What do you think about the current state of “trauma-informed” labeling, especially in tattooing?
No one submitted this question! But it’s one I wish would be asked, so I’m putting it to myself to write and reflect on it. I’m hoping for some catharsis because it’s been weighing on my mind for quite some time. I’m tired, in an existential way. The only copy of my own book I have at the house has been peed on by our dog, and that feels like an apt metaphor for a lot of things right now.
Image: “girl explaining” meme, with the caption “the thing is, trauma informed and justice centered strategies were meant to be about equalizing power imbalances. When we frame them as exceptional we actually reinforce those hierarchies under the guise of care which when you think about it is actually kinda fascist”
If you’re new to my work, I have spent the last few years writing and teaching trauma-informed (or trauma-aware) protocols for tattooing. Throughout my practice as a tattoo artist, I have been involved in organizing and activism, and I first began to think critically about the need for these guidelines in tattooing after training on an LGBTQIA+ crisis hotline. Because of the identities I hold, my ability as a listener, gendered expectations of emotional labor, or a combination of the above, I was receiving the same types of disclosures during my tattoo appointments as I heard during the training and on calls. It was clear that tattooing enabled this type of sharing, despite the relative silence around its commonality.
This was against a backdrop of the rise of tattoo television. Shows like Miami Inked were a hit, Ink Master was on the air encouraging us to live mas, and mainstream television audiences were shown hour after hour of footage of clients narrating the story behind their tattoo before going under the needle. Tattooers (at least the ones I was around) seemed to blame the need for storytelling on tattoo television giving clients the idea that there had to be a profound, complex justification for getting a piece done. Most were totally resistant to that type of sharing, complaining that you don’t need to hear someone’s life story to tattoo them. While personal narrative is a part of this equation, what I was more compelled by was understanding how this pattern was formed by and against larger power structures and political systems.
Tattooing evolves much more slowly than other professional fields. My theory is that it’s partially because of how decentralized it is, with no central ethical guide or oversight, and partially because of the romanticization of the past, outlaw culture, and a nebulous “tradition” that tattooing famously upholds. Therapeutic, social work, and medical fields had begun developing trauma-informed programming and were already moving beyond them to expand best language and practices. Shawn Ginwright proposed “shifting from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement,” and therapeutic practitioner Vikki Reynolds introduced the framework of “justice doing.”
While the term trauma informed care is important, it is incomplete. First, trauma informed care correctly highlights the specific needs for individual young people who have exposure to trauma. However, current formulations of trauma informed care presumes that the trauma is an individual experience, rather than a collective one.
-Shawn Ginwright
From early on, I included these ideas in my own teaching on trauma-informed tattooing, speaking to practices that were justice-centered and addressed the larger systems that produced trauma to begin with. Critical to understanding how to prepare for and respond to trauma is maintaining a wide view of systemic inequality, and how healing from its effects can help us resist that oppression. But what I’ve noticed about the adoption of trauma-informed labeling into tattooing at large has been troubling. There is a reason I don’t describe myself as a “trauma informed tattoo artist,” or award certificates or stickers for business doors upon completion of my workshops. Believing that a singular, standardized set of practices and language will serve everyone’s needs and insulate you from doing any harm is what got us to where we are now in the culture at large— individual care needs being flattened and erased under a standard that favors able-bodied people, cis bodies, white bodies.
Tweet by Abolish Time reading “when we try to script the social interactions we believe will inevitably create a liberatory future, we sacrifice the depth of skill and relationship necessary to make care and insurrection real rather than performative.” Support their patreon here.
The central thesis of my book, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work was threefold: that witnessing bodies in pain— and dissociating from being the person inflicting that pain— takes a psychic and emotional toll on tattoo artists; that all tattooing involves, to some extent, work around trauma (whether helpful or harmful, conscious or unconscious); and that if we name that work for what it is and build skills and supportive scaffolding around its practice, we can create a healthier, more just tattoo industry overall. I began writing this book in 2019, and things have changed drastically since then. What I see as the key takeaway from this original thesis is the fact that all tattooing possesses the ability to impact the experience of bodies within systems of power: what I call the “political potential” of tattooing. Central to this proposition is the belief that bodes are contested political terrain and addressing our bodily agency, or interrupting processes of bodily subjugation, can have radically transformative effects.
