FERREIRA - 2014 - Becoming A Heavily Tattooed Young Body - From A Bodily Experience To A Body Project

427839
8X11427839FerreiraYouth & Society

© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:

YAS46310.1177/004411
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Article
Youth & Society
Becoming a Heavily 2014, Vol. 46(3) 303–337

© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
Tattooed Young Body: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0044118X11427839
From a Bodily Experience yas.sagepub.com
to a Body Project
Vitor Sérgio Ferreira1
Abstract
Why some young people start to tattoo their bodies? And why some of them
keep going on with this practice, until having all body tattooed? What doing so
means to them? These are some of the questions that underlie a qualitative
research project carried out in Portugal on heavily tattooed young people.
In this article, the author discusses their embodied trajectory from the first
experiences to their involvement in a body project, and explains the meanings
involved in this extreme corporeality.The analysis takes into consideration the
structural dynamics that define how young people live their transitions and
their identity construction nowadays to contextualize what appears as indi-
vidual experiences and projects without reifying the individual as a privileged
site of knowledge. Based on in-deph comprehensive interviews, the author
demonstrates that the engagement of young people in this permanent body
modification project represents an embodied struggle for the maintenance
of a desired subjectivity. In an increasingly liquid and uncertain society, some
young people ink larges extensions of their bodies searching for social recog-
nition as different, authentic, and autonomous individuals and trying to main-
tain their core identity during transitional turning points.
1
Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL), Portugal
Corresponding Author:
Vitor Sérgio Ferreira, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Av. Professor Aníbal de
Bettencourt, n.º 9, 1600—189 Lisbon, Portugal.
Email: vitor.ferreira@ics.ul.pt
304 Youth & Society 46(3)
Keywords
tattoos, body project, identity, biography, transitions to adulthood
Introduction
The body has become a material resource increasingly invested in contempo-

rary culture, evident in the growing of services, techniques, and technologies
called for its modification and/or maintenance. The value of the physical
capital (Shilling, 1991) is particularly high among the younger generations
(Ferreira, 2009). They increasingly communicate through their bodies,
socially expressing the sense of who they are, or who they want to be, through
investments on the appearance, movements, and senses of the body. The
young people of the present times are part of a cultural world where the sense
of self is not separated from the feeling of embodiment. On the opposite, the
self is revealed through the body. The body is a medium of expression, of
self-experience and of social recognition. A medium that can and should be
malleable, to someone become somebody.
Among many body investments recently disposable, some authors have
documented the popularity of tattooing and body piercing practices in the
last two decades (Atkinson, 2003; DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001; Pitts, 2003;
Tiggemann & Golder 2006; Turner, 1999; Vail, 1999). As practices included
in an expanding body design industry—an industry that offers an increas-
ingly complex and sophisticated variety of commodities, techniques, tech-
nologies, and services focusing on the modification and maintenance of the
human body as a whole or in its most insignificant fragments–, tattoos and
body piercing have been increasingly globalized and commodified across
the occidental world (Bengtsson, Ostberg & Kjeldgaard, 2005; Kosut,
2006b).
Yet, certain kind of tattooing and body piercing are far from being socially
accepted as common practices of body modification, even among new gen-
erations. Not only genital piercings or facial tattoos are still conceived as
nonmainstream, nonnormative, deviant, or extreme forms of body modifica-
tion practices, among others as branding, burning or cutting the skin (Goode
& Vail 2008; Klesse, 1999; Myers, 1992). Also the heavily tattooed and
pierced bodies’ remains socially perceived as bizarre and anomalous, as more
extreme and unusual—namely, when they are evaluated in relation to that
kind of corporeal modification procedures that serves to adapt the bodies to
the institutionalized and celebrated image of “young body”—niveal, smooth,
healthy, and discreet.
Ferreira 305
As a matter of fact, the recent renaissance of ancestral practices of exten-

sively ink and pierce the body (Fleming, 2000; Rubin, 1988) has led to the
revival of some old moral stereotypes and social panics on their users, namely,
via an exoticized and sensationalist public mediatization of these body modifi-
cation practices (Pitts, 1999). Frequently media accounts interpret these prac-
tices keeping their anthropological and historical connotation with “marginal”
and “uncivilized” individuals, as well as with “barbarism,” “mutilation,” and
“psychiatric” or “deviant” disorders.
Historically taken more as mental patients rather than social agents, the
collectors of tattoo and body piercing have had more attention and interest
from psychology or psychiatry than from sociology. Sociology just started to
pay attention to tattoo and body piercing users when their practices begun to
integrate the consumer culture and its body design industry (Craik, 1994;
Demello, 1995; Featherstone, 1999), being chosen by a larger (quantitatively
and qualitatively) social spectrum of clientele than before. In this context, it
has being the main task of sociology to deconstruct the pathological, indi-
vidual, and subcultural images of tattooed and body-pierced people, taking
into account the process of commodification of body marks and its collective
sociosymbolic consequences on a macro level.
Following that perspective, the aim of this article is the sociological com-
prehension of the embodied subjectivities embedded in and constituted by
skin-extensive body marking practices among young people. Yet done on a
basis of a microscale and qualitative study, the article puts in relation the
construction of these young bodies with social conditions and cultural dynam-
ics that crosses the contemporary world of young people, considering their
transitions to adulthood and processes of identity construction.
Historical and Theoretical Background

When tattoos were imported by the West from exotic and distant colonized
territories, they gradually became used by some of the lowest social class
fringes (Caplan, 2000). In the second half of the 19th century, the presence of
extensively tattooed brown or white-skinned individuals was regular at circus
freak shows and traveling fairs, alongside with dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins,
bearded women and other “monsters” and/or “primitive” curiosities (Bogdan,
1994; Oettermann, 2000). In the beginning of the 20th century, tattoos became
widespread in neighborhoods of dubious reputation, among social figures
associated with vagrancy and criminality: sailors, dockers, prostitutes, ex-
convicts, laborers, gang members, and other type of scoundrel (DeMello,
1993; Fisher, 2002; Le Breton, 2002; Mifflin, 1997; Peixoto, 1990).
At a later stage, these resources were included in the “uniforms” of

some youth subcultures that emerged throughout the second half of the
20th century, as symbols of resistance against “mainstream society” and its
forms of domination and homogenization of the “young body”
(Camphausen, 1997; DeMello, 2000; Govenar, 1988, 2000; Le Breton,
2002; Phillips, 2001; Sanders, 1989; Steward, 1990). At the same time,
since the earlier that the law and the medicine fields worked hard to clas-
sify and to institutionalize collectors of tattoos and other body marks as
social deviants and psychological patients, in need for criminal (e.g.,
Lombroso, 1895) and medical care (e.g., Lacassagne, 1881). Even today,
when these practices are much more visible and widespread, there are
legal and medical discourses that keep trying to pathologize them as poten-
tial indicator of deviance, delinquency, personality troubles, or self-harm
or addictive behavior (Favazza, 1987/1996; Fried, 1983; Hewitt, 1997;
Koch et. al., 2009; Kosut, 2006a; Putnins, 2002, Winchel & Stanley, 1991).
Locating body marks outside the traditional marginal and subcultural
fringes, some sociologist have enthusiastically argued (Mendes de Almeida,
2000; Sweetman, 1999; Turner, 1999) that these resources have turned into
fashionable and beautification accessories included in body design industry,
and depleted of their traditional subcultural and/or anthropological meanings.
Body marks were transformed into nothing more than sign-commodities of
contemporary consumerism, hyper-cool accessories conform to current trend
fashions, ironic and playful clichés borrowed from geographically and histori-
cally distant cultures.
It is not my intention to contradict this fact. This indeed has happened.
Nevertheless, it is just a partial vision on the phenomenon, that do not take into
consideration the complexity and plurality of ways of consuming body marks
in the contemporary world. Although tattoo and body piercing had become
trendier among new publics—namely, among young females (Atkinson, 2002;
Hardin, 1999; Maccormack, 2006; Mifflin, 1997; Pitts, 1998; Riley & Cahill,
2005; Sanders, 1991; Wroblewsky, 1992) and middle class young people (see
Benson, 2000; Blanchard, 1991; DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001; Mendes de
Almeida, 2000; Sweetman, 1999)—this just has happening in its shorter skin
version. There are ways of consuming tattoos and body piercings that are
beyond the more mundane, acceptable and (socially and physically) safe but-
terfly ankle tattoo or eye brown piercing.
To have or plan to have a heavily tattooed body is still taken as an
“extreme” decision, only carried out by an ultra-minority social universe of
young people. As some research has pointed out, to have large portions of
skin inked keeps evoking a social world of “madness,” “perversion,”
Ferreira 307
“deviation,” and “marginality” (Ferreira, 2003, 2008). The extensive use of

