixed raciality, and
markings such as tattoos. Performing on a bed of nails, the long sharp spikes that jut up
from the bed evoke elements of both the sexual and carceral, sites of both the home and
the state, where the regulatory jurisdiction imposes physical and psychic violence upon
the “non-natural” queer raced inked body. By laying on top of these spikes, Faux Pas
symbolically exerts her agency over these multiple forms of imprisonment, but also
exhibits her willing acceptance and accession to subjugation as well as subjecthood,
allowing the body to experience the pleasure of pain in performance. One of the verses of
the song goes like this:
Heaven help me for the way I am / Save me from these evil deeds / Before I get
them done /I know tomorrow brings the consequence at hand / But I keep livin’
this day like the next will never come.
By parodying “evil” and “criminality,” the disidentifying drag queen occupies what
Judith Halberstam (2005) calls queer space and time, or “the inhabitation of worlds
outside heteronormative reproductive and familial space-time” (10). The presentness
alluded to in the song lyrics show a blatant disregard not only for the legal consequences
27
I owe this insight to Judith Halberstam and her graduate seminar, “The Status of the
‘Alternative’ in Contemporary Critical Theory,” Spring 2007, University of Southern
California.
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of the singer’s supposed “evil deeds,” but also towards a futurity that she tries to keep at
harm’s distance away. Yet this queer time also functions in another valence, which is to
say, the uneven temporal plane of corporeal historicity, highlighted by the specific
instances of criminality that Faux Paux embodies in her performance.
Faux Pas lip syncs, “All I need is a good defense / because I’m feeling like a criminal…”
The word “like” here functions not unlike the “like” that Judith Butler discusses in her
analysis of Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”
(Butler 1990, 29-30). Faux Pas’ drag is not only parodying socially constructed
formations that naturalize sex/gender/desire (vis-à-vis Fiona Apple’s post-adolescent
sexual “maturity”), but also the criminalization of these very formations. In other words,
Faux Pas is not only laying bare the “ontological illusions” that posit continuities
between sex, gender, and desire, but is also critiquing the state’s regulation of these
illusory systems and categories. As the “criminality” of the tattooed body helps to make
visible,
28
the power of the state and its juridical enforcements converge heavily upon the
body that is rendered both queer and mixed-race, a body that is at once the site that
challenges heteronormative reproductive values and is also the literal embodiment of
historically criminalized forms of heterosexual reproduction (in other words, the product
of miscegenation).
29
Stated another way, what Faux Pas seems to be saying in her act is
28
For a more detailed discussion regarding tattoos as markers of criminality, see work by
Steward (1990), Caplan (2000), and Demello (2000).
29
For a discussion on how antimiscegenation law represents the “power of legal language to
construct, criminalize, and appropriate the human body itself” (39), see Saks (1988). See also
Martinot (2003). In relation to specifically Asian Americans, see Takaki (1989) and Chan
(1991).
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that no matter how much you try to prohibit our actions or prevent us from existing, we
are always already here among you. Furthermore, the flirtation with “criminality” that is
embodied and performed in monstrous drag challenges onto-epistemological foundations
of the moral and the legal, calling attention to the production of criminality as a necessary
process in the production of bourgeois power.
30

In contrast to Butler’s (1993) analysis in Bodies That Matter, drag here is not solely about
the hyperbolic allegorization of heterosexuality/heteronormativity (235), but takes on
additional forms and meanings. In revisiting her thoughts on drag, Butler (2005) expands
her analysis and writes:
The point to emphasize here is not that drag is subversive of gender norms, but that
we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts
of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be
considered real and true, and which kind will not…This differential effect of
ontological presuppositions on the embodied life of individuals has consequential
effects. And what drag can point out is that (1) this set of ontological
presuppositions is at work, and (2) that it is open to rearticulation. (214)
Recent examples of such rearticulations include work by Munoz (1999) in writing about
Vaginal Cream Davis. He points out, “her drag mimesis is not concerned with the
masquerade of womanliness, but instead with conjuring the nation’s most dangerous
citizens. She is quite literally in ‘terrorist drag’” (108). Drag for Faux Pas, like Davis,
becomes a useful tool for critiquing the nation-state, reinterpreting the performative
disruptions of the “monstrous” or criminal constituencies of race, gender, and sexuality.
By inhabiting an identity that exceeds various mechanisms of the state, Faux Pas
30
Thanks to Judith Halberstam for pointing me towards this Foucauldian reading of Faux Pas’
performance.
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materially and symbolically inscribes herself within competing and contradictory
discourses regarding the legibility and illegibility of the body at “home” in the panoptical
sphere of the U.S. nation-state, in an attempt to “rearticulate life outside these
constraining legibilities.”
31
Faux Pas does this by way of what Agamben (2000) calls
“the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native
(that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state” (19). Hers is a strategic move to
enact a reconsideration of what we take as given, an urge “to abandon decidedly, without
reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the
subjects of the politics…and build our political philosophy anew” (Agamben 2000, 16).
4.4 Making monstrosity work
“Who works and what works, for whom, and to what end?” In her essay “Terror Austerity
Race Gender Excess Theater,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1993) asks this difficult question,
forcing us to consider both the possibilities and limitations of any artistic practice, and in
so doing highlighting the dialectical tensions that inhabit and embody every critical
performance.
32
She continues, “For the project at hand the question turns toward this
particularity, What work do certain kinds of acting—of performance—do, especially
when the venue straddles the chasm of a crisis of the crisis state?” (25). The question asks
us to consider the blurred boundaries that (cease to) exist between dreaming and waking,
31
I owe this insight to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her post-panel discussion of a shortened version
of this chapter at the Crossing Borders Ethnic Studies Conference, University of California,
San Diego, March 5, 2007.
32
Gilmore lists these tensions as existing “between drama and realness, between repetition and
invention, between spectator and actor, between invention and work, between Fordism and
Americanism, between economy and culture” (25).
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imagination and reality, fantasy and fulfillment, fact and fiction. As Robin Kelley (2002)
asserts, “It is not enough to imagine what kind of world we would like; we have to do the
work to make it happen” (187).
So what kind of work does “monstrous drag” do, for whom, and to what end? The body
of Faux Pas, and by extension Josh himself, illustrates, quite literally, the illusory
stabilities of state-sanctioned categories and naturalized causalities that are taken for
granted as being easily visibly read at the level of the corporeal. As Peggy Phelan (1993)
notes, “Identity cannot, then, reside in the name you can say or the body you can see…
Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the
signifier to convey meaning exactly” (13). The potential for new identities also emerges
within the failure of the overall structure of the field of signification, the state apparatus’
failure to fully interpellate the body’s multiplicities. Ideological states apparatuses, as
Chandan Reddy (1998) reminds us, “produce contradictory interpellations, not only
because they might conflict with an adjacent or previous interpellation, but because each
apparatus is itself a material institution. The forms of strata, division, and ‘difference’
found within that material site and required for its maintenance and reproduction are
often the ground for negating the fantasy of equivalence or identity lodged in any hailing”
(358).
The ground for negating the fantasy of equivalence. If queers of color, as Reddy suggests,
illuminate the failures of the state’s ability to hail the impossible ideal of the citizen-
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subject, they do by way of excess. That is to say, “the conflicting, noncorrespondent, and
overlapping constitutive interpellations of race, gender, and sexuality” (367) are always
already inadequate delineations for compartmentalizing what William Haver (1996) calls
the nontranscendent nonreducable materialities of our being. The “field of power” that
Reddy locates within the contradictory relations between the fallacious veracity of the
interpellating apparatus bent on producing a “social reality” and the enactment that
parodies the existence of such a “reality” is the field of fantasy. Stated another way, by
striking at the artificial divide between fantasy and reality and recognizing that what the
state and civil society projects as reality is in actuality fantasy, helps to pave the course
for thinking about how fantasy is, or can be, in fact, our reality. Negating the fantasy of
equivalence, then, is not simply an affirmation of the reality of nonequivalence, but
establishes the grounds for alternate forms of fantasy altogether. “Fantasy is what
establishes the possible in excess of the real,” writes Judith Butler (2004). “Fantasy is
what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise” (216-17).
“The new world of monsters is where humanity has to grasp its future,” writes Hardt and
Negri (2004, 196). Josh and Faux Pas enact what can be considered a “becoming-
futurity,”
33
a type of posthuman
34
performativity, which not only blurs the boundaries
33
I owe this term to Ruth Wilson Gilmore from our personal discussions about this topic.
34
I owe my understanding of “posthuman” to Halberstam and Livingston (1995), in which they
write that the posthuman “participates in re-distributions of difference and identity…The
posthuman does not reduce difference-from-others to difference-from-self, but rather emerges
in the pattern of resonance between the two” (10).
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between what is internal and external, real and unreal,
35
but whose conditions of
possibility lie precisely at the spaces of (structured) failure within and around competing
states apparatuses. The becoming-futurity of the monstrous drag queen enacts a
strategically non-essentialist move from being objects of organized abjection and
abandonment to multiplicitous subjects who refuse,
36
or in Reddy’s terms, subjects who
“produce cultural formations that fail to separate cultural productions from material
circumstances and political representation, producing powerful confusions of culture,
politics, and economic circumstances that engender contradictory subjectivities” (368).
Indeed, such “productive failures” calls into question the notion of “subjectivity” itself—
insofar as it is (over)determined by state power and its interpellating apparatuses—and
asks us to divest, de-essentialize, and deterritorialize the conditions upon which we relate
to our self, each other, and the world. Through these productive failures we find what
doesn not work and try to imagine what can and will work. Imagination, as Kelley (2002)
says, is “our most powerful weapon” (159). This is when fantasy and imagination can
(and) do work. Quoting Gilmore (1993): “Our work is to rearticulate our own connections
in new (and frightening) forward-looking moves in order to describe, promote, organize,
bargain in the political arenas” (30).
35
For a more sustained theoretical meditation on body modifications that are both inscriptive
and exscriptive, see Lippit (2006). For a discussion of performatives that are both introversion
and extroversion, see Sedgwick (2003).
36
Gilmore writes: “But even stand-ins, in times of austerity, might unionize, might move from
being objects of organized abandonment, redlined along with the buildings and neighborhood,
to subjects who refuse—who refuse to bear the weight of late capitalism’s stark utopia, the
abstraction of abandonment, the violence of abstraction” (34).
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Henri Lefebvre (1991) writes: “Any revolutionary ‘project’ today, whether utopian or
realistic, must, if it is it avoid hopeless banality, make the reappropriation of the body, in
association with the reappopriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda”
(167). For Josh and Faux Pas, the monstrous body and the spaces it inhabits are sites of
multiple de-territorializations and recombinations, ever-expanding processes of
becoming, developing “new ways of thinking and being.” Josh shares a similar sentiment
as expressed by Robin Kelley (2002) in his writings on the revolutionary potential of
surrealism. Kelley notes that “any revolution must begin with thought, with how we
imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships,
with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity
rather than rationality” (193). For Josh, revolution entails “people not limiting
themselves, and accepting themselves and their bodies for who they want to be and what
they want to do with their lives.” He goes on:
I’m more speaking to ways of overthrowing old ways of thinking, and in doing
that, and affecting change with each one of us, starting with one person and then
leading to the next and leading to the next…eventually it will start affecting bigger
ways of change. If each one of us woke up loving ourselves and loving our bodies,
and really cherishing our loved ones and our families and being in that mode every
single day, we would not have war, we would not have these things that limit us
and hurt us and hold us back from the world that we possibly could be. [my
emphasis]
Josh and Faux Pas’ inhabitation of the monstrous and the multiple is the inhabitation of
the Deleuzian line of flight, an adventure of possibility (Gilmore 2007, 241) into the
fantastic realm of monstrous futurity. “I also believe it is not too late to act,” Gilmore
writes, “to make work work, through rearticulation of the ‘complex skein of relatedness’:
organic integrations of the earth, technology, desire” (1993, 34-35). The “rearticulation of
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the complex skein of relatedness” is the rearticulation of the complex skin of relatedness,
an imaginative reinscription of our bodies and our world for the purposes of a
revolutionary vision, for living our lives far beyond simply survival.
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Chapter 5: What Color is the Racial?
5.1 Beauty and color
At all times man knows how to apply an intrinsic standard to the object. Thus man
creates also according to the laws of beauty. –Karl Marx
In a recent episode of the reality show Tattoo Wars, a sunglassed and t-shirt clad white
male flashes a smile for the camera and proclaims, “Beautify the world, get colored!” It’s
a striking statement for a number of reasons. One is that it raises questions such as: who
is colored and who is not? Why are certain bodies considered colored while others not? In
what ways are we colored? Of course, the intended meaning from this unidentified white
male is that color is synonymous with tattoo. Underlying this seemingly innocuous and
playful catch phrase “get colored” lies the assumption that people without tattoos are not
colored. Yet aren't all our bodies always already “colored” under the ideological logic of
the US racial state? What this man seems to be indicating is that we have the ability, the
choice, the free will, to modify the bodies that we are born with, that we don’t have to be
limited by the supposed “naturalness” of unadorned skin. Of course, his statements and
the implications that lie therein merely reflects dominant understandings of the skin.
Under such a logic, skin color, as Angela P. Harris (2009) puts it, possesses a “seemingly
natural, unmediated quality” (4). Yet as Marx (1976) reminds us, the so-called “natural”
is a socio-historical concept, complex and contradictory, infused with labor and value―a
perceptual aesthetic (over)determination of value. Likewise, creative labor is involved in
both the production of the beautiful as well as the very idea of beauty itself. “Labour is,
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first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his
actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature,”
writes Marx. “He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body...Through
this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he
simultaneously changes his own nature” (283). Thus, a dual transformation takes place
—“man and nature”—highlighting the relationality and mediated quality of both our
bodies and our environment.
The changing nature of bodies has long been a topic of close scrutiny in feminist theory.
In her influential writings on cyborgian bodies, Donna Haraway (1991) explains how our
bodies are always already constructed, factualized and fictionalized, under various
overlapping ideological economies of embodiment. So to what extent is color something
that we can just “get”? In other words, is it really simply a matter of individual volition?
Sitting on a couch, watching the digital transmission of this well-meaning white male on
the tv screen in front of me inspired a knee-jerk reaction that “of course a white man
would make such a statement!” Such a pronouncement can be easily interpreted as the
oh-so-typical workings of white privilege and the authorative voice it lends. But what if
we were to give this man the benefit of the doubt? What if what he is saying is the result
of a particular consciousness, an informed statement, regarding the way in which the
body is not tethered to the concept/categories of race. In other words, in my immediate
annoyance towards an apparent declaration of white privilege, I myself had reinscribed
the very categories/concepts that I have set out to disrupt! (Oh how effective ideology is!)
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An extensive body of literature exists in the humanities and social sciences that have
attempted to divorce the concept of race from the body.
37
And yet, there’s a certain
indelibility, a stain on our skins that is difficult to remove, regardless of how much we try.
