When Alyssa Trapani was 12 years old, she decided to start stretching her ears. Her earlobes were constantly infected, but she wanted to continue wearing the jewelry. From that point on, she has been modifying her body further, aggregating more than 15 different piercings, larger gages, a three-quarters sleeve tattoo on her left arm, rib tattoos, and tattoos behind her ears. She currently has her bellybutton, septum, and philtrum pierced, as well as multiple ear piercings. She is also a UC Berkeley student working toward a degree in Sociology, and is planning a career in law.
Body modifications do not render a person any less intelligent, credible, or successful. Unfortunately for Trapani and other individuals with body modifications, our society has created and upheld a stigma against tattoos, piercings, and the like. This stigma is heavily perpetrated by the media and its portrayals of body modification; its propagation affects their day-to-day lives as well as their future career trajectories.
“I think a lot of people have preconceived notions about people who are body modified,” Trapani explained. “They are seen as more rebellious and dangerous. People underestimate who I am as a person because I choose to modify my body, and people aren’t given the credibility that they deserve.”
While tattoos and piercings carry no inherent, objective meaning, our society has attached certain stereotypes to people who are body-modified. Due to her body modifications, Trapani is often treated with disrespect. While working at a restaurant, customers would often grab her arm without permission to get a better look at her ink.
“There’s this misconception that people that wear more of themselves on the exterior with body modifications are seen as open books,” Trapani said. “It’s like the pregnant woman thing – ‘Oh she’s pregnant, she wants people to touch her belly. Oh, she’s tattooed, she doesn’t mind if I grab her arm.’”
In addition to the unwarranted physical harassment, she is often harassed with invasive questions. While working at Buffalo Exchange, a woman asked her how drunk she had to be in order to get her tattoos. She regularly gets asked about the meaning of her tattoos, whether or not it hurt to get them, and what she’s going to do with them when she gets older.
“People don’t think that they’re intrusive questions, but they’re incredibly intrusive,” she said. “My tattoos are all very personal, and a lot of them have to do with death and making something beautiful out of loss. It’s my body, it’s my right to do whatever I want with it, and I shouldn’t have to explain it to anybody.”
There are also much more harmful and severe effects that stem from this stigma. Despite driving at the legal speed limit, Trapani and a friend were pulled over while on a road trip from California to Oregon. Trapani was wearing a tank top, tattoos clearly exposed.
“The cop looked at me and told me that I had no rights and that he could do whatever he wanted to me,” said Trapani. “I was harassed and molested by Oregon State Troopers. They denied us female officers, put us in handcuffs, and searched my car without my consent. I felt completely powerless and was taken advantage of in a really horrible way.”
“Unfortunately when you’re out in the social world, you have to alter who you are to not be targeted,” she said. “They see us as freaks: if you’re defying that aspect of society, what other aspects are you defying?”
The treatment she faced from the police sheds light on the enormous reach that this issue has; individuals with body modifications are often discriminated against and become the subject of prejudice. Trapani is fully aware that her ambition to become a criminal defense attorney might be affected by her body modifications; she has already been forced to make sacrifices in the professional world because of her appearance.
While working for companies such as Starbucks, she was forced to cover her tattoos and take out her piercings; her self-expression was stifled and she felt dehumanized. Although Starbucks very recently changed its policy about tattoos and no longer requires workers to cover up, many other workplaces and industries still forbid visible tattoos and piercings on the job. However, to Trapani, it is more important to fight a stigma than to simply succumb to it, and she will continue to pursue her plans for a law career.
It is true that certain industries have been and most likely will remain traditional and conservative, especially in their attitudes toward body modifications and unorthodox appearance in general. Dressing up for a job interview, UC Berkeley Media Studies Professor Josh Jackson explained, means playing by the rules.
“You as the interviewee make a decision to dress conservatively in order to present yourself as a team player who knows what’s expected of him or her,” Jackson said.
In a utopia with no workplace discrimination, people with distinctive haircuts, tattoos, or piercings would be treated as equal to clean-cut people with normalized appearances. Until we reach this, however, we must address why this stigma is being upheld and what we can do to ameliorate it.
The creation of this prejudice has been greatly influenced by media representations of body-modified individuals. The media plays a very important role in helping provide people with models of how to act, look, and be, according to Jackson.
“I don’t know if it’s a negative connotation [of body-modified individuals], but what the media makers mainly want to evoke is difference, otherness,” Jackson said. “They want to construct a character that’s different from the mainstream somehow, and the mainstream viewer gawks at this unfamiliar culture.”
Media representations also often perpetrate a gender dichotomy – women are shown as highly sexualized while men are portrayed as very powerful.
“Women who have tattoos are portrayed as sexualized objects, and that has a lot of negative connotations that reverberate to social interactions,” Trapani said. “People perceive me to be more sexual, or more approachable, because I have tattoos.”
The gender norms that are traditionally perpetrated through media are replicated when it comes to the representation of body modified individuals, leading to gender-specific questions and concerns when women decide to get tattoos or piercings. Rarely are men asked, “What will you do about your tattoos at your wedding?” Women, on the other hand, are constantly interrogated about their prospective appearance in their wedding dress. This also operates under the assumption that women are obligated to wear a dress at their wedding, reinforcing traditional aesthetic and gender role ideals.
“There are all these questions that adhere to women playing this certain role of being pure, clean and white,” Trapani explained. “That’s not how I see my life or myself. People ask me, ‘Why do you have all that s**t in your face? You’re so pretty, you don’t need that to be pretty.’ Like that’s my main goal of existence – to be attractive and to be seen by the male gaze in a positive light.”
Many media representations of body modification also associate these individuals with crime, drugs, and deviant behavior. If the representation doesn’t hold negative connotations, than it often involves the trope of drunken mistakes used for comedy. This is seen in “The Hangover,” in which lead character Stu wakes up from a drunken night of revelry with a face tattoo resembling that of Mike Tyson. Such representations are not uncommon, creating the impression that body modification is either an intoxicated mistake to be regretted or a deliberate association with some form of deviance or crime.
“It happens because it’s easy,” Jackson said. “The media maker wants to use body modification to signify something. It’s a convenient shortcut to show difference or to represent something as edgy, or having a subcultural affiliation. They can do so with dialogue or backstory, but it’s just as easy to slap some gages in there…”
This might be a classic “the chicken or the egg” dilemma – did the media representations create this stigma, or did they simply respond to and represent an already existing stigma? Either way, the media portrayals of body modification are neither accurate nor diverse, and they help reinforce this erroneous and unfair stereotype that people like Trapani must overcome in the modern workforce.
Trapani will continue fighting this stigma and has plans to further modify her body; she will not allow this prejudice to dictate her decisions. She continuously subverts people’s expectations and thereby challenges the existence of these negative stereotypes.
“I can’t speak for everyone who chooses to go down this path of body modification, but I do it because I want to bring something to people’s consciousness,” Trapani said. “I want to make people ask questions about why they think those who have tattoos and piercings should look, be, and act a certain way.”
This article was originally published in Issue 11 of Caliber.
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