tattoos and body piercings is still socially perceived as an abuse of the body,
as an unnecessary excess that places its practitioners under social suspicion.
It is a social history rooted on deviation and pathology that feeds the distrust
and fear often felt toward heavily tattooed and pierced bodies; that socially
incriminates and discredits its young wearers; and that frames most of the
social situations in which they are daily protagonists.
That is why those who after having experimented, keep tattooing and
perforating their body, representing a statistically atypical and very marginal
case: considering the results of a survey in 2002, less than 0.5% of the
Portuguese young people between 15 and 29 years old made more than one
tattoo or one piercing (Ferreira, 2003). As my ethnographic fieldwork led me
know, this core of individuals is different from the young people who, in
greater numbers, limit themselves to tattooing a small mark in a relatively
discreet area of the body, or placing one or two piercings in places already
usual for perforation. The reasons given, the meanings invested in, and the
social backgrounds of the users of those same resources, but in different
quantities, are considerably different by ones and others.
As I will further demonstrate, who does tattoos and body piercing in
great skin extension does not make it only as a fashionable and meaningless
statement. In spite being symbolically ambiguous and arbitrary, tattoos
nowadays are not always necessarily “playful” and “ironic,” “decorative”
and “cool” in its content (Turner, 1999, pp. 41-42). Although being today a
“free-floating” sign-system (Sweetman, 1999, p. 65), body marks continue
to “signify”, that is, to be a practice invested of a high symbolic density and
of a high capacity for social commitment. The permanent nature of the skin
inscription, the physical pain and social sanctions that involves to have
them, as well as all the planning engaged in the decision-making process of
becoming heavily tattooed, are characteristics that hardly make one take the
process of collecting body marks as a simple trend that implies nothing but
to pick up a new product in the “supermarket of style.”
The recidivism of the process of being tattooed is neither a question of
pathology, nor like to “eat potato chips” as it was metaphorically stated by
Vail (1999). To understand the process of becoming heavily tattooed and body
pierced among contemporary youth, this article will focus on the bodily tra-
jectories followed by some young adults engaged in this kind of extreme body
modification practices since their adolescence, as well as on the subjective
dispositions embodied on those trajectories. I understand by subjectivity the
symbolic forms of meaning, such as beliefs, images, and values that give
shape to how people conceive themselves and cope with the word they live
and the body they inhabit.
How do young people involved in this kind of extreme body modification
practices experience and understand the course of their voluntarily form of
embodiment? Via ethnographic field work and comprehensive interviews, I
have followed the ongoing process through which a set of young people
constructed their heavily tattooed and pierced body and, simultaneously,
their sense of selfhood in the contemporary world. By knowing the subjec-
tive dispositions that guide the social action of this core of young people who
choose to defy the institutional bodily comfort zones, I pretend to understand
their radical carnal engagement on tattoos and body piercing, and the place
of the body in their relation with social world.
Method
The fieldwork of this research was carried out in Lisbon, capital of Portugal.
The testimonials presented in this article comes from individual in-depth
comprehensive interviews—a methodological approach developed by Jean-
Claude Kaufmann (1996)—with heavily tattooed and body pierced young
men and women. I soon realized the biographical richness of the life courses
of these young people, as longstanding consumers of tattoos and body pierc-
ing since their adolescence. Their biographic trajectories are exemplary of
the way these bodies go much further beyond the mere corporal manifesta-
tion of a certain “irreverence” traditionally attributed to the youth phase of
the life course and connected with more mainstream ways of using tattoos
and piercings.
Sampling Strategy
As a comprehensive approach demands, the selection of interviewees was
neither random nor opportunistic, merely as a result of the conveniences and
facilities of the researcher in accessing the participants of the research. As a
matter of fact, opposite to certain research trends on “niche” or underground
social worlds, I depart to the fieldwork as an outsider (Merton, 1972), as I did
not have any previous social connection or participation in the body modifica-
tion scene or other subcultural world. Actually, most of the researchers that
lately have been working about this phenomenon also have their skin marked.
This situation of insider research comes along with the tradition of “subcul-
tural studies,” where frequently the researchers used to have some participa-
tion within the youth scenes they are studying (Hodkinson, 2005).
Ferreira 309
To overtake the eventual disadvantages of my condition as outsider, I was

visited and stayed in two tattoo and body piercing studios for more than 3
years. There, I had the opportunity not only to observe the social and physi-
cal process of how to become tattooed and/or pierced, but also to talk infor-
mally with many young customers and body modification professionals.
Among these informal conversations, a purposive corpus of 15 individuals
was selected for individual in-depth comprehensive interviews. As the epis-
temological point of view of this methodological approach is not to produce
large empirical generalizations and demonstrations but deep conceptual
propositions and interpretations, the preference in terms of interviewees was
given in choosing diversity of profiles, with narratives carefully collected
and treated in depth.
Considering the small size of the sample, which could be felt as a meth-
odological disadvantage, I purposely preferred not to use the “snowball
method” to find my interviewees, to avoid any effect of social homogeneity
due to the fact of people meet each other. A strategic and accurate sample of
interviewees was constructed, not with the intention of its statistical repre-
sentation but its sociological relevance for the research. The selection of the
interviewees was submitted to explicit intentions conceptually driven and
ethnographically relevant.
First, it was considered the exemplarity of the interviewees in terms of the
object of study (Ruquoy, 1995/1997, p. 103). The most important criteria for
the selection of the interviewees was being young people with the skin exten-
sively marked, which means, with at least more than one third of the body
tattooed, and planning to ink the skin yet virgin. Starting from that common
criteria, the sample of interviewees was diversified in terms of classic sociode-
mographic conditions such as gender (9 men and 6 women), academic qualifi-
cations (6 graduated or being at university, 3 with secondary school and 6 with
elementary school) or social origin (5 high social status, 5 middle social status
and 5 low social status). Concerning age breakdown, the interviewees were
mostly “young adults,” with ages between 20 and 34 years. One third of them
are still studying, other two thirds already have a job (one as tattooist, two as
body piercer), but yet not married or being a parent, situations that go along
with the extending of the youth condition among South European countries as
Portugal (Ferreira & Nunes, 2010).
Another strategic variable evinced during the ethnographic fieldwork,
and that I also took into consideration for the study, was the diversity of the
interviewees related to youth subcultures. Even if tattooed young people
largely exceed subcultural worlds nowadays, I could realize through my
ethnographic fieldwork that more tattooed young people are still connected
with these social clusters where underground music and spectacular visuals
are elected as main affinity references, with great powers of aggregation and
sharing (Ferreira, 2009). Taking this into account both as empirical question
and criteria, individuals who, during their trajectory, participated or are still
members of groups like rock’a’billies, heavy metal, black metal, punks,
skinheads, gothic, hardcore, straight edge and techno, were interviewed.
By the end, the sample considered young people who lived in extremely
unequal social conditions, with various social backgrounds and pathways:
from the young factory worker with a short school trajectory, also son or
daughter of a factory worker and residing on the periphery of Lisbon to the
young university student, son or daughter of the intellectual bourgeoisie and
highly educated, residing in privileged neighborhoods of Lisbon. During
their adolescence, all of them began living and constructing their identity in
proximity of some “alternative” music scenes, whose participants share the
taste for the stylization of bodily appearance, identity, and life under the aegis
of originality, excess, and extravagance.
Data Collection
Regarding data collection, intensity was chosen rather than extensity,
which means that rather than the luxury of numerous accounts to amplify
the homogeneity of the group of respondents, less observable units were
preferred to obtain longer and denser narratives (Harper, 1992). Data were
collected through in-depth, face-to-face comprehensive interviews. The
duration of the interviews was between 4 (the shorter one) and 8 hours (the
longer one), and some of the longer interviews were made in more than one
session. All the interviews were conducted by the researcher, a male in his
middle 30s, without any exterior sign of belonging to some kind of youth
(sub)culture.
To announce these characteristics is important because they are not neu-
tral within the interviewing interaction. Furthermore, the comprehensive
process of making questions, as Kaufmann (1996) point out, does not pre-
sume the interviewer to have a neutral and impersonal role within the inter-
viewing interaction but to fully assume a personal engagement that
stimulate equivalent commitment from the interviewee within the inter-
view situation. The discursive chain of the interviewee must be both fol-
lowed and conducted by the interviewer, which demands from this one a
permanent concentration on the come-and-go of answers and questions, an
attitude of attentive listening followed by an attitude of active questioning,
open and respectful toward the narrative chain of interviewee.
Ferreira 311
That implies to assume the interviewing guide as a methodological tool

required and useful, but not necessary standard, directive, and untouchable,
made once and for all in the beginning of the research. The comprehensive
interview supposes a certain degree of formalization within the interviewing
process but always in articulation with a know-how that has to be enough
flexible, plastic, and adaptable to be applied to each situation of interviewing,
regarding the person interviewed, his or her biography, conversation flow,
language competence, and social background.
Therefore, even if there was a guide previously prepared with the primarily
and most interesting topics for the research, the interviews’ situation took a
flexible outline (Bloor & Wood, 2006), always adapted, in its form and con-
tent, to the interviewee narrative flow and discursive skills. The interviews
took an informal and conversational arrangement, partly shaped by the inter-
viewer’s preexisting topic guide and by concerns that emerged from the inter-
view situation. In this kind of approach, a good question is not the one that we
have planned ahead of time, but that one found in time, demanded by the last
answer of the interviewee. And very easily those new questions can make
sense in the context of the next interview without any regrets of not being
asked on the previous interviews.
The interview protocol was designed to understand symbolic, social, and
biographical dynamics attached to the process of body modification through
tattooing and body piercing. The topics previously prepared for the interview
were to describe the context of first body mark (age, what, where, why, with
whom, how was it); to describe the trajectory of the other body marks; to
describe the future plans for the body, its limits and limitations; to identify
connections between body-marking process, life course, self-identity and life
style changes of the interviewee; to identify social impacts of body marks
among daily life worlds of the interviewees (school, work, family, friends
and other daily life sociabilities). Data on the respondents’ family, school,
and professional background was also collected.
Data Analysis
The interviews were all audio-recorded and entirely transcribed verbatim,
which is the first act of interpretation of the data. Like the actor as to make
a work of interpretation when one transforms a written text into oral dis-
course, also the transformation of oral discourse into a written text implies a
work of interpretation, all about punctuation, silences, emotions, voice into-
nations, and so on. After the transcriptions, the discourses were subjected to
protocols of qualitative content analysis (Maroy, 1995/1997, p. 117), which
involves a meticulous, continuous and careful reading, coding, and synthe-