Popular discourse still relies upon a reductive substitutability that shorthands skin color
for race. As Harris notes, “Color is haunted by race both in the substitutability of color
for race in the naturalization process, and also in what it communicates about the human”
(5). The result of such a misguided equation is that both liberals and conservative tend to
agree that to “overcome” racial discrimination is to cast a blind eye, to embrace a naïve
chromophobia and aspire to “color blindness.” But is it a problem of our eyes? Or of
color? Or the relationship between them? Vijay Prashad (2001) explains, “the
conservative theory of the color blind…smuggle[s] in biological ideas of race to
denigrate the creativity of diverse humans” (xi). In other words, such a formulation
operates under the assumption that race exists and that it exists as a material (biological)
fact. So much for social construction!
38
At the same time, according to Prashad, this
“denigrates the creativity of diverse humans.” In other words, the reification of the racial
suspends both the human “procreative” capacity of endless variation (as if reproduction
proceeds in a uniform and predictable way!), as well as the creative capacities of who we
37
Some of the most convincing critiques of the socially fabricated relationship between race and
the body come from scholars working in what is now regarded as Science Studies. For
example, see work by Stephen J. Gould, Gloria Marshall, S. L. Washburn, and Frank
Livingstone. A number of these writings have been collected in an insightful volume by
Harding (1993).
38
In addition, this “color-blind” logic also rests on the assumption of the visual as being outside
of social construction—that social construction is something we do to the so-called “truth” of
the visual, thus the need for blindness.
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are as living, thinking, feeling (sentient) beings. This creative capacity, as Marx notes in
the epigraph, points us towards a quest for beauty.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Or so the saying goes. But according to this
unidentified white male, beauty exists under the skin. Aesthetics is not just visual, it is
corporeal. Thus, the ocularcentricity of vision may not be sufficient to understand the
processes of aesthetics, tattoos, and race. “Beautify the world,” he says. But what is this
process to “beautify”—an active verb that signals a process of change. And as beauty
connotes aesthetics, aesthetics connotes epistemology, epistemology connotes ontology—
our way of knowing and understanding the world, who we are, and our relation to it. As
color is deposited under the skin, its visibility relies upon its ability to permeate the layers
underneath which it sits, a self-permeation that creates the capacity of visual
interpretation and beautification: tattoos, aesthetics, and racial form. These are the
keywords of this chapter. And we take our cue from the blues writings of Clyde Woods
(1998), when he writes, “Attempts to analyze the lyrics separately as literature ultimately
fail because meaning and abstraction in the blues emerges from the simultaneous
interaction between language, music, and movement” (35). Similarly, unlike other
scholarship on tattoos, this dissertation has approached tattoos as a subject that must be
studied as the simultaneous interaction between the body, aesthetic senses, and various
forms of movement within and across spatial scales. This movement started with the skin
(Chapter 1), traversed the trans-Pacific (Chapter 2), traveled across temporalities
(Chapter 3), dragged out the body (Chapter 4) and now ends back here at the skin. We
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can pause here, at the conclusion of this journey, to reflect upon the most intimate of
scales—the scale of the body and the processes of creativity, beauty, and form that
converge in color.
5.2 The racial viscosity of blood and ink
“I don’t think people who aren’t tattooed understand how involved the process can be,”
Michael, one of my interviewees states. He explains his views on the tattoo process as we
sit and chat over dinner at one of his favorite Thai restaurants in the Castro district of San
Francisco. Michael has just endured a four-hour ink session, and he looks both tired and
hungry, anxiously awaiting his entrée to arrive. Michael, a Filipino American tattoo
enthusiast, has been working on a large Japanese dragon on his right calf for the past four
months. We have known each other for over 10 years so there’s a level of familiarity that
permeates the conversation. “It's exhausting, yeah, but not only that, everything about
you feels so raw,” (see Figure 5.1) he says in between mouthfuls of pineapple fried rice.
When I ask him to elaborate on this feeling of rawness, he responds: “Well, not only does
it require a lot of endurance to sit through hours of having a grip of needles penetrating
you over and over again, but there’s this heightened sensitivity to everything around you.
You kinda reach that point where it stops hurting and it just is. Like, you’ve left yourself
open to this…and you can literally see all the little openings in your skin, oozing blood
and ink and all the other stuff the artist smears all over you, vaseline and all that…you
feel all raw and sticky and hyper-sensitive…but at the same time, you feel so…so alive. I
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guess that’s why I keep coming back, it's an addictive feeling!…but y’know, that could
just be the adrenaline talking.”
Figure 5.1: An example of tattooed skin bloody and raw
Ink, blood, vaseline, bactine, latex, needles…the sight, smell, sound, and touch of the
tattoo process—the simultaneous penetration of the multi-sensorial. Laura Marks (2002)
discusses how these types of materials trigger corporeal “memory associations” that stay
with us, auto reflexes that circulate within our collective “connective materiality” —
intersubjective connective tissue that locates us by and through “its particularity, its
strangeness, its precious and inimitable place in the world” (Marks, xii). Michael recalls
such associations when it comes to the healing process. “I prefer getting drilled with the
needle to the healing process. Getting all wrapped up in the bandage … and then the next
morning having to peel it off—how sticky the new tattoo is from all the dried blood,
excess ink, oozing plasma, and vaseline. You have to be really careful not to fuck it up.”
The fluids that make up the tattoo—ink, blood, vaseline, bactine, water—are sticky and
viscous, and altogether necessary for the skin coloring process. (See Figure 5.2.) This
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viscosity creates form. Arun Saldanha (2007) uses the concept of “viscosity” to explain
racial form. According to Saldanha, “race is simultaneously discursive, genetic,
neurochemical, technological, aesthetic, and more” (207). He continues,
It is thus defined not simply by boundaries between self and other but by the lines
of flight of its components: for example, the capacity of phenotype to connect to
music, or the capacity of music to connect to phenotype. What can and does
frequently precipitate from all these connections is viscosity, bodies slowing down,
sticking together, and collectively becoming impenetrable. ‘Slowing down’ means
connections endure, not necessarily that bodies decelerate in Euclidean space …
The way out of viscosity, out of racism and the privilege white bodies enjoy in this
world, is not to abolish race but to multiply it, to use its lines of flight toward a
situation wherein skin color, genitals, AIDS, hunger, obesity, beauty, wealth, and
speed connnect in less predictable ways than they do now. (207)
Saldanha is concerned with assembling a “materialist theory of race” (9)—of bodies,
spaces, movements, relations—in order to consider how appearance matters. For
Saldanha, viscosity becomes a useful theoretical concept to understand the materiality of
racialized bodies and their attractive/repulsive properties. Similarly, viscosity can be a
way to think through the materiality and tactility of tattoo: viscous fluids like blood, ink,
plasma, vaseline, and how they combine and reform in different ways—phenotypical,
biomorphological, racial. They also play a part in the intersubjective relationships
(intimacies) surrounding their usage. Being as becoming by way of the viscous. We are
held together as well as kept apart by this viscosity, fluidities that pass or don't pass
through the semi-permeable membrane known as skin. Skin should be understood not as
a text or envelop or any other metaphor (that lends itself to inaccurate abstractions), but
rather as its own material, its own metaphor. Skin is also the site of convergence of the
“corporeal sensorium” (Castronovo 2007) surrounding the viscous: touch, smell, vision,
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sound—the simultaneous interaction between skin, ink, needles, blood, energy, music,
movement, stillness.
