The Department of Gender Studies Speakers' Series invites you to a presentation by Gina Snooks, Master of Gender Studies candidate.

What motivates women to have their skin permanently inked? By using an auto/biographical approach to storytelling as a feminist practice, I study tattoo stories as embodied life narratives through which women perform subjectivity. Thus, framed within feminist scholarship that thinks of the body as a powerful symbolic form and as a site marked with cultural, social, and political meaning, I examine tattoos as social billboards. More specifically, I theorize ways in which tattoos function as scripts that communicate the gendered performances of everyday life that are entangled with broader sociocultural and political discourses about women and spirituality. In other words, I am interested in the ways that tattoos tell stories about women’s lives.