sizing of all material. The first goal of my methodology, as the qualitative
“comprehensive” indicates, is to produce theoretical prepositions in close,
continuous, and creative articulation with data collection, a bottom-up pro-
cess of hypothesis formulation to build up a comprehensive model that
replies the depart questions, grounded on empirical work but without falling
into the empiricist flaw.
To achieve this goal, the first procedure of content analysis applied to each
interviewee’ speech was narrative analysis. Through this technique I was
searching the symbolic investments and the social circumstances attached to
the body marking process within the biography of each interviewee. After this
biographical protocol, I applied a thematic analysis transversal to all inter-
views, to search for regularities and singularities across biographies, and to
produce more refined understandings and more abstract propositions.
A codebook was established under a dialogue between theory and empiri-
cal fieldwork to find units of meaning expressed and linked by the social agent
and, at the same time, understandable through (new or established) sociologi-
cal concepts. The codebook applied on this transversal analysis emerged from
common themes crossing the interviews, considering relevant conceptual and
ethnographical (or “native”) categories: some codes were theoretically
grounded (like “body modification meanings,” “body modification feelings,”
“body modification plans,” “self-identity dispositions,” “social values,”
“social practices and tastes,” “biographic turning points,” “sociabilities,” or
“social reactions”); others emerged from the data itself (as “experience,”
“addiction,” “project,” “difference,” “authenticity,” or “life style,” for exam-
ple). From the continuous rereading of the narratives, more fine-grained codes
emerged and correlated to the basic ones.
One might say that the small number of interviews formally conducted is a
limitation of this study. I would say that was sufficient to state deep conclu-
sions in view of the effect of information saturation among the interviewees.
The content analysis procedures were able to show that the interviewees, hav-
ing very different social backgrounds, trajectories, and conditions, and not
constituting a proper “social group,” produced a very coherent and homoge-
neous discourse amongst them, referring to very similar symbolic frameworks
to justify the uses, meanings, and social effects of their bodies. In other words,
the existence of a socially convergent narrative (Abbott, 1992, p. 69) became
noticeable from the content analysis of their discourses.
This calls the attention for the powerful mechanisms of socialization of
tattooing and body piercing scene, surreptitiously effective in the social
production and reproduction of a structured mythology about the body,
Ferreira 313
identity, and the world, regardless of the social backgrounds of its young
participants. The countersocialization effects of this scene in relation to
other social spaces traditionally responsible for youth socializations (such
as school, family, or even work) are so remarkably influential that they are
capable of a strong microcultural effect of homogenization of symbolic
frames, evidenced in the congruency of shared discourses, expectations,
and values—in relation to the body, identity, and the world—of young peo-
ple that come from quite different social backgrounds.
Therefore, I wish to examine those symbolic frames regarding the body,
identity, and the vision of the world attached to young people deeply
involved in radical body modification scene, and to understand how those
(ab)uses of the body might express a way of coping with uncertainty and of
struggling against insecurity nowadays present in transitions to adulthood
and in processes of identity construction. In the next section of this article, I
will characterize the “experience” of being voluntarily marked and its pri-
mary motivations; then I will analyze how that first bodily experience can
turn into a reflexive body project; being Tattoos a permanent body project; I
will demonstrate how it is reflexively used as a way of coping with a liquid
world and to preserve a solid and durable subjectivity; and as an auto-bio-
graphical device to socially recite and celebrate the individual resistance
toward the impasses of a more fluid and less expectable world. The article is
presented as a meta-narrative where the conceptual analysis is grounded on
the transversal approach of the interviews, from where some quotations are
used to fulfill and illustrate the main theoretical propositions.
The “Experience” of Marking the Young Body

Where pathology and deviation have traditionally been found, my ethnographic
fieldwork undertaken on body marks young wearers came across an aesthetic
and sensorial “experience.” “I like it so I wanted to try,” “It’s beautiful so I’d
like to experience how it is to do and to have,” were the most repeated state-
ments I have heard during my staying inside the studios. It was notorious how
the previous intention behind the inaugural action of tattooing or piercing the
body always combined looking for visibility and intensity.
Looking for Visibility

The experience of the first tattoo or body piercing is narrated by our inter-
viewees as a powerful aesthetic experience in the way that it mobilizes a
cultural artifact that exceeds and destabilizes the usual body production
canons. This is not only because they feel that tattoos and body piercings are
historically stigmatizing ornaments but also because they perceive specific
aesthetic characteristics in this kind of ornaments. Invested with an aura of
artistry and handmade originality, to make a tattoo offers a large field of
creative aesthetic opportunities—opportunities that other body modification
practices, more conventional, industrialized and massified, do not offer them
as easily.
The accumulation of tattoos on the skin ends up expressing a neo-baroque
aesthetics, as defined by Calabrese (1992): a set of aesthetic statements that
uses the temptation of the limit, and the ornamental and details excess as a
strategy of being original, that seeks a radical differentiation toward the
standard average, or that seeks eccentricity and provocation toward the
dominant codes of good taste and proper behavior. This kind of aesthetics
reinforces the distinctive value of the voluntary body marks as divergent
bodily statement, offering one way of their bearers to perceive themselves
and make them acknowledged as different:
Man, it’s incredible how people all drink the same thing, have the same
type of conversation, almost all use the same mobile phones, have the
same taste in cars, don’t dress very differently! And that scared me a
bit, you know? Maybe that’s why they say that people that use pierc-
ings or tattoos are different. [Female, elementary school]
Indeed, to tattoo the body means a reaction to the prescriptive structures

and processes that conform and homogenize young bodies in contemporary
society: it resists to the norms and conventions behind the idea of “natural-
ness” of the body; it breaks the dominant and most valuable corporal model,
distinguishing itself from the more institutionalized and commodified image
of the “young body.” Capitalizing symbolically these set of aesthetic quali-
ties, some young people, in the early years of their adolescence, start to
mark their own body as a way of catching the gaze of the others on them-
selves. In this way, they refuse a social condition of anonymity and indiffer-
ence and they manifest their individual presence in the world. As one of the
interviewees say, considering his own experience and the one that he has
with his customers:
I think people have a need to call attention, of saying: “hey, I’m also
here! I’m also a living being! I’m also around!” (. . .) I think people
have an enormous need to show themselves and to call attention to
them. [Male, elementary school]
Ferreira 315
By choosing to radicalize this body regime through its exaggeration, some

young people are trying to push forward the social visibility of their personal
existence through the violation of the dominant standards of bodily discre-
tion, respectability, and integrity. Therefore, more than collective text to be
read, written with a communicative intention as it was in the pass, the heavily
marked body corresponds, for the young people who embrace it, to a personal
manifest to be shown and appreciated, built up under a conspicuous intention
of grabbing the other’s attention as a singular person, as an individuality, as
the following testimonial testifies:
Normally, when people do the first piercing or tattoo, they do it because

they are searching for something different. After doing the first one,
people realize that it’s not that forbidden territory, that thing from
another world that one imagined, and they start developing the taste for
exaggeration. In other words, the more they use it, the more they show
it, the more status it gives them. If you like, the more it differentiates
them from the common citizen. (. . .) And the quest or search for differ-
ence oftentimes turns into exaggeration. [Male, university student]
Looking for Intensity

The divergent aesthetic manifest of voluntary marked bodies does not only
remain in its perception but also in its feeling. If we keep in mind the Greek
etymology of the word aesthetic, it derived from aisthetikos, which means
“sensitive”; or it derived from aisthanesthai, which means “to perceive, to
feel.” And in fact, the embodiment of body marks does not only involve the
construction of a singular appearance but also the experimentation of a
personal bodily sensation, usually not chosen as an option. Due to the inva-
sive nature of the action into the skin, being tattooed or pierced is an
embodied experience that involves an engagement of the senses beyond
ordinary. It hurts, it bloods, it scars, and it involves anxiety and healing. The
intensity of the voluntary pain experienced explains the sensuous meaning
that is also valued within the narratives of young people with whom I talked
to. To mark the body is a form of intensifying their individual existence
through a real bodily experience, in a culture in which pain is, by default, a
reality to be suppressed, a sensation to be anaesthetized, an emotional sign
of suffering and of pathology, susceptible of being medicalized and con-
trolled (Le Breton, 1995).
Among the several expectations involved in the inaugural situation of
marking the body, the anticipation of how will be the feeling of pain—brief
and intense in the case of piercing, long and constant in the case of tattooing,
at times a true demonstration of endurance—takes a central role in the form
in which young people imagine the experience. The probable intensity of that
sensation appears as one of the most relevant dimensions in the justifications
of the first experience: “So that I know what it’s like . . .,” one often hears
regarding the first marking. “Will that hurt or not?,” it is the question most
often asked by its potential practitioners, as this testimonial confirms:
The first question of the majority of people before tattooing is “does it

hurt a lot?,” even in relation to the piercing it is “does it hurt there?”
or “is there anesthetic?” Always that concern about pain. [Female,
university student]
For the ones that have tried, the pain gives them a sense of pride for volun-
tarily going through. Often the discourses about the pain during the body-
marking process show some revivalism of the imaginaries originally attributed
to these practices within the ritualistic frameworks of so called “primitive”
social formations, where a certain degree of exposure to pain represented an
act of bravery, courage, or strength (Clastres, 1974/1989; Lévy-Strauss, 1963;
van Gennep, 1909/1981). Although no longer invested with the stoicism value
that it held in the past, the experience of pain felt during the body-marking
process is still susceptible to being interpreted in light of its traditional collec-
tive memory, as it pointed out by this interviewee:
I actually usually say that if nothing was felt, nothing, it wouldn’t be