Figure 5.2: An example of a bandage the morning after a tattoo session
Saldanha’s theorization highlights how bodies are contradictory sites, created and
recreated within what Donna Haraway (1991) calls an “apparatus of bodily production,”
constructing material-semiotic actors whose boundaries, or lack thereof, materialize
through social interaction. “Viscosity explains why…white bodies stick and exclude
others. Viscosity is about how an aggregate of bodies holds together, how relatively fast
of slow they are, and how they collectively shape the aggregate…Viscosity is also about
how this holding together is related to the aggregate's capacities to affect, and be affected
by, external bodies” (Saldanha 2007, 50). I depart from Saldanha’s use of the viscous in
two significant ways. While Saldanha views this “stickiness” as the perpetuation of
whiteness (i.e., racial privilege and exclusion), in my work, thinking through the
stickiness of tattoos and race allows us to examine the ways that new social groupings
come into being (not automatically tied to privilege and exclusion, but are certainly
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succeptible to such outcomes). Secondly, despite Saldanha’s insistence on the materiality
of racial formation, he falls back on metaphors of the viscous, not an actual substance but
a metaphoric stickiness between bodies. Unlike the metaphorical stickiness of Saldanha’s
subjects, tattoos actually do involve stickiness—ink, plasma, vaseline, bactine, blood, etc.
—and the interactions between such sticky substances identifies the technologies that go
into the re/creation of the body itself.
Despite these differences, I do agree with Saldanha when he writes, “What the concept of
viscosity does is sense that the flows of people are at once open-ended and gradually
thickened by recurring, allegedly conscious decision making. Both the thickening and the
opening up are functions of the particularly dynamic interactional nature of human
nature” (51). These dynamic interactions have the capacity to create different forms of
social groupings, what Gengenbach (2003) calls “webs of affective ties” formed through
the relations sustained through blood, ink, and the care of the body.
For example, Vikki and Alex, two Vietnamese American sisters living in San Francisco,
bond over their shared love of tattoos and express the importance of having each other
there during the tattoo process. “It’s nice to have someone there to distract you, y’know,
the pain and stuff. A lot of times we go together,” explains Vikki. Alex elaborates, “I
think we have a very distinct process. When I get tattooed, she [Vikki] drives.” They nod
in agreement as we sit at Samovar café in the Hayes Valley District, trading tattoo stories.
“I feel like it takes a lot out of you,” Vikki continues, “Afterwards I just want to sit back
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and relax, cuz you’re kind of spacey and out of it…and it’s nice to have someone take
care of you.” Alex concurs, “See some people don’t get that, but that’s a really important
thing.” While tattooing in the “West” is often coded as a mark of independence, Vikki
and Alex share with me the ways in which it is precisely the opposite that, and instead
requires interdependence, a Foucauldian sense of caring that displays how the body is
both enacted and acted upon. Foucault (1994) writes, “The care of the self is ethical in
itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ethos of freedom is
also a way of caring for others” (287). The process of getting a tattoo requires different
forms of relationships: a body on which the tattoo can materialize, as well as with an
artist to apply the ink. Furthermore, other forms of intimacy can cohere around tattooing,
such as the intimacy of caring: self-care as well as the care of another person. Rather than
independence, then, creation requires interconnection.
Taken together, the tattoo experiences of Michael, Vikki, and Alex are characterized by
issues of intimacy and vulnerability, challenging ways of thinking of the body as bounded
and monadic. Skin is the site whereby the tattooer and the tattooed create what Laura
Marks would call a “haptic relationship.” She writes, “In a haptic relationship our self
rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface…We cannot help but be changed
in the process of interacting” (xvi). The body is modified through this process of haptic
permeability. The marking of skin is also a marking of touch and movement, a process of
visualization that exceeds the visual, or the visuality of tattoo: the excessive visuality of
race.
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All three chose tattoos that avoided the immediate correspondence with their ethnic
background. Michael (Filipino), Vikki and Alex (Vietnamese) chose to adorn their skin
with Japanese aesthetics. When I ask Michael about why he chose Japanese aesthetics
rather than, say, Filipino, he explains, “Well, I do have Filipino tattoos. But I wanted to
get a dragon because I was born in the year of the dragon. All my tattoos don't necessarily
have to be Filipino. I am Filipino but I am also Asian American. I decided on the
Japanese dragon because I am Asian American.” Likewise, both Vikki and Alex explain
how they are drawn to Japanese tattoos regardless of their ethnic background as
Vietnamese. For them, getting Japanese tattoos is not a sign of their being any less
Vietnamese, but that their appearance takes on an additional identity of being Asian. Race
comes into being simultaneously on the skin at the same time at the tattoo itself. The
overlapping categories of ethnicity, race, ink, symbology/motif, gender, affect, and taste
challenge the notion of a singular, unified, bounded subject, but instead allows the
recognition of the body as a contested site of multiple possible embodiments, or as
Dorinne Kondo (1990) has pointed out, “how selves in the plural are constructed
variously in various situations, how these constructions can be complicated and enlivened
by multiplicity and ambiguity, and how they shape, and are shaped by, relations of
power” (43).
A common thread that runs through the experiences of Michael, Vikki, and Alex is that
they all frequent the same tattoo artist, Yutaro Sakai, a San Francisco-based tattoo artist
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who attracts a large Asian American clientele. Those who continue to get inked by him
cite similar reasons: skill, authenticity, and that “he's just a really nice guy.” Ironically,
Yutaro—a Japanese immigrant who himself doesn't identify as Asian American (he is not
a US citizen and doesn't claim an American identity)—becomes a nodal point for the
construction of the Asian American body in ink. Indeed, Yutaro inhabits what Lisa Lowe
(1996) calls the “unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrant” and his role in the
production of the Asian American identity of his clients can be understood within the
“partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” construction of Asian
American culture to which Lowe refers (65). However, just as the category “Asian
American” is typically coded as East Asian in the United States, the go-to aesthetics for
Asian American ink enthusiasts are similarly East Asian, or Japanese, to be precise. My
interviewees state a number of reasons: the beauty, the intricacies (highly developed
design motifs), and as Alex says, “there's a timeless quality to Japanese aesthetics.”
Production of the tattooed body entails the (re)production of race, coming into being by
and through the body. So while race is a construct that is not located on the body, these
examples serve as a way to relocate race on the body. This demand can be seen as less
regressive than as a creative capacity of becoming, a desire for phenotypical imagination,
striving towards what James Scott (1990) calls “the imaginative capacity of subordinate
groups to reverse or negate dominant ideologies” (91). Again, to quote Saldanha:
Understanding how phenotype matters in social formations and interactions can
thus be the first step toward a situation in which phenotype can be appreciated
outside of the entrenched racist configurations now in place. An ontological
approach to racial formations asks how they merge as physical aggregates, how
what Guattari would call the molarity of race comes about, rather than merely how
race is known or represented. (208)
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The phenotypical construction of both race and tattoo elicits an interrogation of how the
creation of the visual entails grappling with tactility and the embodied aesthetics of the
bio-political subject in ways that challenge, re-create, or launch a “counter-creative”
movement that lays bare the insidious “multifarious realities” (Saldanha 2007) of race.
Yet Saldanha also cautions, “Becoming less sticky isn't always liberating” (52). The
formation of the subject proceeds by way of the dialectical forces of creation and
subjection, with no guaranteed results. But the point is that viscosity is a property that
possesses varying degrees of change and flow; viscosity reconfigures and reshapes. So do
relationships formed in its wake. Artists and enthusiasts promiscuously come together
and come apart. Tattoo artist families and loyalties converge and diverge. (In fact, a
number of the relationships that I have studied during my research have since dissolved.
