ABSTRACT
Critical scholarship on tattooing has tended to frame the conversation around two seemingly contradictory narratives. While some scholars view the act of tattooing as “self damning resistance,” others have focused on the tattooed body as an archival site of resistance and cultural preservation. This chapter complicates each of these narratives by examining the contradictions embedded in prisoners’ choices of tattooing practices. I argue that while these practices serve as an act of counter-hegemonic agency against the state’s control over their bodies and dehumanization, simultaneously, prison tattoos further position prisoners as vulnerable to additional carceral punishment. As a result, this reifies those very same dehumanizing structures that prisoners are fighting against. Thinking through a decolonial lens, I engage both the life and tattooed body of “Jordan” – a young Mexican/Chicano gang affiliate currently serving a 15-year sentence – to understand why racialized prisoners (despite their awareness of potential carceral punishment and/or hyper-surveillance) choose to get “get blasted up” (tattooed) and offer a nuanced lens that understands prisoners’ agency (expressed through their tattooing practices) as self-dignifying counter-narrative identity constructions and acts of re-humanization.
