FÖRELÄSNING  av RIKKE ANDREASSEN
LÖRDAG 18/1 kl 15.00

At the turn of the twentieth century, a medical doctor researched tattoos among poor, marginalized women in Copenhagen. While most women had the name of their male lover engraved, quite a high number had the name of their female lover tattooed on their skin. In this talk, I follow in the footstep of some of the women, who engaged in female same-sex relationships at the turn of the twentieth century. Differently from the medical doctor, who saw the tattoos as evidence of the women’s depraved morals, I show how the women’s tattoos can be understood as attempts to reclaim their marginalized positions, resist oppression and create community. As such, the tattoos are a window through which we can gain understanding of women’s same-sex relations and rebellions in the past.

Illustrations from the doctor’s research on tattoos, from women´s in 1891.

Rikke Andreassen is Professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is leading the research project ’Queer women 1880-2020’

The lecture is followed by a conversation about Queer archives and how to work with Violent archives (from police, medical records etc, that often condemn both queerness and tattoos) with Rikke Andreassen, Marie Lunau (post doc researcher) and Pia Laskar (history of ideas and behind QRAB -Querrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek).