Los cuerpos utópicos. Etnografía feminista del tatuaje en el contexto español: identidad, arte y resistencia

Abstract

From 1975 onwards, after 36 years of dictatorship, Spanish society faced a freedom never before explored. Subcultures, youth cultures and counterculture took on new impulses, decades behind other European countries. The reality of women also began to change, and the feminist movement reassembled after decades of clandestinity and difficulties. In this context, tattooing represented a novel bodily practice. The main objective of this doctoral thesis focuses on analysing, from the anthropology of the body and feminism, the experiences of women in the world of tattooing, both on an intimate, social and professional level. To this end, participant observation, in-depth interviews - with some of the pioneers of tattooing and piercing, tattoo artists and heavily tattooed women - and an autoethnographic process were carried out. This research has ethnographed, in person and virtually, the realities of women in the tattoo culture in the Spanish context, helping to reconstruct their history and experiences. The results of this doctoral thesis show that the women and queer people participating in this research, with their embodied experiences, succeed in overturning the myth that our being responds to binary labels. The bodily practice of tattooing allows the construction, through individual utopian actions, of collective bodily horizons based on autonomy and creativity.a Although the perception of heavily tattooed bodies is strongly influenced by gender, age and ethnicity, the results of this research highlight the resistances that emerge in women linked to the world of tattooing. Our narratives and corporealities escape aesthetic and gender normativity, and allow us to generate strategies to confront the sexist dynamics that characterise some sectors of the tattoo industry. Tattooing thus becomes a subversive artistic medium that allows us to re-appropriate our bodies, especially in a socio-political context strongly marked by an anti-feminist and repressive political past.