Page - 141 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

The Tattoos of Armenian Genocide Survivors | 141www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 this idea implied a “pure” community, cleansed of “Turkification” – an ideal that the tattooed women carrying visible reminders of it on their faces hardly fit. Among the aides, Jinks states, a “national reconstructionist humanitari- anism” prevailed that urged for a recreation of the Armenians as a people: “Women, as child-bearers and custodians of domesticity, had to epitomize Ar- menianness.”64 In the context of this national reconstruction, not all women were perceived as equally recuperable. With the formation of a stable Armeni- an identity as a key goal in the process of nation-building, the tattooed wom- en turned into a threat. Since their tattoos were perceived as “an extreme social transgression. […] most rescuers shrank from the women – suspicious also that the tattoos indicated an individual’s transculturation, and thus di- vided national loyalties.”65 Concluding Remarks The regulation of the Armenian women’s bodies by means of tattoos was not a random occurrence. The tattoos were not simply the result of living togeth- er, that is, of adapting to a custom. Those who regulated the women’s bodies had an aim. But beneath all of the sexual, religious, and ethnic ideals, we find one main concern: making women’s bodies the same – the same as the tattooed bodies and the same as the non-tattooed bodies. For their captors, this involved appropriating the body, by reshaping it according to their own will. For their fellow Armenians and foreign volunteers, it involved cleansing the body of sexual evidence, of an alien religion and ethnicity. However, while the application of the tattoos was certainly coercive, it remains unclear how much agency the women had in the process of their removal. Having been assimilated into a community they did not want to be a part of and excluded from the community to which they felt they belonged; the tattooed women did not fully belong to any group.66 After their escape, delin- eating themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide would have been a logical step toward reinstating their belonging to the Armenian community. Because of their tattooed bodies, the women did not have the chance to re- 64 Jinks 2018, 94. 65 Jinks 2018, 91–94, 102, 105, 110. 66 Jinks similarly notes: “as “captives” held in “slavery” by these marks, they were not fully part of Bedouin society, but neither could they fully rejoin the Armenian community.” See Jinks 2018, 106.