This concept is central to what I see our responsibility being: if it’s in all tattooing, we all have the ethical and moral imperative to step up to the challenge of encountering it. Neither of us is more or less responsible, and none of us is more of an inherent authority than another.
I have the skills that I do because I’ve tried hard and invested just as much time into that learning and development as I have to actually applying a tattoo, if not more. I have no desire for authority or power in this role. What I want, more than anything, is for people to take it upon themselves to learn, to practice, to develop highly specific skills that are made for their immediate community’s needs, to trade knowledge and approaches and to support each other in doing it because we all have to be. When I see people framing “trauma informed tattooing” as a unique, therapeutic specialty that only a select few (including themselves) offer, I wonder: how was what I’ve been saying so misinterpreted? How has this labeling been used to bolster one’s own individual power and status, rather than as a way to be in alignment with the inherent power of tattooing as a medium?
I’m grateful that I had the foresight not to title the book anything related to trauma, because that labeling feels less resonant as I’ve seen it trickle into the larger consciousness. If the last two years have taught me anything, it’s how quickly and insidiously the cooptation process works, rendering toothless and meaningless concepts meant at one time to be radical (take “safe space,” for instance, or “diversity”). Every so often, I know that there’s been an abuser outed in tattooing because my work experiences a small burst of renewed interest. This despite an industry that for all intents and purposes is more diverse, more decentralized and autonomous, more concerned with challenging the status quo than ever before. The cycle of devotion to prevention only as a reaction to harm already done is a demoralizing one, and I’m tired— of getting calls to “pick my brain” about addressing community harm from people who have never read my book, didn’t know I co-created a set of client rights guidelines, didn’t know I distilled all of this into a digestible pamphlet form years ago. Awhile back I was invited to take part in a roundtable discussion about sexual violence in the tattoo industry. The organizer then sent a photo of a tattoo to the group chat, speaking in derogatory ways about the body part the tattoo was on in the picture. I was astounded. How, pray tell, are we addressing sexual violence if we’re still participating in the devaluation of people’s bodies?
Tweet by Butch Anarchy reading “I’d like to gently remind my fellow survivors that survivorship alone does not automatically give you a robust analysis of abuse and, in fact, the conditions of abuse itself often forces us to internalize abuse apologia. Intentional study and unlearning is necessary.” Support their patreon here.
I sat down to answer a question about whether or not tattooing is oversaturated in 2022, but felt compelled to write this incomplete beginning instead. It felt more urgent, more present, and I have much more to say on the subject. Truth be told, I don’t read much about tattooing these days. I’ve been immersing myself in past and contemporary writing about surveillance, about abolition geographies, about imagination and utopia, about cooptation and anti-violence strategies. Everyone seems tired, not just me. My usual coping strategy in these moments is to zoom way in—to focus on my immediate world, immediate community, and where I have the power to shift things even in the tiniest of ways. For a long time tattooing felt like it could be that small place. I’ve been in this industry for thirteen years, maybe more at this point, and felt like if I couldn’t shift things in a space I knew so intimately, then where?
I haven’t been able to access that belief of late. The coping mechanism I’m trying instead is touching grass clay, connecting with community IRL, and being more unrelenting in my language and naming of what I see. If something is fascist, call it fascist. If something is survivorship, call it survivorship. A friend of mine recently said (and I’m paraphrasing) “if you thought this was about tattoos and not about total social revolution, you’re dead wrong.”
“Trauma-informed” as it’s been employed leaves plenty of space for misuse. How can we shrink that space? How can we be exacting in what we want, what we need, and what we believe in?
❤️ A TIME-SENSITIVE MUTUAL AID REQUEST: A friend of mine has not received benefits and needs help paying rent. If you have anything to contribute, it would mean the world to me. You can venmo @Portia-Roy-2 ❤️
My book is available via Afterlife Press here.
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