For example, as of this writing, the relationship that I detailed in Chapter Two between
Horitaka and Horiyoshi III has since ended, whereby Horitaka is no longer part of the
Horiyoshi family.) Relationships form, break, reform in different ways. Similarly, Omi
and Winant (1994) remind us that racial categories are constantly in the process of being
created, recreated, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. So, too, then, must our
perceptions, or aesthetic understandings, of the racial be malleable, versatile, modifiable
enough to keep up with these transformations.
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5.3 The hurt and the hum
Skin houses the network of nerve endings that connects us to pain and pleasure,
and it’s the casing that protects us from bacteria and disease. Our sense of touch
resides in its top later, the epidermis, and a second layer, the dermis, holds the ink
and ash that tattooed people have used to decorate themselves for more than 5,000
years. Skin is expressive: it bears our unique pore patterns and fingerprints, and
registers temperature (through chills, hot flashes, and goose bumps) and emotion
(through blushing and blanching). —Margot Mifflin
In Chapter one, I opened the dissertation contemplating the second most asked question
addressed to a tattooed person: “What does it mean?” Here I return to that popular
discourse to address the number one most asked question: “Does it hurt?” The question
itself displays an immediate recognition that a tattoo involves a relationship not simply
between the enthusiast and the artist, but a relationship to one's own body as well. (What
is the “it” in this equation? The body? The tattoo? The process? All of the above?) The
assumption or expectation is that the acquisition of the tattoo involves pain. Or, at the
very least, a tactility, between needle and flesh, that culminates in the coloring of skin
vis-a-vis a process which can be characterized as the “wondrous reciprocity of passivity
and activity” (Taussig 2009, 48). The interviewees in my research all agree, getting
tattooed involves this reciprocity of activity and passivity—that tattooing requires an
extreme focus, not to move (so as not to disturb the artist) and to endure the incessant
rupture of skin. So when asked the inevitable question, “Does it hurt?,” many answer:
“Hell yeah, of course it hurts!” To endure the hurt is a rite of passage, a way of proving
that you've earned your tattoo.
39
39
Endurance is a large part of the tattooing process: time, movement (lack thereof), control
(reflexes, urges to squirm or scratch, etc), “pain,” and monetary compensation. Even as a
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Others take a more meta approach and counter the question with another question: What
is pain? Fakir Musafar, in an interview on the TV series Eye of the Beholder, maintains
that pain is something that we don’t want, so can we really call something ‘painful’ if it’s
something we do want. According to his logic, if we choose the modification, and we
embrace the process it entails, including what some would call pain, is that really pain? In
Chapter Four, Joshua David Reno refers to the pain as a “bleeding out of negativity.” His
is a unique yet not exceptional story. As many scholars of tattooing in the “Western”
world have pointed out, many people use tattoos to reconfigure the definition of pain and
reappropriate the body as an expression of creativity rather than condemnation. The
vehicle for this creative capacity is the skin. For example, Mifflin (1997) describes her
encounters with tattoo enthusiast Laura Lee: “Until her death in the early ’90s, Laura Lee
was the only well-known black woman collector to travel the convention circuit...Lee
wore an ever-increasing collection of skulls; she said she ultimately wanted to have a
skull for every victim of the black holocaust, in which untold numbers of Africans died
on slave journeys from Africa to America” (132). Mifflin (1997), Pitts (2003), and
Langellier (2001) write about women, tattoos, and the aftermath of breast cancer. For one
particular breast cancer survivor, “tattoos allowed her to rebuild her physical and sexual
self-image on her own terms―not those of the American Cancer Society, which, she
says, all but demands that post-mastectomy patients wear prostheses in the name of
researcher, I, too, must endure long hours of sitting and watching the process take place.
Interviewing subjects during the process often proves difficult during a session not only due to
the level of discomfort that the tattooed person feels during the process, but also because the
loud sound of the electric tattoo machine gets in the way of hearing/recording.
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looking ‘normal.’ The tattoo also gave her the satisfaction of attacking the site of her
illness and spitting in the face of death” (Mifflin 1997, 154). Michael Atkinson (2003)
notes how tattoos have been used by gay men to express a previously repressed identity:
“A vital part of the tattooing process for these enthusiasts is the ritual cleansing of a
previously oppressed body, mind, and soul” (196).
These examples challenge normative assumptions regarding the question of pain and its
relationship to physical and psychic violence. Another way of thinking about this is,
what hurts more: the pain that results from the penetration of skin, or the pain that results
from the violence of racism, sexism, homophobia? I illustrate this point by way of a brief
anecdote of the autoethnographic variety. I have a pretty friendly relationship with my
friend's eight year old son, let’s call him Kevin. Kevin is intrigued by all my tattoos. He
likes to look at them, talk about them, and often asks me excited questions about how,
when, and why I got them and when I will get more. He certainly possesses the makings
of a tattoo enthusiast in training! But one day, as we (my friend, Kevin, and I) are all
having lunch at a restaurant in West Los Angeles, my friend asks me about my dating life.
I tell her about a guy that I went out with on a couple dates, but speak in a level of
generality mindful that my audience includes an eight-year old. But the more I talk about
my dates, I begin to see a dark frown creeping across Kevin’s face. When he realizes that
the ‘he’ pronoun that peppers my speech is a clear indication of my sexual orientation, he
sulks away from the table and reseats himself at a table across the room. At first I’m
confused, but then I realize that he is reacting to the realization that I’m gay. When my
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friend goes over to him and asks Kevin what is wrong, he says that he no longer wants to
be my friend. I was shocked, hurt, confused. It had been a long time since I last felt the
sting of such overt homophobia from someone in my inner circle of friends. But the
question that such a episode leaves me with is this: What is more painful—a tattoo or
homophobia? Maybe these two things are incomparable, but judging by the amount of
people who get tattooed based on their experiences with psychic and emotional pain, the
connections are very real. After all, these false dichotomies (body/mind) are both
intimately tied to what bodies do and who they do it with; physical, phenotypical,
psychological, or what Marcel Mauss (1973) refers to as the “physio-psycho-sociological
assemblages” (85), that are never neat, always complex, often contradictory.
Indeed, many of the subjects in my project attempt to use tattoos as a form of re-
articulation (in the Stuart Hall sense of the word “articulation”: to both express and
connect). One of these re-articulations is the strategy of re-racialization, embodying race
when we know that race has no biological basis in the body. Such aims force us to
attempt to “work through the contradictions” of how race both is and is not embodied.
Tribal tattooing among the Filipinos is a good example of this—“flipping of the scripts”
of primitivity and the savage/backward aesthetic, while at the same time reifying those
same categories and cultures. The “use of pleasure” (Foucault 1985) is frought with
questions of the biopolitical, which must take seriously the role that aesthetics plays in
how we construct our bodies in relation to both oneself, each other, and the society we
live in. This “beautification” process—and I use that term loosely, to refer not just to the
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coloring of skin but also to the “beauty” of overcoming adversity and hostility
40
)—is one
that calls into question normative frameworks that act on the body, as discussed
throughout this dissertation (ideological formations, structures of feeling). Furthermore,
at the base level of zero-degree aisthesis (Haver 1996), it reveals the “body of this
tattoo”—marked by historicity and sociality, nothing short of its always already natural
unnaturalness. In other words, the normativity of the “natural” demands an interrogation
of the relationships that constitute the “natural” in and of itself—one of which is the
question of racial form (particularly in the form of bodies/skin). I wonder if tattoos hurt
more for the person looking at them than the person who “wears” it. By this I mean it
forces an aesthetic recognition and potential reappraisal that moves somewhere beyond
the spectator’s normative framework. The observer perceives the experience of tattoos
through ideas of pain and epidermal sensation, which is not necessarily corroborative of
the “wearer’s” experience of getting the tattoo, nor necessarily where ‘pain’ is located in
relation to the tattoo. To provide an example: one person’s hurt is another person’s hum.
