Playful female skinscapes: body narrations of multilingual tattoos

ABSTRACT

Using oral narratives of tattoos and their bodily emplacement, the paper explores the performance of creativity, language and multilingualism, identity and gender among female students at three universities in South Africa. We draw on notions of skinscapes, the material culture of multilingualism and multimodality to illustrate, analyse and discuss the creativity and imagination of the design features of the assembled semiotic material that inspire the content and representations of the tattoo. We highlight the inspirations and explorative imaginations of the tattooed and/or the tattoo artists that enable their creations to be visually materialised and for new meanings to be constructed on the skin. We argue that multilingualism and identities should not just be seen in the inscribed languages on tattoos but in the totality of the material and verbal constituents that includes the languages spoken, heard and referred to in the context in which the artefact is reproduced and consumed. We conclude by emphasising the significance of looking at tattoos as material culture of multilingualism/multiculturalism deployed as a creative practice in meaning making. Skinscapes thus becomes a way of expanding sites within semiotic landscape research to include the human body.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimodality
• multilingualism
• creativity
• skinscapes
• semiotics
• resemiotisation

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Drs Máiréad Moriarty and Johan Järlehed for inclusion in this exciting special issue and we also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Shanleigh Roux conceptualised her Master’s thesis under the guidance of her co-supervisors, Dr Amiena Peck and Prof Felix Banda. The article was contributed to by all parties.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All the participants have been assigned pseudonyms.

2. Of course, there are some exceptions, but as a general overview women in Lord of the Rings were not as heroic as their male counterparts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Research Foundation (Project Number 107534).