funny. And I’m not in favor of pain! I feel pain like the majority of
normal people, don’t I? And are funny those old values and those ideas
that you, to have a tattoo, have to be brave, tough and so forth . . . (. . .)
If it didn’t hurt, you, perhaps, wouldn’t give the meaning you give to
your tattoo! [Female, elementary school]
The experience of marking the body ends up to be meaningful to young

beginners as a sensorial and social challenge. It assumes the form of a physi-
cal test because it inevitably implies some suffering at the time and in the days
that follow, resulting from the skin invasion as well as from the scarring pro-
cess or other possible complications. But it also assumes the form of a social
test as young people who are willing to go through it, aspire to prove to them-
selves and to others that they are capable of overcoming this self-imposed
challenge; and to show themselves worthy of what they imagine to be the
backstage of the tattooing and piercing world: a universe of courage and resis-
tance, for the ability to be indifferent to exterior judgment. Therefore, the pain
Ferreira 317
felt during the body-marks process confirms not only the capacity of resis-
tance and control of the beginner in facing the specific situation marking the
body but also demonstrates, in metaphorical terms, a personal ability to face
the adversities of the contemporary world. As one of the interviewees attests,
[Doing a tattoo] It’s not exactly the same as buying a vest and starting
to fancy that dress and using it until it is very old. It’s not the same
thing, because the vest is taken off, the vest can be replaced by another.
Whereas holes and tattoos are absolutely ours, it’s our body, it was our
idea, the self-proposition of going there, suffering, paying for that. And
then having to bear all that comes from using a piercing or a tattoo.
[Male, university student]
Thus, the pain that is felt during the body-marking situation is far from
calling attention to the body’s vulnerability and consequent fragility of the
human condition, as the usual meaning of the nonoptional pain, out of the
individual’s control. By being consented, predictable, and cautious, this kind
of pain does not subjectively correspond, as per usual, to a sense of impo-
tence, in the impression that the body is beyond the individual. It assumes, on
the contrary, a perception of self-accomplishment and autonomy, of self-
power and self-control over one’s individual action. In the sense that the
action is nothing more than a pretext for exercising their own free will, some
young people discover in the gesture of marking the body a sense of empow-
erment and emancipation.
From the “Experience” to “Addiction”:The

Construction of a Body Project
After being successfully overcome, the experience of tattooing or piercing
the body can introduce young people to a bodily and life world that leaves
them reflecting on its continuation. Many young people declare leaving the
studio thinking about the next tattoo to be made. Such statements indicate the
transition from an experimental pattern of consumption to a projectual pat-
tern consumption of body marks. This transition is discursively identified
when the consumers start using the native term “addiction” to characterize
their consumption of body marks:
[Tattooing] It’s that kind of thing that it’s really an addiction. To me,
this, all that I see empty, it’s to fill in with scars [he is referring to the
skin not tattooed yet]. [Male, elementary school]
There’re people that see this as fashion. I don’t believe. (. . .) This, after
the first one, starts to be an addiction of having more and more!
[Female, university student]
However, the meaning of “addiction” for the interviewees does not

involve a physical or psychological dependence, compulsively engaged and
which generates unmanageable anxiety, as pointed out by Winchel &
Stanley (1991). It represents a patterned habit, where the compulsivity is
replaced by reflexivity, as the capacity of social agents to reflect on the
options and possibilities they face, to justify their choices and decisions,
and to calculate their potential reactions and effects in diverse life domains;
and where the anxiety involved in the preparation of another tattoo is posi-
tively lived and enjoyed as an act of creativity and freedom, and not as an
act of self-control loss. The term “addiction” is used just as a metaphor for
a practice that the consumer knows it will go on in the future, routinely, as
long as there is skin lasting. And even because they are aware that their
“virgin” skin is not endless, their upcoming tattoos involves more and more
planning, increasing the reflexivity accounts needed to choose and to take
decisions about the next tattoo.
Chris Shilling (1993, p. 5), following the proposal of Giddens (1991), has
pointed out in Western contemporary societies, “a tendency for the body to
be seen as an entity which is in the process of becoming,” subject to a “proj-
ect” to be reflexively worked on by the individuals, who have become
responsible for the design of their own bodies. While the notion of “body
project” is very useful to conceptualize the heavily tattooed body—being
used and recognized by their wearers—it must be made clear that not all
marked bodies can be treated as expressions of body projects. Most of the
time to mark the body emerges among young people just as one or a couple
of aesthetic and sensorial experiences that, only sometimes, turn into a body
project. That is, a body design reflexive plan resulting from a succession of
past and foreseeable future acts of tattooing or piercing the body. The next
two extracts of interviews are very illustrative of this process from the bodily
experience to the project of marking the body:
Each tattoo starts by being an important experience. Then, to use the

body as a canvas, that comes from the taste acquired from the art of
tattooing. (. . .) It starts with specific things, like that small drawing
that they liked. And then, after realizing that tattooing is something that
gives them pleasure, they then decide to go for the true works of art.
[Male, university student]
Ferreira 319
There are those people that do a tattoo just because . . . . Women, for
example, because the husband thinks that it’s sexy to have a tattoo. (. . .)
And then I think that there are other types of people that like it, that
thinks that it has something to do with them . . . They don’t do one,
they do tattoos, they do piercings, as a project. As a project they want
for their body, they want to transform their body into something else,
into a living work of art. [Female, university graduated]
The theory of body projects as it was presented by Shilling and by Giddens

contains a serious analytical problem of generalization, in the sense that it
does not consider that reflexive capacity does not affect all embodied actions
and actions on the body with the same intensity and in the same way. There is
no uniformity in reflexivity (Archer, 2003). Different issues and decisions
require different ranges of mental activity, and there are different ways of
reflexively conceptualizing the same issue or decision process making.
As I said earlier, the process that goes from the experience of being once
pierced or tattooed to a full body-marked plan, involves a more intense and
detail reflexivity investment by the consumer concerning the options to take
on the body. For instance, options about the kind of drawings to tattoo, its
theme, size or originality; about where to put them on the skin, considering
its aesthetic coherency and symmetry among others already there; about its
social visibility, concerning social sanctions within the family, the school or
the professional life; about the physical and social risks that might be
involved; along with other kind of decisions that are taken more seriously
into consideration when there are previous tattoos and body piercings.
On the other hand, the reflexivity accounts involved in the project of
fully marking the body implies not only an aesthetic dimension but also an
identity and a (sub)political dimension, in the sense given by Beck (1996) to
the concept of “subpolitics”: actions and social areas that, being tradition-
ally outside of formal places and institutions for doing politics, recently
have been subject to repolitization, that is, invested of political value and
content. In fact, the more extreme body modification project usually comes
along with a project of identity and a (sub)political statement, as a way of
young people to perform a new sense of selfhood and, as I had developed
elsewhere (Ferreira, 2007), to express disaffiliation to and critical vision of
the “mainstream” world.
Thus, to plan a heavily tattooed body goes far beyond the fluidity of the
mimetic, trendy, fashionable, consumer, and impulsive reflexivity accounts
that characterized the experimentalist appropriation of body marks. When the
appropriation of body marks turns into a projectual form, it implies a process
of densification of the reflexivity accounts among their planners. This pro-

cess involves not only the elaboration of a plan about the future aesthetics of
the body but also a process of symbolic investment on it, in terms of how
each mark is subjectively experimented and understood.
This means that in the process of becoming a heavily tattooed body, the
aesthetic investment young people do in the successive acts of marking the
body becomes much more sophisticated, with an increasing demand for orig-
inality to the iconographies embodied and the development of an authorial
vision of the body as a work of art; its identity investments becomes more
personalized, as the planners start to use important turning points or critical
moments in their biography as justification to have another body mark; and
the (sub)political investments starts to be also emphasized, in the sense that
to heavily mark the body begins to be perceived by their bearers as a form of
expressive activism from which the mainstream bodily and social orders are
put in question as well as a social display of their life politics and escape
lifestyles (Ferreira, 2007).
In its process of expansion on the skin, the tattoos became a more central
axe in the process of social and personal identity (re)construction of young
people who use them, performing what McDonald (1999) has called as
struggle for subjectivity. That is, a corporeal expression of their young wear-
ers to maintain permanently and coherently their sense of self over their
transitions to adulthood as well as to claim the autonomy and sovereignty in
actions and decisions on their own lives. That is the meaning beneath the
“conquest” of the skin: for these young people, the process of everlastingly
and extensively inking the skin becomes a metaphor for the conquest of a
space of subjectivity, where they feel they can be who they want to be and
where they can do whatever they want to do, against all.
Through the successive action of marking the body, often against the
opinion of parents or other figures and institutions of body socialization and
regulation (school, market, church, medicine, etc.), they build up a perdu-
rable feeling of being masters of their own body, their own identity and
their own life. Throughout the statement of ownership of the body and the
control and planning of its modification, young people experience them-
selves more as subjects of their identity and life than as subjects to con-
straint social forces. This mythology of autonomy is built on a share belief
among these young people, that they are exercising what they consider the
fundamental right of governance toward their own body, which they per-
ceive as their private property, used without restrictions, except for those
defined by them:
Ferreira 321
[The tattoos] They are mine! I can’t own anyone. But I can own my
body. The body is mine! (. . .) Despite the things that we are condi-
tioned by, that is, by work, by the society in which we live—we can’t
walk around naked, we have ours constraints—but what we do with
our body is nobody’s business but ours (. . .). Only me, and nobody
else, can say what to do with my body! (. . .) [The tattoos] are my
personal conquests, they are a statement, a personal statement! (. . .)
And there is no better way to feel good about ourselves, of what we
can, or being the only ones who can legislate about what we are. Or at
least about our envelope. [Male, university student]
During their adolescence, these youngsters start to appropriate and to cap-

italize the body, in its appearance, as a privileged material resource to be
socially shown and recognized as an individual and emancipated person. Its
flesh turns to be creatively worked to present and to represent a new personal
identity claimed as “different,” in the way that they share a great feeling of
personal distinctiveness and uniqueness; as “authentic,” that is, a strong com-
mitment in building up a desired identity, an identity that it is wanted; and as
“rebellious,” that is, sharing a strong wish to not follow the usual and expected
pathways. The struggle for the conquest of the skin follows the social process
of construction and claim for this set of subjective dispositions, as it is evi-
dent in the next testimony:
[To choose tattooing the body] It may have been, perhaps, a . . . desire
to be different, not be like everyone else, and to try to have a personal
thing . . . (. . .) This was perhaps a type of escape, perhaps it was a way
of showing that there is more than one direction, just because someone
dresses like that doesn’t mean everybody has to. (. . .) For me, people
were that cliché of growing up and having to be that. I wanted to be
what I wanted, not what I had to be, right? (. . .) It may also have been
a way of finding myself. And perhaps I did not identify with what other
people were, at that initial stage of personality formation. It was a
gradual process, it didn’t happen overnight. [Male, university student]
Thus, as the last statement shown, a body-marking project corresponds to a

process of social construction, presentation, and representation of a subjectivity
that starts being worked during the adolescence of some youngsters, with the
aim of reaching oneself as another, using the words of Paul Ricoeur (1990/1992).
A subjectivity that is on a process of becoming along with its embodiment,
revealing the aspiration of some young people in shifting themselves into

another self, perceived as “singular,” “authentic,” and “autonomous.” A self-
hood that is not the one that they feel that was socially prescribed to them: resist-
ing the direction to the sameness, they choose to take a direction to otherness,
trying to demonstrate their willingness through building an unconventional and
extreme body. Through the voluntary, permanent, and invasive process of mark-
ing the skin, some young people intend to make public a stable, coherent, and
lifelong commitment with, at a time, a body project, an identity project, and a
lifestyle project. All of these projects connected in the intention to escape from
what they perceive as a set of prescribed pathways and normative social roles.
Tattooed Body and Contemporary Identity:

A Solid Corporeality Within a Liquid Word
Most recent modernity has seen the traditional systems of social meaning
and order being questioned. The common experience for the current genera-
tion of young people seems to be that of flexibility, discontinuity, risk, and
fluidity which they have to deal with while structuring their life projects.
The traditional pathways, markers of passage and institutions that used to
regulate the transitions to adulthood are losing their social power and sym-
bolic value (Ferreira & Nunes, 2010). The pattern of stable employment,
progressive careers, early marriages, and stable family lives appears to be
proceeded by more turbulent times and lives (Bruckner & Mayer, 2005). The
conventional identification sources are uncertain and temporary, and the
social bonds and tights are more and more fragmented and fragile (Ferreira,
2009). In fact, emergent social reality has been enabling a new social expe-
rience for young people—more diffuse and labyrinthic—reflecting a more
unstable and uncertain social world (Pais, 2003).
In such a liquid and uncertain times (Bauman, 2007; Ehrenberg, 1995),
young people have been experiencing feelings of vulnerability and insecurity
regarding their social trajectories and identities. The rearrangements and read-
aptations that their life trajectories are constantly going through results in a
permanent reflexive reordering of their sense of self (Giddens, 1991). The
high level of plasticity demand to the contemporary subjectivities tends to be
followed by a high level of malleability and adaptability required to the body,
to play different roles and to assume different identities on diverse social set-
tings. And all over the place one can find services, techniques, and technolo-
gies that instigate the management and maintenance of the required body
malleability, considering the plasticity demanded to contemporary identities.
Widely commodified as an accessory for the presentation and representation
Ferreira 323
of the self (Le Breton, 2000), the contemporary body is socially understood
and appropriated as a flexible personal resource, always open to new design to
adapt to new social settings and roles.
It is easy to understand, therefore, why to tattoo and change permanently
the body is such a cautious body design option, in spite of its media popular-
ity and visibility. As I noticed before, the most widespread version of body-
marks’ consuming includes just small sketches or adornments, in little
dimension and extension on skin, discreet and often placed far from the
glance of their bearers (so they do not get “tired” of them) and of the unknown
others (so they do not feel suspicious). Some sectors of body design industry
offering this kind of service nowadays (such as some beauty salons, for
example) also offers the antidote for the permanency in the form of multiple
simulation techniques (e.g., temporary tattoos), or removal techniques (a set
of surgical techniques that promote its disappearance).
The projectual version of the marked body, in turn, corresponds to an
option that is too “extreme” and not very socially disseminated precisely
because, although demanding a high malleability of the body, it is an option
that is made once and for all. It is a permanent and irreversible form of
embodiment, a definitive commitment with certain kind of corporeality. And
tattoos are so much valued than piercings by its young wearers precisely
because they imply an irreversible “second skin” that lasts for life, while the
piercing, if does not extend the skin, can be easily taken away:
When I do a tattoo, I’m thinking two or three years. It’s also not like
piercing, instantaneous. (. . .) A tattoo is really for life. (. . .) And actu-
ally irreversible. [Male, university student]
The major value given to the body tattooed project withdraw exactly from
its permanence, as a solid mode of embodiment that allows young people to
construct themselves as consistent, single, and indivisible individuals through-
out time and space. Young people who extensively tattoo their bodies perceive
in this regime an ancestrally validated resource of achieving a stable and
coherent existential harmony between their subjectivity and its embodiment.
A harmony that will not be threat by the demands of a word increasingly
erratic, diffuse, and fragmented, potential producer of adaptable, permeable,
and even corrupted subjectivities. We are talking about young people who do
not want to change their self-identity considering the challenges that they have
ahead in life, during their transitions to adulthood. Resisting making conces-
sions in the way they are, they sturdily express it through the body, choosing a
strong, powerful, and permanent appearance to themselves.
Look, this all [the tattoos] is like being attached to my own personality!
And for life! (. . .) [Today] I feel more fulfilled with my own personality,
and with what I’ve always liked being. [Male, elementary school]
The façade that they built, to use a Goffmanian concept (1959), as a pro-
tective mask, although being an artifice, it come out here, paradoxically, as a
support of authenticity, of the “real” self. However, this “reality” no longer
corresponds to an essentialist subjectivity, a self rooted within the individual
that would emerge through body modification, as it was defended by the
pathologic and criminologist models of conceiving the tattooed bodies since
the XIX century. The “real” self that these young people want to achieve and
to fulfill through their body project is perceived as an option, someone they
want to be. Thus the heavily tattooed body expresses a performative subjec-
tivity that is being in construction, resulting from a deliberated identity proj-
ect voluntarily chosen by the young, who elect the body as a resource to
reach it individually and assume it socially:
[This is] The image that I want to have, it is the image that I created to
present myself as a person. That’s how I identify myself! (. . .) And
that’s how I want to be! [Male, elementary school]
If the first experiences with body marks do not challenge seriously the
self-image and social expectations toward the person who did them, when it
takes on the form of a project, that body demarks a disruption in the identity
order. It implies a deep personal and social adjustment between an identity
performed in the present and a desired identity for the future (Bajoit, 1999),
subjectively valued in its singularity (“being different”), authenticity (“being
myself”), and autonomy (“being what I want”).
On the other hand, the permanent nature of the project permits the inte-
gration of the self under the same mask throughout time and places, avoiding
the contemporary phenomenon of self-discrepancy (Higgins, 1987). Even
when young people are constrained to cover up their façades in specific
social contexts or situations, the feeling of authenticity that just the fact of
having tattoos offers them is not put in question. The authenticity, in their
perception, is not inevitably dependent of the sincerity that implies the per-
manent public exposure of the bodily project (Trilling, 1971).
Given the stigma that still threatens heavily tattooed corporealities nowa-
days, to engage into this kind of body project corresponds to a commitment
with a bodily space that compromises the social space of whom assumes it,
both in the present and future. It compromises, right from the beginning of the
Ferreira 325
transition to adulthood, the access of young people to specific social circles,

particularly in the employment field, where they feel or foresee a high level of
restrictions due to their look. As a result they need to socially manage the vis-
ibility of the marked epidermis, while they do not possess a means of making
a living that allows them to fully socially assume the sincere expression of their
“authenticity.”
It’s the employment situation that makes many people having to abdi-
cate from ways in which they would like to dress or present them-
selves. It’s the imposed model, it’s the stereotype. The suit and tie
ends up being a uniform, a work uniform. I, fortunately, don’t have
yet to use a suit and tie. (. . .) But I’ve already had to compromise,
which is to take off my earrings, but let’s leave it at that. It was hard
enough. (. . .) I don’t feel well being without earrings, I don’t feel well
having to go to work interviews having to hide parts of the tattoos—
some I can’t actually hide, no matter how hard I try. (. . .) I hope that
one day later, I will be able to dress like I want to, short sleeves, full
of earrings on my face, and no one will say absolutely nothing. [Male,
university student]
Therefore, beneath an extensively marked body project is not only a

strong feeling of personal distinctiveness but also an attempt to order and
unify an identity that is more and more fragmented and menaced in its coher-
ency. It puts out through the young body a fragile form of symbolic struggle
for one’s own individuation and subjectivation. That is, a fight for the social
affirmation of a subjectivity with a strong sense of individuality and identity
unity, which one intends to be solid, stable, and long-lasting, built up against
structural conditions that promote liquid, uncertain, and discontinued social
experience.
Body Project and Life Story Narrative:

