The Tattooed Classicist
Re(th)inking Professionalism in the Field
I once went to dinner with a scholar who had given a guest lecture for my department. While we were waiting to be seated at the restaurant, he started talking about the job market in our field and, seemingly out of nowhere, gestured to his nose. “One day,” he said, “when you go for interviews you will take out these,” then gestured to his shoulder, “and cover up those.” He was, of course, referring to my piercings and tattoos.
Up to this point in the conversation, our interactions had been friendly and informative. I had been excited to ask more about his work, which was tangentially related to a topic I was writing about. Suddenly, though, I wanted to melt into a puddle and slip out the door Zeus-as-golden-shower style. My only response was nervous laughter. I imagine he walked away from that interaction feeling nothing, while I was left to stew in my embarrassment for the remainder of our dinner.
I would like to say that this scholar’s comments were an exception to my experience in the field, but that would be a lie. I receive comments about my self-decoration with alarming frequency, from senior scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students alike. Even at the WCC panel on harassment in the field (of all places), I met a graduate student who was shocked to see my green hair, visible tattoos, and facial jewelry. “I dyed my hair a fun color once,” she said, “but I would never do it during the school year.” Later in the day, another scholar noted that she also had visible piercings once but “eventually you just have to move past that.”
Two assumptions underlie these comments. First, these folks suppose that I need to be alerted to the fact that my self-decoration makes me stick out in a room full of classicists, as if I am not consistently made aware of this fact. In most cases, their patronizing tone implies that they are doing me a favor by warning me about the danger of hyper-visibility. If I had realized that danger on my own, they think, surely I would have taken more care to cover up my tattoos or remove my piercings.
Second, they imply that such self-decoration is a frivolous, juvenile, and dispensable form of self-expression that I can (and should) simply take off in order to appear more professional. As academic Francesa Stavrakopolou recently argued in response to criticisms of her feminine style, the message is always the same: “unless women dress modestly and conservatively, they look out of place in academia, because fundamentally, they don’t have the right bodies to be academic authorities.” That is to say, if I am preoccupied with my appearance, I cannot also be an intelligent and capable classicist.
The fact that academics react to my appearance in such a way does not surprise me. The association between tattoos and lack of personal refinement dates back even to the antiquity that we study as classicists. The ways in which tattoos have been used to subjugate and “other” particular bodies in Greco-Roman contexts has been well established by classical scholars. In 1987, C.P. Jones published an influential study, which explores Greek and Roman use of the word stigma (from the Greek στίζειν, “to mark”). Jones demonstrates that the word almost always refers to tattoos and argues that upper-class Greeks and Romans were averse to extreme body modification because they saw it as a mark of ethnic, religious, and social “otherness” (Jones p. 141–42).
Tattoos seem to have been, for example, a popular means of self-decoration in Thrace. Fifth-century vase paintings depict Thracian women marked with animal shapes and geometrical forms. While the poet Phanocles claims that the Thracian women were forcibly marked by their husbands as a reminder of Orpheus’ death, Clearchus suggests that they were marked by Scythians after being defeated in war. Regardless of the particular explanation, Jones writes, “the Greek view of tattooing … turns a decorative, perhaps religious, practice into a punitive one” (Jones p. 145).
Deborah Kamen has recently elaborated on the notion of tattooed and branded skin as a “mark of slavery” or punishment. Kamen discusses a scene from Petronius’ Satyricon, which uses a tattooed forehead as its central gag: Encolpius and Giton paint their foreheads to disguise their identities. Notably, these characters’ false markings cause a woman to cry “in part out of sympathy, in part because the faces of these young men have been — or so she thinks — permanently disfigured” (Kamen p. 100). A scholion of Aeschines illuminates this woman’s distress, for it suggests that runaway slaves had their foreheads tattooed with a permanent reminder of their status as property: “Catch me, I’m escaping” (Kamen p. 101). For the Greeks and Romans, then, marked skin was often the sign of a body forcibly altered or a body that participated in the wrong religious and social practices. In any case, it was not the controlled, idealized body of the citizen male.
A body that bears distinctive markings of “otherness” is, of course, an attractive mirror against which to construct a sense of collective identity. For Greeks and Romans, perpetuating the notion that marked bodies were defiled and in some way “less than” was an effective tool of empire and military expansionism. In fact, similar patterns of exploiting marked bodies to enforce arbitrary power structures exist across space and time. During the conquest of the Americas and beyond, tattooed native bodies were marked out by colonizers as especially “exotic.” Still, it was not long before tattoos were adopted (and appropriated) by working-class white folks. In the early 20th century, the popular Sailor Jerry style offended bourgeois sensibilities specifically because it grew out of a form of self-expression that seemed foreign and, therefore, ugly.
