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Arts & Entertainment

Local Pages: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo

This Women's History Month, take a journey through time with two books that follow the histories of tattooed women.

Although she herself has no tattoos, Nyack-based author Margot Mifflin has a definite tattoo obsession. It all began in 1997 when she first published Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, which chronicles the history of tattooed women and women tattooists going back to the 1880s. This fall, Mifflin will release a new edition of Bodies of Subversion with expanded text and new photos.

Her work on Bodies of Subversion, led Mifflin to her next tattoo-focused work, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman. The Blue Tattoo tells the amazing history of Olive Oatman, who as a child was kidnapped and enslaved by the Yavapai Indians in 1851, and then sold to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.

During her life, Oatman became a legend and after her death her story has been retold in fiction, artworks, film and television. Most recently a fictionalized version of her character was written in A&E's drama, Hell on Wheels.

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Both The Blue Tattoo and Bodies of Subversion provide unique and intriguing reads that are perfect for Women’s History Month.

Mifflin, who is scheduled to discuss The Blue Tattoo at the Nyack Library on this Friday March 23, at 6:30, gave us a preview of that upcoming discussion, and let us in on what we can expect to see in her 3rd edition of Bodies of Subversion this fall.

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Patch: Over the years, Olive Oatman’s story has been re-told across different mediums. What is it about her story that is so compelling? 

MM: People are always interested in stories of adventure in alien places. She was traded to Mohave Indians who adopted and raised her as their own, which included tattooing her on her chin, which made her equally alien in white culture when she was ransomed back at 19. This was before tattooing even for men had really taken hold commercially in the U.S., and it was 30 years before the tattooed first circus women.

When her story was first told in newspapers in the 1850s and in a biography in the 1860s, it fascinated newly literate middle class readers because it detailed a kind of wilderness journey that was forbidden to women.

The novelty of her story continues to fascinate, as does the tragedy: she lost her white family in the initial attack, and she lost her Mohave family, with whom she had bonded, when she was ransomed back against her will by the U.S. army. She had to rebuild her life over and over again.

Patch: Did Oatman’s tattoo define her?  

MM: It did, but the definition depended on who was looking. For the Mohave, it denoted her adopted ethnicity and put her on their ancestral continuum, ensuring that she would be identified in the afterlife by her Mohave forbears. To her Anglo contemporaries it marked her as the damaged victim of vile Indians. And to anyone looking today, it illustrates the inherent poly-ethnicity on which our country is founded. Like most of us, she’s a hybrid American, only her dual ethnicity is written on her face.

Patch:  On your homepage, you quote the latest Harris Poll results that “tattooed women now outnumber tattooed men.” Why have tattoos become such a cultural phenomenon particularly among women?

MM: Women are plagued with body issues, and they’ve accelerated since the 1980s, with the rise of cosmetic surgery, eating disorders, cutting, breast implants, the debate over abortion and fetal rights-you name it. The artist Barbara Kruger nailed it when she said “Your body is a battleground.”

I think the woman who walks around feeling comfortable and happy in her own body is in the vast minority in our country, and the project of fulfilling whatever ideal a woman aspires to can be very consuming.

Tattooing is a way women assert control over their own bodies to get customized results that express their individuality on their own terms.

Patch: Are tattoos art?

MM: Absolutely. They’re technically difficult because you have to use this unwieldy machine to draw on a permeable, irregular canvas, where you’re faced with the same challenges a painter or draughtsman is: shading, outlining, mixing colors, using highlights, getting proportions right. A good artist has to both make the design original and adapt it to the taste of the customer. And then after you’ve spent hours or weeks or months conceiving and executing this thing that will last a lifetime, it gets up and walks away.

One reason tattooing rarely enters the discourse of contemporary art is that the actual work can’t be sold or shown for any extended period.

Patch: Can you provide us with a “sneak peek” into your upcoming re-release of Bodies of Subversion

MM: The book will be out in October (Powerhouse Books).  It will be redesigned, updated and expanded, with a chapter on the new millennium and about 60 new photos. It includes information on international women artists, new applications like coverups for women coming out of gangs, prisons, and situations of domestic abuse with degrading tattoos, the impact of reality shows on tattooing, characters like a heavily tattooed pastor and a Jew who’s covered with holocaust imagery, and a section on tattooed women in literature. You can see the work of one of my favorite new artists in the book on my blog at margotmifflin.com.

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