A Skeptic's Guide to the Twelve Steps
Author: Phillip Z
How many of us have felt like Phillip Z? He has a staunch belief in the Twelve Steps, yet struggles with the concept of a Higher Power.
In A Skeptic's Guide to the 12 Steps, the author investigates each of the Twelve Steps to gain a deeper understanding of a higher power. He examines what may seem like "unsettling" concepts to us including surrendering one's will and life to God, and he encourages us to understand the spiritual journey of recovery despite our skepticism.
Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community
Author: Margo DeMello
Since the 1980s, tattooing has emerged anew in the United States as a widely appealing cultural, artistic, and social form. In Bodies of Inscription Margo DeMello explains how elite tattooists, magazine editors, and leaders of tattoo organizations have downplayed the working-class roots of tattooing in order to make it more palatable for middle-class consumption. She shows how a completely new set of meanings derived primarily from non-Western cultures has been created to give tattoos an exotic, primitive flavor.
Community publications, tattoo conventions, articles in popular magazines, and DeMello's numerous interviews illustrate the interplay between class, culture, and history that orchestrated a shift from traditional Americana and biker tattoos to new forms using Celtic, tribal, and Japanese images. DeMello's extensive interviews reveal the divergent yet overlapping communities formed by this class-based, American-style repackaging of the tattoo. After describing how the tattoo has moved from a mark of patriotism or rebellion to a symbol of exploration and status, the author returns to the predominantly middle-class movement that celebrates its skin art as spiritual, poetic, and self-empowering. Recognizing that the term "community" cannot capture the variations and class conflict that continue to thrive within the larger tattoo culture, DeMello finds in the discourse of tattooed people and their artists a new and particular sense of community and explores the unexpected relationship between this discourse and that of other social movements.
This ethnography of tattooing in America makes a substantive contribution to the history of tattooing in addition to relating how communities form around particular traditions and how the traditions themselves change with the introduction of new participants. Bodies of Inscription will have broad appeal and will be enjoyed by readers interested in cultural studies, American studies, sociology, popular culture, and body art.
Booklist - Patricia Monaghan
This book has much to recommend it for general collections. . . . DeMello's major interest is in describing the new community of tattooed people, both men and women, for whom new meanings are being forged from the meeting of skin and ink.
Gayle Rubin
A fascinating book bursting with penetrating description. DeMello makes a very useful contribution to the literature on these increasingly salient voluntary communities of passion, interest, and identity.
Honey Magazine - Carol Cooper
DeMello uncovers some fascinating data about exactly how and why tatoos once associated exclusively with older servicemen and social outlaws have become acceptable for some of today's brightest young strivers.
The Village Voice - Margot Mifflin
A penetrating and wonderfully original piece of research, interweaving references to Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu . . . with field work in a well-organized and cleanly written book.
Kirkus Reviews
A respectful look at an aspect of pop culture not normally treated in such unsensational terms.
Library Journal - Chogollah Maroufi
An interesting, authentic account of tattoo communities.
The New Yorker - Leo Carey
DeMello describes how the new tattoo movement has tried to put a 'middle class face on the art form.' Clearly, though, a sense of danger still accounts for much of the tattoo's allure.
What People Are Saying
Kathleen Stewart
The histories of tattoo traditions presented in this book are fascinating and rich. DeMello has many insights into tattoos' complexity of meaning, brought out in precise ethnographic and historical fashion.
—(Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America)
Table of Contents:
| Preface | ||
| Acknowledgements | ||
| Introduction: Bodies and Social Orders | 1 | |
| 1 | Finding Community: Shops, Conventions, Magazines, and Cyberspace | 17 |
| 2 | Cultural Roots: The History of Tattooing in the West | 44 |
| 3 | Appropriation and Transformation: The Origins of the Renaissance | 71 |
| 4 | Discourse and Differentiation: Media Representation and Tattoo Organizations | 97 |
| 5 | The Creation of Meaning I: The New Text | 136 |
| 6 | The Creation of Meaning II: The Tattoo Narratives | 159 |
| Conclusion: The Future of a Movement | 185 | |
| Notes | 195 | |
| Bibliography | 207 | |
| Index | 219 |
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