It is important to acknowledge that not all marked bodies are created equal. The history of tattooing in America is itself rife with issues of appropriation and racism. And yet, such history is not usually the object of critique when conversations about tattoos arise in the field of Classics. Instead, scholars of antiquity continue the process of “othering” tattooed bodies with little regard for what personal, religious, or cultural significance such marks may carry. In our field, the range of respectable forms of self-expression is particularly narrow, a problem which stems from continued obsession with Oxbridge prestige. Apparently, for many, part of the answer to the question “What does a classicist look like?” is still: “Not tattooed.”
Yet also part of the history of tattoos is the way in which they have recently been reclaimed as a means of empowerment and self-expression. As academic and author Roxane Gay writes in her memoir, Hunger: “With my tattoos, I get to say, these are the choices I make for my body, with full-throated consent. This is how I mark myself. This is how I take my body back.” Unlike the suffering that the rest of the world poses on your body, she says, “You have chosen this suffering, and at the end of it, your body will be different. Maybe your body will feel more like yours (p. 184–6).”
My tattoos are not a dispensable part of my identity. I cannot “simply” cover them up; I cannot “simply” take out my piercings. Both are a means for me to claim an embodiment of identities that I was taught to hate: parts of myself that were deemed “less than.” They are a marked expression of my feminism and my queerness; they are a symbol of victory after many years spent starving myself and trying to disappear; they are, too, a purposeful mark of where I come from — the working class family and communities I grew up in.
Far from being at odds with my academic self, my body modifications speak to the reasons why I am in graduate school for Classics and why I do the kind of scholarship that I do. I did not enter academia only to philosophize about otherness, racial injustice, and gender norms: I came to academia to think about the ways in which we can actively tear these constructs down. “Otherness” is not an abstract concept that we can critique at a distance and then ignore, especially in a field that is so overwhelmingly white and was, for much of it history, overwhelmingly male and heterosexual and upper-class. While revolution is not won at the level of the individual, I do think there is value in demanding that individual expression and presentation be accepted and appreciated.
In closing, I’d like to return to the question: “What does it mean to be professional?” I have asked myself this question after many conversations with senior scholars who conceived of their commentary on my self-presentation as acceptable advice for “professional development.” To those scholars, professionalism consisted of critiquing a young woman’s body and the way she presents that body, without ever reading her writing, hearing her present her research, or watching her teach a class. This notion of professionalism must change.
Classicists must let go of the antiquated notion that purposeful self-decoration in any form, whether tattoos, piercings, hair dye, or makeup, undermines one’s professional skills, since such outward signifiers have no discernible negative influence on one’s effectiveness as a Classicist. The view that tattoos and piercings are distracting to one’s students, for example, has been disproven even in formal research. As a series of studies by the Harvard Business school recently suggested, students tend to see nonconforming individuals as more competent, viewing them as more autonomous. While these results necessarily become complicated across lines of race and gender, they demonstrate that attitudes toward atypical expressions of professionalism are changing. They also, admittedly, fill me with a smug sense of satisfaction.
I would add to the formal research that my biggest challenge to teaching as a green-haired, tattooed, pierced person is that my students are still half asleep when we attempt to translate Sententiae from Wheelock’s Latin Textbook at 8am. Even in my short stint teaching high school Latin, the 14-year-olds in my class were far more distracted by their desire to steal one another’s shoes (yes, really) or to sneak a peek at their cell phones than they were by my self-decoration. In fact, I have never once gotten the impression that my students view my body modifications as an impediment to my professionalism. Their respect for me as a dedicated Latinist reinforces what I already know to be true: my outward expression can exist harmoniously with my career as a classicist. These parts of my identity are in no way at odds with one another.
In order for us all to be better students, colleagues, and mentors, we must put constant pressure on ourselves and others to challenge expectations of what a classicist should look like. If we do feel the urge to suggest that someone change their appearance in order to be taken more seriously, we must first ask ourselves why we feel this way. Is there actually anything about the way this person looks that stands in the way of their ability to do their job? With what biases are we approaching this interaction? Second, we must consider how we can take the onus of change off of those being “othered” and put it onto those in our field who have the power to undercut norms of professionalism.
Considering these questions will be an important step in moving conversations about “othering” beyond our scholarship and into our everyday practice; we must value and support those who pose a challenge to the powers that be rather than alienate them. Failure to do prevents academic spaces from fully achieving their radical and non-conforming potential. In the end, I see my self-decoration as my own small, daily form of resistance. As feminist academic Emma Rees recently wrote, “if [my critics] don’t like or understand that ‘form of resistance’ perhaps they’ve simply misunderstood what a university is for.”
Kelly McArdle is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she received her MA in 2018. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Classics and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.
