Tattoos Place In Contemporary American Culture Analysis

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Tattoo’s Place in Contemporary American Culture This article by John Roberts is to help us better understand how and why people have tattoos. Tattoos meaning in the popular culture have changes over the years. People are getting tattoos for different reasons and in different ways. “despite… path-breaking analyses of tattooing as a contextual and negotiated signifier of identity, sociological statements on the cultural use of tattoos in North America ultimately (re) produce a conceptualization of the practice as contra-normative. The symbolic relationship between tattooing and illegal behavior (or otherwise unconventional lifestyles) still dominates in sociological research. Sociologists prefer to study the subversive subcultural uses of tattooing.” (Atkinson 127). This quote exposes the schism that formed around a phenomenon, one view focuses on the deviance and mental disorders, and the other view focuses on positively contributing to fashion and identity formation. …show more content…

The tattooed people get tattoos that show no matter what they believe that is part of themselves and to cover it would be a shame. People that have tattoos get them in places easily covered, so they don’t get judged by anyone who disagrees with them and for professional reasons. John talks about the meaning of a tattoo in the new age, how most do it because of fashion or identity formation. Fashion is all about the media and what is trendy, identity formation refers to as getting a tattoo for a lost loved one or for morals. Placement seems to be what defines us as tattooed people or people with

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