Page - 132 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

132 | Ulrike Luise Glum www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 comb, while on the back of her hand, there are arrangements of circles and dots resembling suns. However, the hands depicted in figure 7 belonged to a Yazidi woman, which shows once more the similarities of the markings across ethnic groups. Inscribed and Erased: Regulating the Body through Tattoos According to the findings of Henry Field and Winifred Smeaton, the practice of tattooing in Asia Minor was rarely connected to coercion. Mostly, women served as tattooists, which highlights the link between this practice and gen- der. However, it was neither an inherited profession nor was it reserved for a certain ethnic or social group.32 While in non-Armenian communities, women were the agents and the tat- toos were seen as voluntary, for the Armenian women who were assimilated into these communities, the tattoo took on the opposite connotations. Along- side other bodily regulations, like rape and captivity, tattoos were a form of deprivation of physical integrity. Tattooing was a means of assimilation along with forced marriages, the imposition of non-Armenian names, and the com- pulsory learning of a new language.33 Haykoush Miridjan Ohanian describes how the process of being tattooed was connected to violence: “The Arabs held me, put me down on the ground and put a mill-stone on my breast. I was kick- ing my feet saying: ‘I don’t want’, and they wanted to tattoo my face, to make me look like an Arab girl.”34 Not only were the Armenian women brought into alignment with the women in their new communities, but their old identities were supposed to be overwritten. It was the visual level that made the assim- ilation evident and irreversible: Through the tattoos, a line was to be drawn between the Armenian women and the Armenian community, between the Armenian women and their “Armenian-ness”. For those Armenian women who escaped their captors, their tattooed bod- ies were once again a matter of regulation, both within the women’s refuges (often led by Christian missionaries) and within groups composed of other Ar- menians. A tattoo symbolized a disgraceful memory and was therefore to be ig- nored, suppressed, and, in the best case, removed from the skin. Gayané Adou- 32 Smeaton 1937, 54–60. 33 Derderian 2005, 10–12. 34 Svazlian 2011, 338.