Body Sign C

On July 2, 1970, artist VALIE EXPORT had herself tattooed in Frankfurt in public. The action was a paradigmatic embodiment of her radical feminist and artistic work methods: her own body was permanently and painfully marked with a garter in order to reveal the functionalization and role of women as sexual objects. The garter—a fetish of male sexual fantasies—reflected her social determination through men. As philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “One is not born as a woman, one is made into one.” VALIE EXPORT writes about her “Body Sign Action”: “Tattooing the body demonstrates the connection between ritual and civilization. In the tattoo the garter appears as a sign of a past enslavement, clothing as the suppression of sexuality, the garter as an attribute of a femininity not determined by ourselves. A social ritual that covers up one of the physical needs, the opposition of our culture to the body is revealed. The garter as a sign of belonging to a class that demands specific behavior becomes a memory. The female body strips off, throws away the stamp of a world that till now was not the world of women, in order to arrive at a human world in which feminine existence is self-determined.