On her facebook page, my friend updates her status to say, “missing the humm [sic] of
the tattoo machine.” If the casual onlooker portrays the process of tattoo as pain, my
friend portrays it as song. Judging by the large number of “like” comments appended to
her post, she is not alone. In Chapter Two, I discussed how the sound of the needle
creates audio inscriptions on the body. Indeed, the tactile sonority to which my friend’s
facebook message alludes is a type of music that requires flesh to carry its tune--
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Gengenbach (2003) explains in regards to tattoo beautification techniques among women in
Southern Mozambique: “Beauty is, of course, historically specific, constituted by ideals
shared among people with a sense of common social location and cultural identity” (116-7).
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corporeal music that doesn’t privilege a single sensual perception but acknowledges the
interlocking vibrations that penetrate the ear, sight, and skin. The hum of the tattoo
reverberates through the aesthetics of the flesh.
The “hum” of the needle is a familiar melody to all those who undergo tattoo. In a study
of Japanese tattooing, one recipient of a Horiyoshi backpiece commented, “My body
loudly echoed the staccatoed rhythm of the tattoo needle” (Saito 2005). Indeed, the
needle’s polyvocality (tattoos are administered using multiple needles held together in a
bundle) creates unmistakable vibrations on the surface of the skin, and this conjoining of
needle and flesh creates a sonority, a sonic materiality which Fred Moten (2003) says
transcends “the ineluctably reductive systematicity of the opposition of phenomenon and
object” (148). By refusing such a reductive systematicity, the tattoo hum and the tattoo
hurt complicates our understanding of the visual as being both auditory and tactile, as
well as both spatial and temporal. Entangled. These entanglements create rhythm, create
meaning. Cedric Robinson (1983) reminds us, “Increments of time contoured to abstract
measure rarely match the rhythms of human action.” The tattoo enthusiasts in my study
are convinced that tattooing allows for the creation of new rhythms, heightened senses
and senses of the self, towards a complex subjectivity rather than a singular reducibility.
5.4 Towards a “strong” visuality
Disarticulation and rearticulation of the wisdom of the body with that of its echo in
our conscious awareness seems especially prone to a color-dependent process that
involves playing off the natural with the artificial… – Michael Taussig
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Is “race” a color? Is it visible? Omi and Winant (1994) define race as a “concept which
signified and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of
bodies.” They continue, “Although the concept of race invokes biologically based human
characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’), selection of these particular human features for
the purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical
process.” Such categorization, according to Omi and Winant, are “at best imprecise, at
worst completely arbitrary” (55). Despite these fallacies, uncertainties, and
contradictions, Omi and Winant are careful not to merely dismiss the fundamental role of
race in structuring and representing the social world. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2009) writes
that “at the symbolic level, the meanings of skin color and race are inextricably linked,
even when explicit reference to race is absent.” She continues, “Skin color, as well as
other phenotypic characteristics…matter because they signify race” (6-7). But how has
this “matter” clouded the way in which we approach our understanding of the visual? Or
to state another way, how has our visual capacities of recognition and understanding been
overcoded by ideologies of the racial—that we know what we know because we can see
what we (think we) know?
David Theo Goldberg (1993) asserts, “Observing racial differences between persons can
only be successful if significant racial criteria have been presupposed, and so observation
cannot be the grounds of the differentiation. And it is altogether incredible that the
supposed significance of the differences lies simply in the observable ‘givens’ of nature”
(86). Yet, despite such warnings, these “incredible” strategies of observation persist.
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Race, evidently, is held firmly in sway to the power of the visual. Under such a spurious
logic, color acts as the defacto shorthand for the racial: white, black, yellow, red, brown.
41

But as the previous sections have tried to make clear, color is not simply reducible to
visual perception. Michael Taussig (2009) explains the tactility of color, “the way the
color dissolves the visual modality so as to become more creaturely and close,” so close
as to absorb the onlooker (19). Color dissolves visual modality, quite literally in the case
of tattoo, as color is achieved through the tactile. One way of thinking about this is that
color dissolves the distinction between the visual and other sense perceptions. The
construction of a colored body (which includes, but is not limited to, a racialized body)
involves the dissolution, or at least the challenge to, visual modes of perception. This is
not to reify the body itself, for as the process of tattoo makes plain, the body possesses a
phenotypical malleability of pigmentation. How we experience coloration involves the
aesthetic faculties which Castronovo refers to as the “corporeal sensorium”—an insistent
aesthetic materiality foundational to ontology and epistemology.
Recent scholarship on the senses have explored the role of synesthesia in how
interlocking cognitive faculties make “sense” of the world. David Howe (2005) explains:
“Synesthesia involves short-circuiting the conventional five sense model and experience
of perception. It establishes cross-linkages between the modalities at a subconscious
41
This is not to dismiss the importance that metaphors of color have played in the realm of
political struggles toward liberatory goals. As scholars in Ethnic Studies point out, color is not
simply a reductive signifier for racialized bodies but refers to social-systematic stratification
and exploitation, as well as the strategies of intervention and oppositional mobilization, that
such metaphors both enable and foreclose. For example, see work by Espiritu (1992), Pulido
(2006).
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level, and so opens up a whole new terrain―the terrain of the inter-sensory” (292). While
I agree that the short-circuiting of the conventional five sense model and experience of
perception is necessary, my research on tattooing has shown how the cross-linking of the
conventional “senses” occur at the subdermal rather than the subconscious.
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Furthermore, the examples from this chapter provide evidence about how sensual
knowledge is not simply a relation of synaesthsia—which posits a discrete separation
between the senses that need to be circuited together—but rather that the sensual is
mutually constitutive of one another: the visual is the tactile is the sonic is the olfactory.
In this way, rather than perpetuating categorical discreteness, I propose, for my purposes,
a more useful theoretical model of “aesthetic entanglements.”
Nicholas Thomas (1991) examines what he calls “entangled objects,” how material
objects circulate within various encounters and relations of exchange. The previous
chapters examined how bodies themselves are “entangled objects,” or perhaps more
accurately “entagled subjects” that circulate geographically at different scalar levels
(local, regional, national, global, etc.) and different ideological economies within the
Pacific World.
43
These entangled subjects navigate through connections vis-a-vis labor,
aesthetics, technology, and citizenship to highlight the role that tattoos play in our
42
One may also go so far as say that the links between the materiality of the senses and the
psychological are experienced through what Didier Anzieu (1989) calls the “skin ego.”
43
Pacific World scholarship, as it has come to be recently called, explores how the United States
is part of a larger global Pacific region, of which the US is but one actor, located along the
eastern edge of Pacific. In situating this region in such a way, the term avoids the reinscription
of such problematic terms as “Pacific Rim” and “Pacific Basin,” which inaccurately posits a
false binary between and within the overlapping and mutually constitutive geographies of the
Pacific region.
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understanding of racial formation on the eastern edge of the Pacific World, within the
context of what Arif Dirlik (1992) succinctly describes as, “a competing set of ideational
constructs that project upon a certain location on the globe the imperatives of interest,
power, or vision of these historically produced relationships” (56). Yet, bodies do not
only circulate geographically. They are, at the same time, composed of internal
circulations, circulatory systems of blood, lymph, nerves.
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These aesthetic entanglements
constitute Costronovo's “corporeal sensorium.” Corporeal aesthetic entanglements that
are at times abstract, amorphous, improvisational, unpredictable.
