Tattoos as Modern Dandyism

Content note: Mind the links, some of them involve people engaged in potentially unsettling bodily practices.

Over the past year, I have been getting increasingly tattooed, and have also been thinking about a framework for how I understand this way of engaging with my body. People have discussed their own understandings of the practice of becoming tattooed and being a tattooed person through a few lenses that hold some measure of resonance with me, but I don’t think fully encompass my understanding of my experiences. The chief lenses people have applied to themselves involve feeling ownership of or being more at home in one’s own body; affirmation of sexual/gender identity; as decoration or artwork; or as ritual activity. All of these strike me as partially true, yet none feel like they completely satisfies as an explanation. I want to offer an alternate image that I think other people will also find appealing, namely, that tattoos (and body modifications more broadly, although I note that I do not have comparable experience with these) are a form of modern dandyism.

What is Dandyism?

Historically, dandyism has been chiefly associated with extravagant dressing, but behind this is a broader ethos of life as aesthetic self-cultivation, the presentation of the self as performance, and moving away from an ideal of authenticity to a studied and interesting artificiality: “my life is my art.” The groups that are the most obvious (and are most often taken as) the descendants of dandyism today include Pitti Uomo menswear guys, Sappeurs, and guys who dress like regency aristocrats on insta or TikTok. Seen more broadly, a lot of aesthetic subcultures (like Goths) could fall under this umbrella, both qua aesthetic subculture and also in terms of the substantive normative commitments they involve (life as art, the aesthetics of excess and idiosyncrasy).

So Why Tattooing? From Fashion to the Body:

In “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Bartky makes the argument that the disciplining of the female body and its shape has moved from clothes that exaggerate (and even produce) certain forms, to the body as such. She argues that this is the grounds by which we can understand the contemporary cultural mania for dieting, exercise, and cosmetic surgery. As far as mainstream aesthetic practices go, I see this as a trend that has applied increasingly to people across genders since the 80s. The body has in this way become the site not only of (aesthetic) optimization to beauty norms, but also the framework through which we understand and make ourselves legible as certain kinds of people amongst our fellow human beings: those that are attractive, professional, desirable, exemplars of their gender, race, and class. Thus they are less about individual expression and more about role-signaling and fitting into particular sets of norms.

In general, Bartky is right to point to this as a site of cultural discipline, but I think she makes the mistake of many second wave feminists in treating these practices as unified and essentially conformist in terms of the projects that they are in service of. Bartky does nod at the practice of wearing makeup as potentially a site of art, but points out that most of women’s skill in this domain is put towards presenting the self in a narrow “professional” mould. It is also the case that Bartky emphasizes the asymmetry between men’s and women’s experiences with the discipline of the body in a way that is no longer true (this stems from her view that femininity is itself not usually an expressive feature of people’s self-understandings, but the lower ranked term in a gendered hierarchy, suggesting that such practices – at least, as they currently exist – cannot be emancipatory. This is a controversial claim which I don't have the space to examine here. Suffice it to say, "beauty practices are often limiting and also increasingly focused on the body").

By analogy, I want to make the argument that much like mainstream aesthetics has moved from shaping the body through bustles and undergarments to regimes of diet, exercise, and cosmetic surgery, so too for the shift from outré fashion to body modification. I argue that tattoos and body modifications represent something distinct from just this pivot, insofar as these kinds of bodily transformations are typically in service to not just different specific aesthetic tastes, but rather an entirely different kind of project or relationship to the body. When we look at mainstream approaches to the body, there are a few main components. First, it involves a very instrumental approach to the body (despite discourses of “doing it for me! To feel good!”). The body is chiefly a tool or instrument to be optimized, useful for engaging in capitalist production and consumption, as well as sending socially sanctioned signals: that you are productive, efficient, attractive in a rule-abiding way.

The body is not wholly reducible to a tool for signaling certain things to others under this logic: individuals are seen as having duties of health towards their bodies, but this can again be subsumed under the logic of optimization. It offers very little in terms of the embodied self being a site of personal expression, pleasure, or experimentation. There is little space for creatively engaging with the life projects attached to (or potentially attached to) these bodies. Second, this way of representing the body and a person’s relationship to it also typically reflects very normative, basic ways of thinking about the aesthetics of the body. It commits to very narrow and also highly gendered body standards, again, not questioning (or even leaving open the possibility of questioning/other relationships towards) these standards. This also, I think, includes a very flat idea of aesthetic experience, reducing it to things that can be immediately responded to as “pretty” or “attractive,” and leaving out the moment of transformative experience whereby a person can come to see unusual appearances as attractive, or beautiful, or striking on their own terms.