Tattoos as an Auto-Bio-Graphic Device
Notwithstanding their pretensions of identity solidity and durability, heavily
marked young people understand their body as malleable enough to express a
subjectivity that inevitably transforms itself gradually. This happens within a
margin of identity consistency fulfilled through the ritualization of the
moments of being tattooed, always in connection to certain key moments in
the life course of the young consumer. The fleshy canvas illustrates a map of
the routes taken by its bearer, by option or accident, but always self-perceived
as framers of the personal identity. That is, that gives a coherent sense of place
and being in the world to the one that is constantly in the move without the
feeling of “letting go,” or “go with the flow,” what would mean to surrender
to the strictures and confinements of the standard routes. Thus the heavily tat-
tooed skin embodies a mnemonic system that serves the construction of a
subjectivity that is not only reflexive but also narrative. That is, a personal
identity that struggle for the power not only to choose and define it self but also
to recount and communicate itself to the others as a biography.
When I did them [the tattoos] I wanted to highlight something that had
happened in my life and that had influenced my life. (. . .) There are
many people that, due to the death of a family member, or the birth of
a son, whatever, decide to mark their body to always remember what
they went through, in the good and bad moments. A person (. . .) wants
to keep that moment forever, and a tattoo is a good way of not letting
things fade away. [Male, university student]
The testimony above shows how the body-marked project is developed

as an embodied and nondiscursive storytelling, as a visual device of auto-
bio-graphical expression. This means that each tattoo intends to reflect
through a drawing (graphically) on the skin (bio) certain important self-
identification fact, context or affinity of the life story of its bearer (auto).
The body project displays, connects, and maintains alive in memoirs a sys-
tem of key moments and significant experiences, tastes, values, affiliations,
and/or figures that strongly define the subjectivity of the young person in a
certain life moment. These topics inspire young people to celebrate and per-
petuate through skin marks, which help them to sustain a sense of temporal
unity and continuity of their identities within a high fragmented and labyrin-
thine society. Even if the subjective importance of those experiences could
be lost in the future—and the interviewees are conscious of this fact—its
biographic value is permanently maintained on the skin as part of a life
course and its dilemmas over time and space.
In its auto-bio-graphical evocation, the tattooed body is mobilized as plas-
tic support, as a canvas over which the reflexive sense of self and the tensions
between change and preservation that threatened it is aesthetically projected
and ichnographically narrated. The permanence and invasiveness that charac-
terizes the tattoos lend solidness and significance to the transitional narratives
that they express. Ritualistically embodied and biographically oriented, the
tattoos sustain the subjective feeling that the successive transformations of the
self are made within the parameters of chosen and coherent identity. As a
Ferreira 327
result, the extensively marked corporality manifests a sense of long-lasting

being, graphically transposed to an everlasting modified body. This means a
body that being under constant transformation keeps reproducing its same-
ness, as the next interviewee clearly points out:
[Each tattoo] It was a drawing that I liked and that symbolized the
scene of connecting me to my ideals, of connecting me to the earth, to
those things that I love, above all. (. . .) Connecting to the earth is,
perhaps, you not forgetting what you were yesterday. (. . .) And I don’t
want to, because now I’m feeling so well about myself, so I don’t want
to become a filthy pig like many people out there. People when they
grow up become really hypocritical, with each other. (. . .) I’m really
stuck in time, in terms of tastes I haven’t changed since I was 16. Nor
do I want to change. I want to be like this forever. (. . .) [For me] The
tattoos are like a statement. In spite of changing constantly, it’s really
always there. It’s not something we can change, no matter how much
we age, no matter how much we’re subjected to psychological tortures
and brain washing. [Male, university student]
In a constant dialectic play between permanence and change, each act of

modification through the embodiment of a new tattoo, is a gesture of confir-
mation and celebration of the coherence and continuity of the self in its bio-
graphical singularity and authenticity. Identity tends to fragment and to
emerge as problematic at specific biographical turning points (Hareven &
Masaoka, 1988), as we can see in the interviewee’s speech below:
Each tattoo of mine has a story, from how it was done to why it was
done. (. . .) There is always a sequence, a logic, along with very
personal things.
[Commitment] This one means a lot to me because it was on the
same day that my girlfriend also did one . . .
[Sister’s death] This tattoo, for example, has my whole life until
sixteen, more or less. This skull has a meaning for me. Whoever
hears this thinks that this is a bizarre meaning. This skull for me is
my sister that died.
[Problems with drugs] I, when I was younger, I also had a problem
with drugs and decided to symbolize it as a Cannabis, in tribal form,
which is what is up here, without color, without the green of Cannabis,
but with the leaves of Cannabis.
[Accident] For example, this really small one (. . .) is an eye. The

eyes, for me, in my way of thinking, have life, the eyes say what the
person is. (. . .) I was a prisoner of death for one month and three days.
(. . .) I won’t say it was a miracle, but it merited a meaning, it deserves
a mark. [Male, elementary school]
These are moments of creative destruction of identities, represented by

disruptive situations that give rise to moments of existential and/or relational
crisis, potentially inductive of transformations in the subjectivity structure.
Thus each tattoo made in connection with a certain turning point states not
the celebration of a new collective status, as it was in the pass, but the cele-
bration of an individual overcoming the deadlocks of contemporary life. In
this vein, each tattoo does not express an ancestral rite of passage anymore,
but a contemporary rite of impasse, in the sense that celebrates the capacity
of resistance and survival of personal identity of each young person to critical
events, integrating and recentering them in the structure of his or her bio-
graphical narrative and of his or her subjectivity.
The cyclical recurrence of the body marking ritual generates a subjective
sense of order, produces an individual sense of directionality and of orienta-
tion in the flow of biographical events. The ritualistic way in which the proj-
ect is developed allows young people to build up an iconographic narrative
that organizes the puzzle of their transitions into a significant and ordered
sequence, according to a reflexive codification and an individual narrative of
the self.
Like some warrior groups that believed that tattoos would protect them
under conditions of adversity, this type of adornments also generates among
today’s young users a feeling of comfort against the anxiety that represents a
more and more contingent daily existence. It is a mask built as a protective
surface against the uncertainties and adversities of the modern world. And also
a mask that provides them with a subjective illusion of individual stability,
consistency, and resistance against social constraints and control mechanisms
felt as attempts of submission or corruption of their desired identity.
Conclusions
Within a context of expanding of body design industry, the tattoos and body
piercing have started to be commodified along with other body modification
services, techniques, and technologies, having a increasigly success among
young people. With the renaissance of this practice in the West, however,
some steryotypes and “moral panics” historically grounded also resurged.
Ferreira 329
But the fact is that this research neither found body marks as a simply fash-
ionable and trendy superficial statement nor as any hint of psycopathology.
Where some researches found pathology or just the commodification of a
practice inside the body design industry, I came across an embodied experi-
ence that, in some cases, turns into a body and an identity project.
To do a tattoo stards to be starts to be valued by nowadays young people
as an experience performed and felt in the skin, the most social organ of the
body (Turner, 1980). Both social and physic, the experience of embodying a
tattoo points out the search for visibility and intensity spotted by Ehrenberg
(1995) as one of the cultural patterns in contemporary modernity. In an
increasingly globalized and standardized world, but where “authenticity,”
“individuality,” and “uniqueness” reign as symbolic values, some experi-
ences are escape strategies from an anodyne and anonymous existence. I
have suggested that such strategies, as to mark permanently the body, are
undertaken by some voiceless and nameless youth to attain social visibility,
distinction, and recognition to their individual existence.
If the body starts to be valued as a medium of play, experimentation, and
transformation, in a certain moment of the trajectory of some young people
it continues to be worked as a project, reflexively pushing and defying social
and bodily boundaries. This stage of the process, often discursively described
as an “addiction” by the interviewees, involves a symbolic densification of
the marked body, taken as a way of claiming and expressing a desire
self-identity.
The corporal dispositions of heavily tattooed bodies carry the markers of
subjective dispositions reclaim by the bearers to themselves. Indeed, there is
a straight correspondence between the aesthetic characteristics that young
people value on body marks and the subjective dispositions that they claimed
for themselves: the value of originality, as a central value in the aesthetic
foundation of the project, gives substrate to the feeling of “individuality” or
radicalization of individual distinctiveness; the permanence of the project
fulfils the aim of identity consistency and durability, found under the feeling
of “authenticity”; its invasiveness functions as a means of externalizing the
“rebelliousness,” as a form of transgression of the taboo that constitutes the
incursion of the in-body epidermis frontier by the layman—an operation
reserved just for medical professions—which gives to whom is able to do it a
feeling of emancipation, self-possession, and self-control.
In spite of its subjective value as an expression of social uniqueness of its
holders, the heavily marked body reveals a complex web of micro and macro
social relations. First, through this project, young people try to ritually celebrate
important social situations and affinitites as self-identifications anchors. At the
same time, they also try to defy and negotiate their bodies and their selves with
some institutions of youth control like family, school, job market, and so on,
institutions that keep pushing and pulling their bodies and identities in diver-
gent directions, change, and adaptation.
Finally, the ritualism with which the project is developed allows young
people to build, within a context of increasingly faster social changes, an
iconographic narrative that organizes the chaotic course of their life in indi-
vidually significant and ordered sequences. Although reflexively codified
according to a very individual narrative, the heavily marked body actually
emerges as a synchronization tool between the personal biographical flow
and the actual historical flow. What appears subjectively invested in the
expressive form of a singularized body, ends up reifying, objectively, a
socialized body, revealing visual information how body, self-identity, and
social structures are interconnected, giving resonance to a more broad cul-
tural and social dynamics.
Indeed, the project of having a heavily tattooed body involved a strugle
not only for the production of a certain kind of subjectivity but also to main-
tain it when confronted with the contemporary social constraints, dilem-
mas, and imperatives. According to Giddens (1991), the conventional
moorings of self-identity have eroded, and traditional pathways to adult-
hood have become increasingly less stable sites to anchor the young people’
sense of self. Less shaped by tradition, increasingly larger parts of the indi-
vidual’s identity and life are to be shaped by the variety of contexts that
young people are involved with.
There is a convergence with the work of Ehrenberg, who argues that the key
to exploring contemporary social transformation lies in the emergence of the
“uncertain individual” (1995), which involves an undermining and destabiliza-
tion of the modern concept of a self-contained and unitary identity. The stability
and coherence of the identities constructed under these social conditions are put
under erasure, being ever more difficult to consolidate a consistent sense of self.
Thus the subjectivities among younger generations are lived as more decen-
tered, fragmented, multiple, elusive, not anymore guaranteed by traditional
pathways or references.
In the process of figuring out who they are or, better, of constructing who
they want to be, to inscribe successively the body under an auto-bio-graphic
script manifests a struggle of young people against the potential erasure of
their early chosen identity. Through writing permanently the body, the most
valued symbol of the self, they try to lastingly embody their subjectivity as a
coherent and authentic, expression of a consistent unity between the self and
the body. Through the ritualization of the construction of the body project,
Ferreira 331
they try to preserve their subjectivity as stable and durable under social con-
ditions that are favorable to a liquid, changing, and fragmented social
experience.
The body being such a valuable capital (Shilling, 1991) and an important
sociosymbolic resource for new generations (Ferreira, 2009) it is at the least
peculiar not to find a more embodied trend on current youth studies or, more
specifically, a more embodied sociology of youth. Approaching youth worlds
through the body goes beyond traditional entrances (social class, gender, social
exclusion, delinquency, etc.), often built up by researchers rather than really
lived by young people. It also has the plus of returning a dimension much val-
ued and mobilized by young people in their daily life, a dimension where they
can be found not just as social subjects but also as social agents. After all, if it
is in the body that young people more intensively experience social control and
disciplines, it is also in the body that many of them find a place of expression
and performance of individuality, authenticity, and autonomy, values that are
part and parcel of the most recent modernity.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Support for this research was provided
by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through a postdoc-
toral scholarship given to the author; and by the Portuguese Youth Institute, through
the research program funding of Permanent Youth Observatory at the ICS-UL.
References
Abbott, A. (1992). What do cases do? Some notes on activity in sociological analysis.
In C. C. Ragin & H. S. Becker (Eds.), What is a case? Exploring the foundations
of social inquiry (pp. 53-82). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. S. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Atkinson, M. (2002). Pretty in ink: Conformity, resistance, and negotiation in women’s
tattooing. Sex Roles, 47, 219-235.
Atkinson, M. (2003). Tattooed. The sociogenesis of a body art. Toronto, Onatario,
Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Bajoit, G. (1999). Notes sur la construction de l’identité personnelle [Notes on the
construction of personal identity]. Recherches Sociologiques, 2, 69-84.
Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times. Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK:

Polity Press.
Beck, U. (1996). The reinvention of politics. Rethinking modernity in the global social
order. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Bengtsson, A., Ostberg, J., & Kjeldgaard, D. (2005). Prisoners in paradise: Subcultural
resistance to the marketization of tattooing. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 8,
261-274.
Benson, S. (2000). Inscriptions of the self. Reflections on tattooing and piercing in
contemporary Euro-America. In J. Caplan (Ed.), Written on the body. The tattoo
in European and American history (pp. 234-254). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press,.
Blanchard, M. (1991). Post-bourgeois tattoo. Reflections on skin writing in late capital-
ist societies. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(2), 11-21.
Bloor, M., & Wood, F. (2006). Keywords in qualitative methods. A vocabulary of
research concepts. London, UK: SAGE.
Bogdan, R. (1994). Le commerce des monsters [Trade monsters]. Actes de la Recherche
en Sciences Sociales, 104, 34-46.
Brückner, H., & Mayer, K. U. (2005). De-standardization of the life course:
What it might mean? And if it means anything, whether if actually took
place? In R. Macmillan (Ed.), The structure of the life course: Standardized?
Individualized? Differentiated? (Vol. 9, pp. 27-53). London, UK: Elsevier.
Calabrese, O. (1992). Neo-baroque. A sign of the times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Camphausen, R. C. (1997). Return of the tribal. A celebration of body adornment.
Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Caplan, J. (Ed.). (2000). Written on the body. The tattoo in European and American
history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clastres, P. (1989). Society against the state. Essays in political anthropology. New York,
NY: Zone Books. (Original work published 1974)
Craik, J. (1994). The face of fashion. Cultural studies in fashion. London, UK: Routledge.
DeMello, M. (1993). The convict body: Tattooing among male American prisoners.
Anthropology Today, 9(6), 10-13.
DeMello, M. (1995). Not just for bikers anymore: Popular representation of American
tattooing. Journal of Popular Culture, 29, 37-52.
DeMello, M. (2000). Bodies of inscription. A cultural history of the modern tattoo
community. London, UK: Duke University Press.
Ehrenberg, A. (1995). L’individu incertain [The uncertain individual]. Paris, France:
Calmann-Levy.
Ferreira 333
Favazza, A. R. (1996). Bodies under siege. Self-mutilation and body modification in

culture and psychiatry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Origi-
nal work published 1987)
Featherstone, M. (1999). Body modification: An introduction. Body & Society, 5, 1-13.
Ferreira, V. S. (2003). Atitudes dos jovens Portugueses perante o corpo [Attitudes of
young Portuguese before the body]. In J. M. Pais & M. V. Cabral (Eds.), Condutas
de risco, práticas culturais e atitudes perante o corpo (pp. 265-366). Oeiras, Lis-
bon, Portugal: Celta.
Ferreira, V. S. (2007). Política do corpo e política de vida. A tatuagem e o body pierc-
ing como expressão corporal de uma ética da dissidência [Body politics and
political life. The tattoo and body piercing as a bodily expression of an ethic of
dissent]. Etnográfica, 11, 291-326.
Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Marcas que demarcam. Tatuagem, body piercing e culturas
juvenis [Marks for demarcation. Tattooing, body piercing and youth cultures].
Lisbon, Portugal: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.
Ferreira, V. S. (2009). Youth scenes, body marks and bio-sociabilities. Young—Nordic
Journal of Youth Research, 18, 285-306.
Ferreira, V. S., & Nunes, C. (2010). Les trajectories de passage à l’âge adulte en
Europe [The trajectories of transition to adulthood in Europe]. Politiques Sociales
et Familiales, 102, 21-38.
Fisher, J. A. (2002). Tattooing the body, marking culture. Body and Society, 8, 91-107.
Fleming, J. (2000). The renaissance tattoo. In J. Caplan (Ed.), Written on the body. The
tattoo in European and American history (pp. 61-82). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Fried, R. I. (1983). The psychodynamics of tattooing: A review. Cleveland Clinical
Quarterly, 50, 239-242.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern
age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Goode, E., & Vail, D. A. (2008). Extreme deviance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press.
Govenar, A. (1988). The variable context of chicano tattooing. In A. Rubin (Ed.),
Marks of civilization. Artistic transformation of the human body (pp. 209-218).
Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Cultural History.
Govenar, A. (2000). The changing image of tattooing in American Culture: 1846-1966.
In J. Caplan (Ed.), Written on the body. The tattoo in European and American his-
tory (pp. 212-233). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hardin, M. (1999). Mar(k)ing the objected body: A reading of contemporary female
tattooing. Fashion Theory, 3(1), 81-108.
Hareven, T. K., & Masaoka, K. (1988). Turning points and transitions: Perceptions of
the life course. Journal of Family History, 13, 271-289.
Harper, D. (1992). Small N’s and community case studies. In C. C. Ragin & H. S. Becker
(Eds.), What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry (pp. 139-158).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hewitt, K. (1997). Mutilating the body. Identity in blood and ink. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green State University Press.
Higgins, T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological
Review, 94, 319-340.
Hodkinson, P. (2005). “Insider research” in the study of youth cultures. Journal of
Youth Studies, 8(2), 131-149.
Irwin, K. (2001). Legitimating the first tattoo: Moral passage through informal interac-
tion. Symbolic Interaction, 12, 119-173.
Kaufmann, J.-C. (1996). L’entretien comprehensive [The comprehensive mainte-
nance]. Paris, France: Éditions Nathan.
Klesse, C. (1999). ‘‘Modern primitivism’’. Non-mainstream body modification and
racialized representation. Body and Society, 5(2-3), 15-38.
Koch, J. R., Roberts, A. E., Armstrong, M. L., & Owen, D. C. (2009). Body art, deviance
and American college students. Social Science Journal, 47, 151-161.
Kosut, M. (2006a). Mad artists and tattooed perverts. Deviant discourse and the social
construction of cultural categories. Deviant Behavior, 27(1), 73-95.
Kosut, M. (2006b). An ironic fad: The commodification and consumption of tattoos.
Journal of Popular Culture, 39, 1035-1948.
Lacassagne, A. (1881). Recherches sur les tatouages et principalement du tatouage
chez les criminals [Research on tattoos and tattooing mainly in criminals].
Annales d’Hygiène Publique, Industrielle et Sociale, 3, 288-304.
Le Breton, D. (1995). Anthropologie de la douleur [Anthropology of pain]. Paris,
France: Métailié.
Le Breton, D. (2000). Figures du corps accessoire: Marques corporelles, culturisme,
transsexualisme, etc [Figures of the body accessories: Body markings, bodybuild-
ing, transsexualism, etc]. In C. Fintz (Ed.), Les imaginaires du corps. Tome 2—
Arts, sociologie, anthropologie. Pour une approche interdisciplinaire du corps
(pp.207-231). Paris, France: L’Harmattan.
Le Breton, D. (2002). Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercings et autres marques cor-
porelles [Signs of identity. Tattoos, piercings and other body markings]. Paris,
France: Métailié.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Lombroso, C. (1895). L’homme criminal [Criminal man]. Paris, France: Félix Alcan.
Maccormack, P. (2006). The great ephemeral tattooed skin. Body & Society, 12(2), 57-82.
Ferreira 335
Maffesoli, M. (2002). La transfiguration du politique. La tribalisation du monde post-

