Page - 133 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

The Tattoos of Armenian Genocide Survivors | 133www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 rian recounts how her mother tried to remove her tattoos, which led to further injury: “But they used to laugh at me. I did not know Armenian. There were blue tattoos on my face. My poor mother tried to remove them with nitric acid, but it burnt my skin. It corroded my skin and left scars up to this day.”35 But often it was North Americans and Europeans who prevented the re- integration of the tattooed women into Armenian communities: Jinks states that only Karen Jeppe accepted all Armenian women into her women’s house without discrimination. The tattooed women rarely appear in the records and fundraising materials, an indicator of the discomfort surrounding tat- toos among relief workers. Moreover, there was an “obsession”, as Jinks calls it, with removing the tattoos surgically. Doctors working for relief missions asked for advice on how to remove the tattoos, while publications printed photographs of successful operations.36 The women were thus assimilated into a foreign tattooed community, while being excluded from their own non-tattooed community, into which they could be reassimilated through the removal of the tattoos. Three aspects of these pro- cesses of regulation were especially relevant: sexuality, religion, and ethnicity. Regulating Sexuality Many of Smeaton’s findings suggest that tattooing among the communities she observed was sexually meaningful. She writes about women who tattooed themselves in order to keep – or lose – their husband’s love. In other cases, tattooing was supposed to induce pregnancy: interestingly, the tattoos were to be applied on the second or third day of menstruation. Smeaton speculates that tattooing might have constituted a puberty rite for girls, who were most- ly tattooed around the time they reached puberty, or at least before they got married. One could also argue that these sexual connotations were reflected in the places on the body where these tattoos were applied, for example on the abdomen, in a line going down from the navel (fig. 8).37 These areas are not visible on the photographs of the Armenian women. However, one eyewitness report also suggests a sexual motivation behind the tattoos: Tagouhi Antonian states that through the tattoos, the Bedouins pro- tected them from the Turkish “harem”: “There we spoke Armenian with each 35 Svazlian 2011, 446. 36 Jinks 2018, 78, 90–91, 100, 107. 37 Smeaton 1937, 54–57.