Tattoo, body piercing and the experience of pain: emotion, ritualization and medicalization

Abstract

Being a physical experience that challenges sensitive and social taboos, body marking with tattoos and body piercing has been fairly explored in the public sphere regarding the issues of voluntary pain and the risks of individual and public health that are involved. Associated with the moral panic that is already linked to these practices, which are related to behaviours perceived as socially deviant, psychopathological or criminal, comes another type of social panic, the «hygienist panic», connected with a fear of contracting infectious and contagious diseases, or of having a bad reaction to the incorporated materials and inks. Attempting to go beyond these discourses, this article aims to analyse: on one hand, how current consumers of tattoos and body piercing deal with the pain associated with these practices, what emotions frame that sensation and what strategies are used in its control; on the other hand, how the producers of tattoos and body piercing, considering their new and extended clientele, deal with the demands for sanitary disciplines regarding their professional practice. As for methodological procedures, the empiric information presented in the article was collected through in-depth biographical interviews conducted with people who had extensively marked bodies, multi-tattooed and multi-pierced, professionals or only consumers of tattoos and body piercing. Fifteen interviewees with different social profiles were recruited in tattoo and body piercing studios located in Lisbon and on its outskirts, after an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in those spaces.