Embodied Art Projects v. the Body as Canvas:

What we see with tattooing and body modification cultures, on the other hand, is the treatment of the body itself as art and as a site for more creative transformations; this is distinct from just treating the skin as a canvas for art (which has been criticized in various corners), because it also implies a broader notion of what counts as art in this scenario. What is art in tattooing isn’t just the product, but also the process, the idea of the self as a thing that is becoming and transforming in unexpected ways, rather than running endlessly on the optimization treadmill, going nowhere fast and never quite succeeding to defeat the onrush of time, or reaching a satisfactory point where — you’re fit! you’re hot! you can relax now!

As a set of practices, I want to argue tattooing involves opening up life projects that are embodied in a particular way (or in a range of particular ways), have distinctly aesthetic components, but that exist outside the default framework of optimization. It makes very little sense to look at getting tattoos through optimizing because some of the questions don’t fit. We can’t assume convergence on the point that irezumi is better than woodcut style, or that one or the other placement ought always to be preferred to produce the ideally "attractive" tattooed body. Rather, the goal involves the studied cultivation of individual idiosyncrasy. Maybe you get your tattoos because you enjoy a certain kind of artwork and want to embody that; or because you are inscribing your personal narrative onto your skin; or because you want to transform your relationship to your body through an unusual or painful experience; or because you want to show your commitment to your own aesthetic principles and live like that in the world.

I think this also, significantly, signals a shift from (IMO an often frustrating language of) resistance to norms, to their wholesale transformation. People often flag resistance as “not doing” — not wearing makeup, leaving things “as-is” — but this doesn’t read necessarily as a deliberate search for an alternative (I borrow this from Joseph T.F. Roberts’ very interesting and productive review of Intact: A Defense of the Unmodified Body by Clare Chambers). Resisting norms is still in necessary conversation with or reaction to the norms; while we can’t entirely escape a social value system of this sort, going off and doing something else that is illegible from within that framework does more to reduce the coerciveness of a norm.

In my own case, getting tattoos made living in my body feel much more open-ended and interesting because it was not simply a matter of situating myself in relation to pre-existing standards (being as generically attractive qua “woman” as possible and passively accepting that I would be judged accordingly); rather it was about questioning those standards, and coming to exist as a particular kind of person of my own choice as part of a conversation between how I see myself and how others perceive me.

It is also the case that people can be changed by getting tattoos in a way that goes beyond just appearances. It involves transformative experience and also re-negotiating how you engage with the body, for example how you relate to experiences of pain—not just as a thing to be avoided, or the risk/anticipation of potentially looking unusual in public. “I have become the sort of person who—“

Why not Just Ritual/ What's Wrong With “Modern Primitivism”?

I’ve made the argument that there is an element of self-construction, deliberate choosing to visibly become a person of one’s own choice, and a commitment to frivolity and excess and idiosyncratic projects of the self that differentiates tattooing from “the body as canvas” approach. This leaves open the question, why is what I’m proposing different from a framework that sees tattooing/body modification as the purview of “modern primitives” or those seeking rituals in a society short on belonging (I have seen this latter argument coming chiefly from conservatives who argue that this is why we need God; I think this version of the argument in particular is deeply silly). Before explaining why I don’t see tattooing through this lens, it’s also worth noting that so-called “modern primitivism” is a creature (and often a highly racist one) constructed by a modern sensibility — basically the edgier cousin of the “RETVRN” guy who just thinks we should retvrn to something weirder, more exotic. But outside of this critique, I think that it has to do with another thing: tattooing is not just art, but the shared ethos of life (and the body as a significant aspect of that life) as art. This also suggests why tattooing in its present form is a distinctly modern phenomenon (which people looking at tattooing from the outside as neo-paganism typically miss), namely, that it transforms aspects that might be read as or function as ritual/religion into distinctly aesthetic commitments, and moreover, often highly idiosyncratic and individual aesthetic commitments, although these still operate within the broader umbrella of a subculture. My view, which I will write more about elsewhere is that our habits of thought and language today are such that most things either become aesthetic, or are experienced and interpreted through the lens of aesthetics.

Author's note: I wrote the majority of this before watching Crimes of the Future, but if ever there was a film about unusual bodily transformations as art that really resonated with my self-perception, Crimes is it (I have some critiques of it as a film, but in terms of its core ideas, I'm very on board).