What I have attempted to illustrate in this chapter about the process of tattooing is how
tattoos serve as a model for understanding these aesthetic entanglements (touch, sound,
smell, vision) and the construction of what Marx (1972) called a “sensuous knowledge of
our times,” whereby the senses can be liberated (or recalibrated) from the oppressive
imperatives of dominant racial ideologies. As this chapter has drawn inspiration from
Michael Taussig’s What Color is the Sacred?, I again return to his insights for guidance,
as he highlights “forms of sensateness, of bodily knowing, that exist below the radar of
consciousness and are all the more powerful for so being” (15). Yet here I depart from
Taussig in the sense that the power of tattoo is precisely its sensateness at the surface
rather than the depth, and its very ability to burrow beneath the skin, into our
consciousness, to challenge prevailing “wisdom” regarding how we understand the body
44
A recent anthology of creative work in the tattoo art field, entitled Blood Work, is instructive in
this regard. By coupling the terms blood and work, the title itself recognizes the inter- and
intra- corporeal circulations and processes of labor that create the tattoo.
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and its myriad relations of color and pigmentation. How do tattoos allow us to question
form, value, perception, interpretation?
I often return to a particular passage in Taussig’s work that seems to burst with subversive
potential. In an anecdote about the psychedelic poster art of 1960s Haight Ashbury
district of San Francisco, he remarks:
Color has been snatched back from commerce in one of the few genuinely
countercultural movements of the twentieth century. What is more, this is done not
by replacing forms with streams of color, but by giving you a sense of the
metamorphosis whereby―thanks to color―form undoes itself. (23, italics in
original)
Applying such insights to the scale of the body, how do colors of the body enable an
undoing of form? In other words, do the possibilities of color hold enough subversive
potential to unravel hegemonic notions of race and its dialectical double, racism, as an
“undoable” social form? Perhaps, at the very least, it can allow for a re-evaluation, maybe
even a re-imagining of form and its potential for re-invention or re-formation.
This “undoing” is intimately tied to sensual knowledge, to how the body intakes and
interprets―renders legible and valuable―forms and its social meanings. The visibility of
certain types and certain forms of color, when applied to the body, creates hierarchies of
form. The dominant discourse around race in the United States is predicated on a visual
“common sense,” that race is easily “read” off the body. In other words, the simple,
overly deterministic equation that race = skin color, whereby the equal sign means vision,
and the so-called cure for racism is “color blindness” (rather than, say, problematizing the
129
very equation in the first place). Indeed, blindness seems to be a particular handy tool of
American hegemony in its pursuit of so-called social and political equality. Let us not
forgot the iconic symbol of the blind-folded lady justice (of Enlightenment era Greco-
Roman import) holding the scales of justice, indicating that within the legal system
“justice is blind.” But poet Langston Hughes does not mince words when he writes:
That Justice is a blind goddess / Is a thing to which we black are wise / Her
bandage hides two festering sores / That once perhaps were eyes.
The tactic of an-aesthesia, in a culture that David Howes (2005) calls “hyperaesthesia”
may, in the end, be a regressive rather than progressive approach. Instead of striving for
blindness, the opposite should be case: a heightened visibility, a critical visuality―or
what I hasten to call, “strong visuality.”
Philosopher of science Sandra Harding soundly criticizes Enlightenment theories of
neutrality and objectivity and instead advocates for what she terms “strong objectivity,”
an epistemological intervention that recognizes the socio-historical nature of knowledge
and its production within arenas of power and dominance. In her critique of positivist
science, Harding (1991) writes,
Value-free objectivity requires also a faulty theory of the ideal agent—the subject
—of science, knowledge, and history. It requires a notion of the self as a fortress
that must be defended against the polluting influences from its social surroundings.
The self whose mind would perfectly reflect the world must create and constantly
police the borders of a gulf, a no-man's-land, between himself as the subject and
the object of his research, knowledge, or action. (158)
Taking my cue from Harding's intellectual acumen regarding the role of a “strong”
reflexivity in the field of knowledge production, “strong visuality” pushes for a
130
transformed logic of the senses that breaks from the assumptions regarding the autonomy
of vision (both as an objective generator of perception as well as a stand-alone cognitive
faculty). “A strong notion of objectivity,” argues Harding, “requires a commitment to
acknowledge the historical character of every belief or set of beliefs” (156). Likewise, we
need a “strong” notion of visuality that acknowledges the entanglements of the senses
and the historical character of sensual perception. The cognition of the visual is not value-
free and ahistorical, but moves within all the complex and contradictory relations of
social life. Vision has a history, one that has involved power, subordination, exclusion,
and reproduction. As Lindon Barrett (1999) notes, African Americans have been “barred
from the privileged affirmation afforded by vision, the primary means of conceptualizing
systems that define the world and one’s place in it” (217).
Visuality, like objectivity, “contains progressive as well as regressive tendencies. In each
case, it is important to develop the progressive and to block the regressive ones” (Harding
1991, 161). Strong visuality not only recognizes that vision is always already mediated
by and through particular culturally-specific ideological systems (hence warping the field
of vision in the first place) but wrests free the visual from its ocularcentrism. In doing so,
strong visuality requires a commitment to acknowledge that the visual is always already
not simply the visual, but a non-reducible materiality/corporeality of aesthetic
entanglements. The multisensorial entanglements of tattoo question the normative and the
natural, an undoing of form and the entryway to a “recalibration of the senses” (Moten
2003). The “strong reflexivity” involved in such aesthetic reappraisals should be aware of
131
the ways that mutually constitutive stimulations function within a corporeal system of
cognition as well as ideological infrastructures masquerading as social norms. Aesthetics,
thus, plays a pivotal role in how we can disrupt the rhythms of subjection, the circulation
of hegemonic logics that naturalize systems of oppression, and the interrogation of truth
through the strong reflexivity of the senses—imaginative and interdependent, entangled
and polysensual.
5.5 Forms of wounding
Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes
his own purpose in those materials. –Karl Marx
It’s easy to forget that tattooing has only become a socially acceptable form of
modification within the past 50 years. At least here in the United States, tattooing has
historically been relegated to a psychiatric disorder usually lumped in with other forms of
self-mutilation (Favazza and Favazza 1987). Indeed, as scholars have often noted, a
generation gap exists between today’s tattoo enthusiasts and their disapproving parents
(Atkinson 2003; Sanders 1989). A number of the enthusiasts I have interviewed likewise
note the strained acceptance that have greeted their tattoos from their parents and other
family members. For example, Alex described how her mother once called her tattoo the
“open wound.” Alex explained how she went to visit her mother after a tattoo session.
Her mother became alarmed by the large bandage affixed to Alex’s arm, with the plasma
seeping through the covering. “It was scary for her,” Alex remembers. “She didn't
132
understand the healing process and she saw it as a gaping hole.” As mentioned previously
regarding the affective bonds of care and concern, Alex’s mother offered to help her clean
and wash the tattoo, as she wanted to make sure that it healed properly and avoided the
possibility of infection.
This idea of the open wound is an evocative concept that, in closing, I would like to
explore further. The term “wound” has been used metaphorically by a number of scholars
in the field of identitarian/oppositional studies.
45
One striking usage has been in the work
of Wendy Brown.
