Page - 136 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

136 | Ulrike Luise Glum www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 tooed were often those perceived as living at the margins of society: seafarers, soldiers, and, in the case of women, sex workers.40 The contemporary press echoes this sexualization of the tattoos. Figure 9 shows a page from the Standard-Examiner of 1920. In the upper right corner, an imagined scene involving the application of tattoos is drawn. A woman, nearly naked, is being pushed to the ground by three men. The choice of words in the headline is also striking: not only has a tattoo been removed, but the woman has been “cleansed” of the “cruel Turk’s brand of shame”.41 In an article from 1919 that appeared in the Prescott Journal Miner, Dr Post of Princeton University is recorded as claiming that the tattoos indicate that a woman had been “an inmate of a harem”.42 This context makes clearer why many missionaries and volunteer workers were reluctant to acknowledge the initial purpose of the tattoos as decorative. Instead, many described them as a type of disfigurement, a stigma,43 as marks of shame and slavery – what “delineated the rescued women as an outcast group”.44 This exclusion was closely connected to moral and sexual concerns, since the tattoos were permanent reminders of the women’s relationships with Muslim men: “the image of sexual subjection evoked by the tattoos was intolerable, and also a symbol that the women’s innocence and purity had been corrupted.”45 Jinks describes how, for this very reason, rescued women were regarded with suspicion and separated from the younger girls. Volun- teers felt particular unease in the case of mothers whose children were seen as a product of “sexual impurity” or even “miscegenation”. Many women, aware of this stigma, did not dare to return to the Armenian community. Because of their stigmatization and rejection, some were left with prostitution as the only means of survival – aggravating the condemnation from their environment.46 The sexual stigmatization entailed by the tattoos also affected how the women were seen by other Armenians, as the eyewitness accounts illustrate. 40 Jinks 2018, 101–102; Oettermann 2000, 193, 205–209. 41 https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/dlc_frenchbulldog_ver04/data/sn8402674 9/00280764711/1920090501/0636.pdf [accessed 28 December 2020]. 42 https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=906&dat=19191209&id=hncNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=D- FIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3752,3372070 [accessed 28 December 2020]. 43 Interestingly, classical Greek and Latin authors commonly used words derived from the noun stigma to refer to the practice of tattooing. See MacQuarrie 2000. 44 Jinks 2018, 106. 45 Jinks 2018, 105. 46 Jinks 2018, 105–106, 112–113.