moderne [The transfiguration of politics. The tribalism of postmodern world].
Paris, France: La Table Moderne. (Original work published 1992)
Maroy, C. (1997). A análise qualitativa de entrevistas [Qualitative analysis of
interviews]. In L. Albarello, F. Digneffe, J.-P. Hiernaux, C. Maroy, D. Ruquoy,
P. de Saint-Georges (Eds.), Práticas e Métodos de Investigação em Ciências
Sociais (pp. 117-155). Lisbon, Portugal: Gradiva. (Original work published
1995)
McDonald, K. (1999). Struggles for subjectivity. Identity, action and youth experi-
ence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mendes de Almeida, M. I. (2000). Nada além da epiderme: A performance romântica
da tatuagem [Nothing but the epidermis: The performance of the romantic tattoo].
Psicologia Clínica, 12(2), 100-147.
Merton, R. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. In
Varieties of political expression in sociology (pp. 9-47). Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press,.
Mifflin, M. (1997). Bodies of subversion. A secret history of women and tattoo. New York,
NY: Juno Books.
Myers, J. (1992). Nonmainstream body modification. Genital piercing, branding,
burning and cutting. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 21, 267-306.
Oettermann, S. (2000). On display: Tattooed entertainers in America and Germany. In
J. Caplan (Ed.), Written on the body: The tattoo in European and American his-
tory (pp. 193-211). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pais, J. M. (2003). The multiple faces of the future in the labyrinth of life. Journal of
Youth Studies, 6(2), 115-126.
Peixoto, R. (1990). A tatuagem em Portugal [The tattoo in Portugal]. In Etnografia
portuguesa (pp. 15-43). Lisbon, Portugal: Dom Quixote.
Phillips, S. A. (2001). Gallo’s body. Decoration and damnation in the life of a Chicago
gang member. Ethnography, 2, 357-388.
Pitts, V. (1998). “Reclaiming” the female body: Embodied identity work, resistance,
and the grotesque. Body & Society, 4(3), 67-84.
Pitts, V. (1999). Body modification, self mutilation and agency in media accounts of
a subculture. Body & Society, 5, 291-303.
Pitts, V. (2003). In the flesh. The cultural politics of body modification. New York,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Putnins, A. (2002). Young offenders, tattoos and recidivism. Psychiatry, Psychology
and Law 9(1), 62-68.
Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
(Original work published 1990)
Riley, S., & Cahill, S. (2005). Managing meaning and belonging: Young women’s
negotiation of authenticity in body art. Journal of Youth Studies, 8, 261-279.
Rubin, A. (1988). Tattoo renaissance. In A. Rubin (Ed.), Marks of civilization. Artistic
transformation of the human body. Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Cultural History.
Ruquoy, D. (1997). Situação de entrevista e estratégia do entrevistador [Interview situ-
ation and strategy of the interviewer]. In L. Albarello, F. Digneffe, J.-P. Hiernaux,
C. Maroy, D. Ruquoy, P. de Saint-Georges (Eds.), Práticas e métodos de investi-
gação em ciências sociais (pp. 84-116). Lisbon, Portugal: Gradiva. (Original work
published 1995)
Sanders, C. R. (1989). Customizing the body. The art and culture of tattooing. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Sanders, C. R. (1991). Memorial decoration: Women, tattooing, and the meaning of
body alteration. Michigan Quartely Review, 30, 146-157.
Shilling, C. (1991). Educating the body, physical capital and the production of social
inequalities. Sociology, 25, 653-672.
Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory. London, UK: SAGE.
Steward, S. M. (1990). Bad boys and tough tattoos. A social history of the tattoo
with gangs, sailors, and street corner punks 1950-1965. New York, NY: Haworth
Press.
Sweetman, P. (1999). Anchoring the (postmodern) self? Body modification, fashion
and identity. Body & Society, 5(2-3), 51-76.
Tiggemann, M., & Golder, F. (2006). Tattooing: An expression of uniqueness in the
appearance domain. Body Image, 3, 309-315.
Trilling, L. (1971). Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Turner, B. S. (1999). The possibility of primitiveness: Towards a sociology of body
marks in cool societies. Body & Society, 5(2-3), 39-50.
Turner, T. (1980). The social skin. In J. Cherfas e R. Lewin (Eds.), Not work alone.
A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival (pp. 112-140). London,
UK: Temple Smith.
Vail, A. (1999). Tattoos are like potato chips. . . You can’t have just one: The process
of becoming a tattoo collector. Deviant Behaviour, 20, 253-273.
Van Gennep, A. (1981). Les rites de passage. Paris, France: Picard. (Original work
published 1909)
Winchel, R. M., & Stanley, M. (1991). Self-injurious behavior: A review of the behav-
ior and biology of self-mutilation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 148, 306-317.
Wroblewsky, C. (1992). Tattooed women. London, UK: Virgin.
Ferreira 337
Author Biography
Vitor Sérgio Ferreira, PhD in sociology (ISCTE-IUL—2006), is a postdoctoral

research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, with a schol-
arship funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Since 2010,
he is the vice-coordinator of the Portuguese Youth Observatory. His main fields of
study are the sociology of youth and life course, sociology of culture, and sociology
of the body. He is publishes regularly, national and internationally, on the issues of
generations and life course, youth transitions, youth cultures, and body modifications.
Among his recent publications are the books Marcas que Demarcam. Tatuagem, Body
Piercing e Culturas Juvenis [Marks for Demarcation. Tattooing, Body Piercing and
Youth Cultures] (2008), Tempos e Transições de Vida: Portugal ao Espelho da
Europa [Timings and Transitions of Life: A view of Portugal Within Europe] (2010)
and Jovens e Rumos [Young People and Routes] (2011), published by Social Sciences
Press of Lisbon University.

FERREIRA - 2014 - Becoming A Heavily Tattooed Young Body - From A Bodily Experience To A Body Project

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

FERREIRA - 2014 - Becoming A Heavily Tattooed Young Body - From A Bodily Experience To A Body Project

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

FERREIRA - 2014 - Becoming A Heavily Tattooed Young Body - From A Bodily Experience To A Body Project

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

427839

8X11427839FerreiraYouth & Society

Reprints and permissions:

Becoming a Heavily 2014, Vol. 46(3) 303­–337

Vitor Sérgio Ferreira1

The body has become a material resource increasingly invested in contempo-

As a matter of fact, the recent renaissance of ancestral practices of exten-

Historical and Theoretical Background

At a later stage, these resources were included in the “uniforms” of

“deviation,” and “marginality” (Ferreira, 2003, 2008). The extensive use of

To overtake the eventual disadvantages of my condition as outsider, I was

That implies to assume the interviewing guide as a methodological tool

involves a meticulous, continuous and careful reading, coding, and synthe-

The “Experience” of Marking the Young Body

Looking for Visibility

Indeed, to tattoo the body means a reaction to the prescriptive structures

By choosing to radicalize this body regime through its exaggeration, some

Normally, when people do the first piercing or tattoo, they do it because

Looking for Intensity

The first question of the majority of people before tattooing is “does it

I actually usually say that if nothing was felt, nothing, it wouldn’t be

The experience of marking the body ends up to be meaningful to young

From the “Experience” to “Addiction”:The

However, the meaning of “addiction” for the interviewees does not

Each tattoo starts by being an important experience. Then, to use the

The theory of body projects as it was presented by Shilling and by Giddens

of densification of the reflexivity accounts among their planners. This pro-

During their adolescence, these youngsters start to appropriate and to cap-

Thus, as the last statement shown, a body-marking project corresponds to a

revealing the aspiration of some young people in shifting themselves into

Tattooed Body and Contemporary Identity:

transition to adulthood, the access of young people to specific social circles,

Therefore, beneath an extensively marked body project is not only a

Body Project and Life Story Narrative:

The testimony above shows how the body-marked project is developed

result, the extensively marked corporality manifests a sense of long-lasting

In a constant dialectic play between permanence and change, each act of

[Accident] For example, this really small one (. . .) is an eye. The

These are moments of creative destruction of identities, represented by

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times. Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK:

Favazza, A. R. (1996). Bodies under siege. Self-mutilation and body modification in

Maffesoli, M. (2002). La transfiguration du politique. La tribalisation du monde post-

Vitor Sérgio Ferreira, PhD in sociology (ISCTE-IUL—2006), is a postdoctoral

You might also like

Becoming a Heavily 2014, Vol. 46(3) 303–337