“Tattoo parlors determine how Chicanas “do Chicana” as a situated accomplishment of difference that is maintained and reproduced in diverse social interactions (West and Fenstermaker 1995) with peers, male tattoo artists, and women who uphold community expectations of what is considered ladylike as their “essential nature”…”

“In the tattoo parlors of East Los Angeles, the colonizer (the tattoo artist) wields his power over the lives of colonized subjects (Chicana tattoo clients) by privileging men and maintaining gendered legacies through the patriarchal requirement that women be inferior”

I chose two passages for this MVP reading, as I really struggled to understand the larger social context or importance posed by this particular reading.  Typically, while reading for my MVP, I gain little chunks of understanding on a large and complex issue that I as an educator will face.  With this particular reading, however, I am having difficulty connecting it to my work as an educator or as a critical social issue.  While I found the passages that spoke about male tattoo artists touching female clientele inappropriately to be upsetting and alarming, I am having trouble buying into the author’s idea that male tattoo artists are “oppressors” and female tattooees  as the “colonized” subordinates.   I don’t really understand how women who make a choice to become tattooed are oppressed; in fact the very nature of them getting a tattoo signifies to me that they are very much in control of their own lives.  I understand that they often are rebuked by the men working in the parlors, but this hardly seems like a pressing issue related to gender roles within the Chicano community.   It feels to me like the author is jumping to some intense conclusions before research had been done and even then it didn’t seem to me, from the interviews that the Chicana women being tattooed felt “conquered” by their tattoo artists.  I am questioning this academic research as to its direct purpose in moving for the Chicana agenda and providing the reader with objective food for thought.  Instead, I found it to be filled with sweeping general statements without much specific research to back up these claims.