Marking Exaggerated Realities: Representation and Reception of Tattoo Cultures Through Reality Television

The growth of tattoo-based reality television (RTV) over the past 15-plus years has contributed to making heavily tattooed bodies and “tattoo stories” more accessible to mainstream audiences. For many viewers, tattoo-based RTV acts as a lens into “tattoo cultures” which may profoundly shape their understanding of tattooed bodies. This prompts heavily tattooed individuals to attempt to resecure their subcultural identity from nascent mainstreaming. As such, this thesis explores the changing role of tattoos within popular culture and the potential role of RTV in that shift. Using a mixed-methods approach combining critical analysis of three influential tattoo-based RTV texts (LA Ink, Ink Master, and Just Tattoo of Us) with in-depth interviews of heavily tattooed individuals, I explore and analyze how heavily tattooed community members understand these reality television texts, and associate with their subcultural identity.

Contributing to fields of study in reality television, audience, (sub)culture, celebrity, and the sociology of tattooing, this thesis makes key conceptual interventions to understand reality television and its relationship to subcultural belonging in late modernity. I introduce an original model, the “Spectrum of Cultural Legitimacy,” which applies Bourdieusian (1984) concepts of taste, cultural legitimacy, and subcultural capital to RTV production, content, and reception. This helps to explain the complex relationship tattoo-based RTV holds with the changing class dynamics of contemporary subculture. I have developed the concept of an “Integrity Ethos,” which expands upon and critiques David C. Lane’s (2020) concept of an “old school ethic” in tattoo cultures to describe the desire to maintain subcultural boundaries. The thesis is split into three key themes: first, viewer expectations for RTV; second, viewer education and the ethics of representation; and finally, the significance of narrative and affective meaning creation in tattoo-based RTV which recognizes the emergence of an artist-as-therapist trope and locates tattooing within the contemporary politics of care.