In a chapter entitled “Wounded Attachments,” Wendy Brown (1995) wrestles with a
central problematic that underlies what has been termed “identity politics”: “what kind of
political recognition can identity-based claims seek―what kind can they be counted on to
want―that will not resubordinate a subject itself historically subjugated through identity,
through categories such as race or gender that emerged and circulated as terms of power
to enact subordination?” (55) Brown skillfully disentangles the ways in which the
production of political identities as (historically state-sanctioned) political categories
reinscribe a dialectic of inclusion/exclusion within the framework of liberal humanism,
dependent upon a specifically white, middle-class, masculinist ideal (65). This willful
“resubjugation” has the effect of naturalizing capitalism and may necessitate a limited
identification through class, specifically abjuring a critique of class power and class
45
For example, see Matsuda, et al.’s Words that Wound, Wendy Brown's States of Injury,
Sniderman and Piazza's The Scar of Race.
133
norms precisely insofar as these identities are established vis-à-vis a bourgeois norm of
social acceptance, legal protection, and relative material comfort (60).
Brown invokes the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment in order to critique what she
feels is identity politics’ attachment to its “woundedness” or victimization―ressentiment
at once signifying the affect of rage and righteousness, interlocutor of said hurt, and the
site of revenge to displace the hurt (68). For Brown, “identity structured by
ressentiment…becomes invested in its own subjection” wherein such politics reverses
rather than subverts the “blaming structure” (70). Brown calls for a new structure of
desire, one that is historically informed yet not closed or bounded by what she feels is the
sedimentation and overdetermination of such presuppositional identity categories. This
new structure of desire would entail a desire of futurity that moves away from the pathos
of ressentiment (74-75).
Brown warns us against the reification of the very categories that have been used as tools
of oppression, so that instead of race serving as a means to an end, it becomes an end in
itself. But as Alex’s mother suggested regarding the “open wound” of tattoo, the care of
the self is mandatory, as such a technique of the body ultimately serves the goal of
healing. In light of Brown's insightful warning, perhaps we should understand our
wounds in direct (yet not necessarily causal) relationship to the process of healing. This is
not to say that we should think of healing in some type of Deepak Chopra new age
mystical way of “healing.” But rather, if taking the metaphor of the “wound” is fruitful in
134
thinking about how identities have been created, perhaps the inevitable process of
“healing” likewise presents a useful metaphor for what is to be done.
Central to such a conceptualization is thinking specifically through the skin. Metaphors
of the body and bodily functions circulate within the humanities (blindness, wounding,
scarring, inscribing) which run the risk of theorizing the body into abstraction. By
bringing it back to the literal level, we can understand skin on its own terms—not as an
envelop or a canvas or an inscribed surface or a boundary. It is all of those things; it’s
what makes skin skin. And because skin is the external membrane that keeps our innards
inside, we subject it to a lot of use and abuse on a daily basis. It gets scratched, scraped,
stretched, cut, roughed up. It bleeds and bruises, breathes and oozes. But it also heals.
If we are attached to our wounds, as Brown suggests, is it not also possible that we can be
re-attached by our healing? The body regenerates, in ways that are often unforeseen and
unpredictable. The healing process produces changes, and with it, different possibilities.
In other words, the “healing” of the skin allows the possibility of the body coming into
being differently. As Alex’s mother recognized, the wound has the capacity to heal into
something beautiful; that is tattoo. Here we can return to that white male who opened this
chapter: “Beautify the world, get colored.” Healing does produce beauty. And this beauty
can be something that doesn't necessarily conform to the normative. After an injury, the
body persists and endures and heals itself in some way. (And yes, it needs help, as my
interview subjects have noted.) And healing doesn’t always proceed in ways that are the
135
most desirable or the most beneficial. There are no guarantees. (Even in tattooing, you
run the risk of not healing “properly”: infection, scabbing, pre-mature stretching, lack of
ink absorption that require additional touch-ups, etc. See Figure 3.3 of healing skin.) The
point is that different possibilities exist. And as Raymond Williams (1989) insists, we
must embrace these “practices of possibility.” In so doing, we can transform Brown’s
pathos into excitement: the adrenaline of creation.
Figure 5.3: An example of tattooed skin peeling during healing process
But let me make myself clear so as to avoid any accusations of naive idealism or
unwarranted optimism. I am not saying, tattoo yourself and change the world. If only it
were that easy!! Such a formulation simply operates within—and yes, reinscribes—a
power-evasive hegemonic individualism that does little, if anything, to change the very
real and very persistent structures of oppression that exist in society. But those structures
themselves are not immovable and unchangeable. They are creative too. (Just ask Wendy
Brown!) What I am attempting to articulate is a bit of a reversal. Whereas theorists have
used the body to metaphorize social processes, I am taking the bodily processes to
136
metaphorize society. Or more specifically, thinking through the materiality of the body
(e.g., healing) to understand the creative capacity that exists within different scales of
engagement. For as Terence Turner (1993) points out, “categories will be combined in
culturally idiosyncratic ways to constitute the symbolic medium of bodily adornment,
resulting in synthetic patterns that reveal much about the basic notions of value, social
action, and personhood or selfhood of the culture in question” (36). How do we
reconfigure these notions of value, social action, personhood/selfhood in different
institutional arrangements so as to be in the service of social justice rather than social
subjugation? How do we subvert the entrenched normativities of regressive forms of
social reproduction? As Foucault (1988) insightfully maintained, “I don’t feel that it is
necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become
someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
Perhaps such a commitment for change raises more questions than it does answers.
Perhaps such is the work of cultural critique. But what the study of tattoo enables is a
consideration of the role that possibility and creativity play in structuring the political, as
much as it is formed by and through those very same constraints. Examining tattoos as
pigments of imagination asks us to consider how to embody the world differently. The
“counter-creativity” (Taussig 2009) of the corporeal directs us towards “an ingrained and
indestructible yet also changing embodiment of the possibilities of common life”
(Williams 1989, 322). “Thanks to color—form undoes itself” (Taussig 2009, 23). Within
the very capacities of the form itself, lies the kernel of its unraveling. Can color undo
137
racial form? To return to Harris, “Skin color…carries fantasies about personal identity
and family unity as well as the confirmation, or disruption, of racial order” (5). Can color
catalyze the disruption of order and the undoing of form?
Skin can be defiant.
46
Defiant to the natural, to the normative, to reification, to the
undialectical. Prashad (2001) writes, “defiant skins come under the sign of the
polycultural…a ferocious engagement with the political world of culture, a painful
embrace of the skin and all its contradictions” (xi-xii). Pain is part of the process of
regeneration, as is the discomfort of healing. Engaging and embracing the contradictory
possibilities are what imbues it with its power. Nicholas Thomas (2005) writes, “To look
at tattooing now―to look at tatau/tattooing now―is like looking through a kaleidoscopic
device. When you turn the tube, every element of the world changes, to fall into
place―or not―in a new way” (226). The dialectics of color and form, how we look at
ourselves and each other, how we envision the future, can only be accomplished through
a “strong” kaleidoscopic visuality that recognizes the possibility that the world can,
indeed, be quite beautiful.
46
Skin as a site of defiance against colonial subjugation has been well documented in regions of
the Pacific and Africa. See work by Ellis (2008), Thomas (2005), and Te Awekotuku (2008).
138
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Asset Metadata

Creator Honma, Todd Sano Urbano (author)

Core Title Cartographies of skin: Asian American adornment and the aesthetics of race

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2011-05

Publication Date 02/04/2011

Defense Date 01/10/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian‐American,California,OAI-PMH Harvest,race,tattoos

Place Name California (states)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kondo, Dorinne (committee chair), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee member), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email todd.honma@usc.edu,toddhonma@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3643

Unique identifier UC1211051

Identifier etd-Honma-4278 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-430503 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3643 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Honma-4278.pdf

Dmrecord 430503

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Honma, Todd Sano Urbano

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu