Michael Atkinson's Interview with the Spec

Spec Interview

Hendrik Poinar Sept. 14

Ian Bruce November 2

Gurmit Singh December 14

Michael Atkinson January 24

Milena Head February 8

Alison Sills March 8

Brian McCarry April 12

Allison Sekuler May 10

Past Lectures
January 2003-June 2003

Past Lectures
September 2003-May 2004

Professor Michael Atkinson

The following article is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator, McMaster University’s partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.

Art, academe and the body mystique
Rob Faulkner

The Hamilton Spectator
November 25, 2004

A professor's research usually fills a journal, lines a bookshelf or feeds a lecture.

Rarely does it start at his wrists, spread up both arms and create a vivid tapestry of tattoos.

Rolling up his sleeve, McMaster sociologist Michael Atkinson, 33, shows where it all began.

With a Guns 'n' Roses logo on his left shoulder, replete with crossed revolvers and prickly blooms.

"I was 18, living in Halifax and had no idea what I was doing," he admits of his souvenir from a dank studio on a downtown pier.

"It was after a concert ... and, like most people, I don't regret my first tattoo.

"I just regret what I got."

Now, 15 years later, you can also see how Atkinson's PhD work at the University of Calgary got under his skin.

He shattered the old thinking that tattooed folk were a single community of outsiders, united by a lack of self-control when it came to own their bodies.

He's added to his G 'n' R logo with a family crest, fish, a crooked dagger, a sacred heart and his mom's name in a banner against the backdrop of a neo-primitivist pattern.

"It was a way for me, sociologically, to try to understand the experience," said Atkinson, who's been at Mac two years and teaches on research methods, body stigmata, deviance and sport.

"It's very different hearing someone say, 'People treat me differently because of my tattoos,' and having people on the street look at you."

But recently, people have been looking at Atkinson for all the right reasons. Last month he won the $25,000 Aurora Prize from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, recognizing him as 2004's outstanding new researcher and praising his original insights and rigorous fieldwork. The council's decision was unanimous.

Just three years after his PhD, he's overthrown conventional wisdom on tattoos. He says that, when one in five people have tattoos, they're not signs of delinquency. Instead, they're a mainstream way to assert individuality; a way to chronicle personal growth.

They are used -- in subcultures like straight-edge (clean-living) punks and urban neo-primitivists (who challenge civilization) -- as an artistic way to counter the commercial tattooing that exploded in the '80s and '90s.

In addition to getting tattoos, Atkinson's fieldwork saw him interview the tattooed and tattooers for a thesis that became his 2003 book, Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of Body Art.

Thankfully, his publisher shortened his thesis title, Miscreants, Malcontents and Mimesis: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Transformation in the Canadian Tattoo Figuration.

In interviews, a rape victim told him how a tribal tattoo was a way to reclaim her body; feminists got wartime pin-up girl tattoos to defang the images of chauvinism; straight-edge Maritime kids (who don't smoke, drink or do drugs) make pacts with their bodies through slogans like True 'til Death and Down For Life.

Even after being interviewed by CBC hosts Evan Solomon and Sheila Rogers, Atkinson says he gets little respect from his dad, Anthony, a University of Waterloo accounting prof.

Atkinson says his dad asks, "Don't you do statistics?" and only begrudgingly lets tattoo sociology into academe.

"But I want to take my research to the people with tattoos, not just my colleagues," said Atkinson, whose interest in masculinity and body modification also takes him into the realms of sports violence, megarexia (opposite of anorexia) and male cosmetic surgery.

On the latter, Atkinson sees gaps in existing research, as he did on female tattooing.

He's heard all about the pressures on women in the face of the Extreme Makeover and Nip/Tuck TV phenomenon.

But why are growing numbers of men going under the knife?

"It's not like men's roles in society are shifting. They already shifted and sociology totally missed it," said Atkinson, noting the rise of male cosmetics, plastic surgery, manicures and makeovers.

He's not taking anything for granted. Does male cosmetic surgery spring from social pressures, a desire for self-improvement, an unattainable beauty ideal or, possibly, male insecurity as women advance in the work world?

And the young prof, raised in Bedford, N.S., Waterloo, Vancouver, Pittsburgh and Kingston, isn't content to be a detached observer. So people wonder what work he will have done on himself as he pursues his cosmetic-surgery research.

"I have a few ideas," he says. His shortlist includes getting his dental veneers done (which he calls "cheesy" because it's so minor). Or corrective laser eye surgery (so the avid runner and cyclist doesn't have to wear glasses). Then there's the remnants of his PhD paunch.

"Over the last two years, I've lost 55 pounds, after ballooning up due to all the bad food and crazy hours during my PhD," he says, noting how different it is to see doctors as a patient and not an academic researcher.

"Skin doesn't have the same elasticity it had when you were 12, so I have a little area on each side that didn't snap back," says the prof, who takes his fieldwork seriously. "They can do that in about five seconds."

This lecture is free of charge and open to the public.

To register for a spot, call
905-525-9140, ext. 24934, or send an e-mail to sciencecity@mcmaster.ca.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the talk begins at 7 p.m.