TATTOOING

Tattooing

Tattooing

Opportunity to Engage

The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments--particularly for specific identities and social selves--in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. The penitentiary also offers an intriguing opportunity to explore the body's role in visual argumentation. Although visual argument is increasing in popularity and focus among communication scholarship, the role of the body in visual argumentation, particularly the operation of tattooing as visual argument, remains unexplored. Given daily contact with the bodies of others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives.

Issues of Tattooing

Claiming the body as a site for visual argument is not without difficulties and is quite possibly a contentious argument in itself. Scholars traditionally celebrate argument as belonging to the classical public sphere--a wide-reaching construction unhelpful for understanding argumentation as it functions in nonpublic communities. In particular, because the body cannot be fully public (1) and is understood as the antithesis of deliberative discourse, the belief that argument is public axiomatically excludes the body as a site for argumentation. (2) Furthermore, the almost exclusive attention paid to public qualities of argument has obscured the ways in which argument might function in nonpublic but still social settings like the penitentiary.

This essay points to some of the ways in which bodies function as argument, operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. My primary purpose is to explore prison tattooing in men's penitentiaries (3) as visual argumentation. Owing to the limited choices available to prisoners for expression, argumentative or otherwise, prisoners (4) must use nontraditional avenues for social communication. My second purpose is to expand visual argumentation theory by calling on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca to show how argument functions in the unique social construct of the penitentiary.

Penitentiary Culture

As panopticon, the penitentiary is an institution that works to exert total control over the lives of those within its system, a mission easily discerned from its physical structure (Goffman 72). Once having been particularized individuals with autonomy and agency, prisoners are faced with becoming indistinguishable members of a group with no freedom to act. Removing personal possessions that designate identity has acute and wide-reaching effects. (6) Compounding the psychological effects of physical strictures, the prisoner's status as subordinate is reified constantly through the penitentiary routine. As one prisoner recounts, "the only decision I can make is what time I go to sleep, and when I go to the loo, and what time I decide to eat my food.... [T]he biggest decision I've got is the fact that I can take my life or I can keep living" (qtd. in Medlicott 167). Because penitentiary life is so totalizing, so degrading, small privileges or moments of autonomy acquire special importance.

One of the penitentiary's primary functions is the elimination of a public sphere for those within its walls, which drastically limits prisoners' ability to construct individual and communal identities, including the arguments that affirm these ...