Stigma

The Machinery of Inequality

Imogen Tyler

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786993328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Stigma is a corrosive social force by which individuals and communities throughout history have been systematically dehumanised, scapegoated and oppressed. From the literal stigmatizing (tattooing) of criminals in ancient Greece, to modern day discrimination against Muslims, refugees and the 'undeserving poor', stigma has long been a means of securing the interests of powerful elites. In this radical reconceptualisation Tyler precisely and passionately outlines the political function of stigma as an instrument of state coercion. Through an original social and economic reframing of the history of stigma, Tyler reveals stigma as a political practice, illuminating previously forgotten histories of resistance against stigmatization, boldly arguing that these histories provide invaluable insights for understanding the rise of authoritarian forms of government today.

Chapter 1

The penal tattoo

Every power, including the power of law, is written first of all on the backs of its subjects. … The law constantly writes itself on bodies. It engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects. … It makes its book out of them.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life¹

Even after two decades, the sound of a needle gun painfully scribbling Jeb Katri on my forehead is something that still haunts me and wakes me up in the middle of the night.

Parmeshri Devi, a Sansi woman tortured by the Punjabi police²

On 8 December 1993, five women were arrested near the Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple) in the city of Amritsar, Punjab, India. They were accused of a stealing a purse.³ The women, Gurdev Kaur, Parmeshri Devi, Mohinder Kaur, Hamir Kaur and Surjit Kaur, were imprisoned for eight days before being released on bail. A few days later Surjit was picked up again, and police garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through a local market.⁴ After Surjit had been publicly shamed in the marketplace, she and the other four women were taken to a police station in the Rambagh area of Amritsar where they were physically restrained by being tied to chairs. The police then sent for ‘a handheld needle gun, meant for marking utensils’ and proceeded to engrave the words Jeb Katri (pickpocket) on their foreheads.⁵ As Parmeshri recalls ‘as we writhed in pain, there was a power cut’, so the police chief ‘ordered his men to bring the battery of their official Gypsy [a police SUV vehicle], which they used to turn the machine back on and complete the permanent marking’.⁶

The penal tattooing of the women came to light when they were presented in court some days later on charges of theft. The police brought the women into the courtroom with their foreheads covered with dupattas (head scarves), but Parmeshri Devi defiantly unveiled her penal tattoo in front of the judge. At the time, nobody in the court seemed concerned by Devi’s revelation, however a newspaper report on the case in the Punjabi paper Ajit – crucially accompanied by a photograph of three of the women outside the court – later made the pages of two national newspapers.⁷

The women petitioned the Punjab and Haryana High Court for compensation for the torture and humiliation they had suffered and for plastic surgery to remove the tattoos. Responding to the newspaper coverage of the case, the Indian National Human Rights Commission of India intervened and in 1994 the court awarded costs for the removal of the tattoos.⁸ However, the treatment offered to the women at a local hospital didn’t involve the removal of the tattoos but only their over-writing. In desperation, the five resorted to borrowing money for a course of laser treatment at a private clinic. One of the women, Hamir, died before her tattoo had been fully removed.⁹

The police officers denied that they had tattooed the women, blaming others in the local community ‘fed up by their habit of pickpocketing’ who desired to ‘publicly shame them’.¹⁰ However, the surviving women continued in their struggle to bring the perpetrators to justice, and after a staggering twenty-three years an investigation by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation eventually led to some prosecutions. In October 2016, three of the policemen involved received prison sentences for forcibly tattooing the words Jeb Katri on the women’s foreheads.

Interviewed by journalists after the conviction of the police, the women and their families explained how they had suffered years of police harassment: ‘the police slapped many cases on all of us to pressurise us to not to give statement in court’.¹¹ Mohinder Kaur’s son Pappu described how he had been taunted at school as a consequence of his mother’s tattoo: schoolmates would stick paper notes with the words Mein jeb katri da beta han (I am the son of a pickpocket) on his back.¹² Parmeshri Devi’s son committed suicide by self-immolation, a consequence, she vehemently believes, of the social stigma and years of police harassment provoked by the case.

In Hindi, the closest word to the English word stigma is godna – a word meaning ‘to prick, puncture, to dot, to mark the skin with dots, to tattoo’ and ‘to wound or lacerate a person’s feelings’.¹³ This dual meaning of godna as designating psychological and/or bodily inscription resonates in the women’s accounts of their torture at the hands of the police. As Devi told a journalist: ‘we had to undergo torture for the past 23 years’.¹⁴

Stigma as inscription

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau reminds us that every power ‘is written on the backs of its subjects’, and that this inscription involves mediating instruments. As he writes:

In order for the law to be written on bodies, an apparatus is required that can mediate the relation between the former and the latter. From the instruments of scarification, tattooing, and primitive initiation to those of penal justice, tools work on the body. Formerly the tool was a flint knife or a needle. Today the instruments range from the police­man’s billyclub to handcuffs and the box reserved for the accused in the courtroom. These tools compose a series of objects whose purpose is to inscribe the force of the law on its subject, to tattoo him in order to make him demonstrate the rule, to produce a ‘copy’ that makes the norm legible.¹⁵

As de Certeau suggests, power is inscribed in bodies in ways that demonstrate the force of law – be that within more formal judicial contexts, or in broader social and cultural contexts of policing, discipline and control.

It is the argument of Stigma that the historical name for practices which describe these impressions of power is stigmatisation. Further, when we think of stigmata as literal inscriptions of power on the body, our attention is immediately drawn to the writing implements, to who is doing the marking, and for what purpose. The instruments used to impress stigma on the other extend from bloody implements of state violence to more symbolic forms of public shaming, including stigmatising visual and textual representations in popular media. This chapter draws on the long history of the penal tattoo, and associated violent practices of marking and public shaming to add depth to an understanding of stigma as a form of power written on the body. What emerges is an incredibly rich and expansive history of stigma as an inscriptive form of power.

