Becoming a Tattoo Apprentice: Doing Flesh and Blood Sociology

• In Event: 3255 - Section on the Sociology of Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 1. Emotion, Affect, and Bodily Practice

Abstract

I apply Wacquant’s (2015) “flesh and blood sociology” to explain key facets of my experience becoming a tattoo apprentice in Oakland, California. His program, echoing feminist scholarship which came before, approaches agents as sentient, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated, while it motivates researchers to enact what they hope to understand. I suggest a flesh and blood approach provides new insight into tattooing, much scholarship surrounding which concerns what tattoos mean for those who get them. A flesh and blood account may generatively align scholarship on tattoos with the work of those teaching us about the lives of people by doing their best to become them, such as fashion models (Mears 2011) and boxers (Wacquant 2004). I suggest this approach is not for everyone while arguing that it is especially helpful demystify naturalized forms of artist talent in the production of tattooing and perhaps other aesthetic goods. As Pitts-Taylor (2014) suggests, it helps articulate “how minded bodies and worlds fit together” and may bring a fascinating, refreshing, and theoretically robust program for other ethnographic researchers studying worlds such as tattooing.

Author

• Dustin Mabry, University of California, Davis