Tattoos of female probationers: discursive marks that engender the constitution of the subject through language

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the narratives that emerge through the discursive manifestations presented in the tattoos of adolescents on probation. The tattoo, conceived as a multimodal text, can be understood as one of the forms of language expression that imprints a style of its own on the discursive subject who expresses himself through the marks tattooed on his body. In the light of Bakhtinian postulates, we sought to understand the dialogic relationships that permeate the discourse revealed in the tattoos, which corroborate the signature of these subjects and their discursive marks, which are historical, social, and cultural. The methodology was qualitative and participant-based, using video recording and tattoos as data. Based on the three Bakhtinian categories "me-for-me", "me-for-the-others" and "others-for-me", it was observed that the discursive manifestations presented by the participants revealed marks of the gaze of the other, which imprinted and marked the gaze they had and have of themselves and that the tattoos as an ideological and multimodal sign reflected and refracted the realities of each of them.