Opinion piece in The Age by Helen Razer. This is the original article which was plagiarised by VCAA for the exam with relevant omissions. The exam version was re-written in the style of a blog and credited to one 'Helen Day', it was bowdlerized with supposedly trendy language, some images were added in and some poster comments. I have made no attempt to replicate this especially since I feel that the version of this article as presented in the exam was really badly written.
Tats lose lustre in long march to fashion foible
Once a sign of deviance and criminality, they're now more Chadstone.
Everyone has tattoos these days. I live near Chadstone shopping centre and every time I visit, I see enough ink on eastern suburban housewives to out-do the collection in Risdon Prison.
Since newsreaders, sitcom stars and Chadstone shoppers began to draw roses, skulls and Latin phrases on their flesh, the power of ink has diminished. The deviant nature of the tattoo has faded like, well, a tattoo.
It was not always so.
From the nativity of our culture, tattoos almost always meant trouble. First the Greeks and then the Romans inked the unconsenting backs of prisoners and slaves. The practice continued in Europe throughout the Middle Ages to mark the deviant and the incarcerated.
The indelible cruelty of the penal tattoo can still be seen living in the flesh of those who survived the death camps of Word War II. There is little that suggests the horror of this genocide more than these numbered tattoos. The proprietary mark of Auschwitz reminds us of the horror of the human body as an effect of the state.
For millennia, and with few exceptions, ink on the body signified ownership and brutality. This external mark was an indication of control; a sign that its bearer had a value that hovered somewhere between chattel and machine.
When something is imposed without our consent, we humans tend to develop a strong sense of satire. From at least the 18th century, those who had been marked by the state as "deviant" began to create their own tattoos.
Australian convicts were known to make a mockery of the king by etching the words, "Property of Mother England" into the flesh on their backs. By these means, their floggers were reminded that they were vandalising the property of the crown.
Just as homosexuals appropriate the language of their tormenters, and just as many Auschwitz prisoners elected to live with the proof of their survival, so it went with "criminal" tattoos. Many consigned to the scrap-heap were drawn to tattoos. These marks, now consensually acquired, lampooned the arrogance of a state that presumed to own the bodies on which they were drawn.
These were the traditions of defiance that saw a tattoo artist set up shop in every Australian shopping centre in the 1990s. And it was in one of these new body modification boutiques that I, and many other young women, dared to "defile" our femininity. Back then, a handful of us angry young things had symbols of our gender affixed to our own bodies. Our theory went that these marks were lampooning the arrogance of a state that presumed etcetera, etcetera.
Of course, ink for women quickly morphed from rebellion into a distant cousin. Tattoos became sexy and adorned the limbs of Sarah Palin's daughters. Personally, I find this profoundly annoying. Here I am stuck not with a real memory of my feminist youth but an indelible kinship to Bristol.
The fact is, body modification has become little more than a laughable logo. The tattoo has been commodified and now performs, more or less, as it originally did; it is fashion's proprietary mark.
It's difficult, of course, to imagine a time when a tattoo marked anyone, man or woman, as an eager freak. For a brief moment, however, I did feel Carnivale unfolding on my skin. And now, I look at my Angry Woman symbol and I see an ornament as ordinary as any other cosmetic quirk.
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