The ancient penal history of stigma

The modern word ‘stigma’ originates in a clutch of Ancient Greek words, derived from the root stig-, meaning to prick or to puncture.¹⁶ In the essays ‘Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity’ (1984) and ‘Stigma and Tattoo’ (2000), classics scholar Christopher Jones transformed received understanding of the meaning of stigma in the Graeco-Roman world. Through meticulous research, Jones uncovered that in Ancient Greece the verb stizo was used to describe ink tattooing with needles or other sharp implements on human skin, and stigma described the resulting mark. In short, a stigma was an ink tattoo, an involuntary tattoo, pricked into human skin for ‘penal and property purposes’.¹⁷ As Jones and other classics scholars have revealed, penal stigmatisation was ‘routine’ and ‘entrenched’ in these ancient empires.

One of the first recorded uses of the word ‘stigma’ appears in a fragment of sixth-century BC poetry written by Asius of Samos, who uses the word stigmatias to describe ‘a marked slave’; and slaves are henceforth regularly and scornfully referred to with words such as literati (lettered), stigmatici (tattooed), inscripti (inscribed) and graptoi (written upon). Indeed, in the Graeco-Roman world, penal tattooing was a punishment reserved exclusively for non-citizens: slaves, indentured labourers, prisoners of war, other resident aliens or religious minorities. As Plato wrote in The Laws, a dialogue on the ethics of government, ‘if anyone is caught committing sacrilege, if he be a slave or a stranger, let his offence be written on his face and his hands’.¹⁸

Penal tattooing involved the inscription of words, symbols, and sometimes full sentences into the skin. These tattoos ‘usually consisted of the name of a crime’ inked into the face.¹⁹ Records of common stigmas include ‘Thief’ or ‘Stop me, I’m a runaway’, tattooed on the forehead.²⁰ If you survived the torture of being tattooed (without antiseptic) you would never be free of the stigma, the ‘disgrace, humiliation and exclusion’ remaining ‘indelibly written on one’s face for all to see’.²¹ As Mark Gustafson reflects, ‘the effects of a penal tattoo forcibly applied to the face’ must have been ‘deeply felt, devastating even’.²² Certainly, a tattoo on the face would have been difficult to conceal: ‘the gaze of the onlooker is virtually inescapable; there is little defence against it’.²³

Penal stigmatisation was intentionally visible, a public form of inscription designed to humiliate and inculcate shame. The Greek philosopher Bion (c. 325–c. 250BC) described how his father had ‘in place of his face … a document [syngraphen] on his face, the mark of his master’s harshness’.²⁴ The Byzantine chronicler Zonaras records a case from the eighth century of two brothers, Christian monks, whose religious worship of icons led to them having twelve lines of ‘execrable poetry’ tattooed on their faces.²⁵ Later sainted as Theodorus and Theophanes, these brothers came to be known by the surname Grapti, from the Greek ‘graptoi’, meaning written upon. Penal stigmatisation was a form of bodily inscription which, as the Roman emperor Valerius Maximus (AD 14–37) put it, turned the stigmatised into the ‘image of his own penalty’.²⁶

Page duBois draws our attention to a play written by Herondas in the third century BC, in which ‘a slave is tattooed on the forehead with the proverbial words “know thyself”’.²⁷ This tattooing was a punishment meted out by a mistress upon a slave who is her lover, but who ‘has lost sight of his position as a slave’ by cheating on her.²⁸ The choice of the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’ underscores the way in which a penal stigmatisation functioned as an injunction to a particular kind of self-knowledge: a mortifying punishment through which you were taught to ‘know yourself’ by ‘knowing your place’ in a highly stratified social order.²⁹ Stigmatisation was thus an act of pedagogical violence through which a person was tutored back into a place of unfreedom, and a means through which domestic slaves, indentured miners, soldiers, roadbuilders, munitions workers could be ‘marked for life with the insignia of their professions’ – stigmata signalled that your labour (and body) was owned by another.³⁰

This Graeco-Roman practice of writing a crime or criminal sentence into the skin adds a literal dimension to the practice of being sentenced. As Steven Connor suggests, in ‘the mark incised or pricked or burned upon the body of the criminal, the law precipitates a lasting sign of its action, the letter of the law made actual and present’.³¹ As a ‘running advertisement of one’s guilt and subjugation’, stigmatisation was designed to permanently lower your social status.³² For example, in Ancient Rome, where slaves could theoretically earn their freedom, a Roman law from the fourth century AD details that slaves who had been tattooed on account of a crime should never be allowed to become free citizens. If a tattooed slave later earned their freedom they were consigned ‘to the lowest possible category of free non-citizens’.³³ A penal tattoo (a stigma) relegated the stigmatised to a bottom rung in the extant social hierarchy. The letters on your body marked your exclusion from citizenship (and rights).

The Ancient Greeks associated voluntary tattooing, undertaken as an aesthetic and/or a religious practice, with ‘barbarians’ and in particular with their despised northern neighbours, the Thracians.³⁴ Surviving Greek pottery portrays Thracian women as marked with decorative tattoos.³⁵ Indeed, within the iconography of vase painting, Greek artists employed tattoos to visually differentiate Thracian women, other foreigners and enslaved people from their unmarked Greek superiors. In ‘Stigma and Tattoo’, Christopher Jones suggests that it was most likely because of this abject cultural association between tattoos and feminised foreign others that the Greeks developed the practice of tattooing slaves as a humiliating punishment. As we shall see, the association between voluntarily acquired tattoos and ‘barbarians’ was revived in eugenicist social scientific discourses in the nineteenth century, when the ta...