Hard Cases: Prison Tattooing as Visual Argument

The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments-particularly for specific identities and social selves—in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. This essay points to some of the ways in which the body can be seen to function as argumentation per se, operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. Because of the social control exerted by the penitentiary, tattooing is uniquely important as an argumentative device within the social space of the penitentiary system. In this context, tattoos allow prisoners to make arguments and express values they otherwise cannot make or express.