The title of this recording is "Maia Berryman-Kemp - Rainbow Studies Now". It is described as: Maia Berryman-Kemp presents at the Rainbow Studies Now symposium, held on 23 November 2023 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. It was recorded in Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn, Wellington on the 23rd November 2023. Maia Berryman-Kemp is presenting.  Their name is spelt correctly but may appear incorrectly spelt later in the document. The duration of the recording is 13 minutes, but this may not reflect the actual length of the proceedings. A list of correctly spelt content keywords and tags can be found at the end of this document. A brief description of the recording is: Maia Berryman-Kemp presents at the Rainbow Studies Now symposium, held on 23 November 2023 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. The content in the recording covers the decades 2010s through to the 2020s. A brief summary of the recording is: The presentation by Maia Berryman-Kemp delves into the complex interplay between tattoos, identity, and social constructs. Berryman-Kemp, who has a significant number of tattoos themselves, uses their body art as a lens to explore broader themes of self-expression, societal norms, and the tension between personal and collective identities. The presentation begins with Berryman-Kemp highlighting the distinction between their indigenous ta moko and their queer tattoos. The ta moko, obtained at 17, represents more than personal choice; it signifies family, growth, and protection, reflecting the indigenous belief in tattoos as a communal and identity-affirming practice. In contrast, their queer tattoos, which include a mix of playful and symbolic designs, represent a more individualistic approach, showcasing personal beliefs and preferences. Berryman-Kemp further discusses the intersection of indigenous and queer identities through their tattoos. They point out the stereotypical perceptions and misunderstandings surrounding indigenous tattoos in the broader context of society, noting how these tattoos often signify deeper communal and historical connections, contrasting with the more individual-focused nature of queer and Western tattoos. The presentation also touches on the transformative power of tattoos. Berryman-Kemp recounts a personal experience where their shark tattoo, initially a symbol of tribal heritage, became a source of confidence and self-reassurance. This shift in meaning underscores the fluidity of tattoo symbolism and its impact on personal identity and perception. Critically, Berryman-Kemp addresses the problematic aspects of Western tattoo culture, including the appropriation of indigenous styles and the commercialization of body art. They critique the superficial adoption of indigenous tattoo practices by non-indigenous individuals, highlighting the cultural insensitivity and ignorance often involved in such acts. In conclusion, Berryman-Kemp calls for a more nuanced understanding of tattoos, advocating for a perspective that respects the complex interplay of personal choice, cultural heritage, and societal influence. They emphasize the need to recognize tattoos as both individual expressions and reflections of broader social and cultural narratives. The full transcription of the recording follows.  It includes timestamps every thirty seconds in the format [HH:MM:SS].  The transcription begins:  Kia ora. Ko Ranginui kei runga, ko Papatuanuku kei raro, ko ngā tāngata kei wānganui. Te korowai o te kaihanga, te korowai o māhinga, ko haraina mai i runga i a tātou. Kaore au te mōhio o kupu mārea, i ngāri, ko te māngainui au, me e tika ana kia mihi atu, kia mihi mai. The Abstract advertised a visual autoethnographic chronology, which is just kind of one too many syllables for people are really [00:00:30] nosy about my tattoos, and I thought that I'd use that to make sure I didn't talk to a bunch of empty seats. So, thank you for being nosy. To set out some scope, I recently counted and I have 36 tattoos, 37 as of next Friday. Just describing each one in a 30 second speedrun would take 18 minutes and would provide no valuable academic insight aside from I probably need a hobby. Because of this, I'm going to be pulling out specific tattoos, which highlights the idea of this presentation. The use of [00:01:00] body practices as a tool for bridging the self and the social. The idea of bodies as an intersect between society and people isn't new, and has been handled extensively through the works of Foucault, Butler, Halberstam, and a load of other white people. The idea of indigenous bodies being particularly potent for this divide, has also been addressed by a load of white people, typically in line with the argument that the natives are grounded bodies, therefore they are dense, and the civil European is a creature of the enlightened mind. I thought [00:01:30] the earth was flat, so that's going well. Queer theory has also flung the idea of a body self society around, typically with the postmodern flair that the discipline is known for. However, as with most work in this sector, there have been a series of invisible lines put in place. The native shall never, ever, ever, ever have control. They cannot understand. Their massive heads are simply too big for their thoughts to meet, and they just cross like ships in the night. Second, the truth of a person can be known, [00:02:00] and it's not like the entirety of existential philosophy in coming of age media is any indication this might not be the case. Third, you get to have one marginalized entity. You're either gender or you're native. As any social scientist will tell you, these lines are nonsense and a product of their various contexts. In reality, no one's brain is actually that remarkable, given we routinely derive entertainment from hen, cat, mate, funny. The quest for the self is a regrettably ongoing [00:02:30] expedition, and everyone identifies and is identified as everything all the time post modernism. Yay. Bearing in mind that it might not be possible to draw any truth at all from my tattoos, I wanted to turn our collective attention, or at least the ones I still have, to the experiences that I have had with my tattoos. The first tattoo I ever got was this ta moko. I got it when I was 17 in an almost impressively racist high school. Those who are able to read moko will pull out some characteristics. It's on my [00:03:00] left thigh. Second, it features this mania piece on top, which is the thing that kind of looks like a heart. Um, It's a Guardian design used to protect the bearer. It features poutama within koru, an indicator of growth through achievement. And it's red, because red's my favourite colour. That's literally it. Sorry to break the big, wise, noble, indigenous illusion I was making. But when I'm asked about my first tattoo, I don't say it was my moko. I say it was that one. Though there are overlaps [00:03:30] which could make the distinction seemingly unnecessary because my moko is about family and my tattoos are about family, moko and tattoo are not the same. Though those outside indigenous tattoos would likely see moko and pierre or tunit as tattoos with just a brown flare, I categorize them as two different things. It's well recorded in literature and tattooing that it's serves two different functions. It indicates group identity and it individuates. This is the first tension between [00:04:00] queer and indigenous embodiment. My queer tattoos, including my gender deviant king and queen, bisexual safo quote, I wish I was joking, and soft lesbian mermaid are not the same as my moko. My indigenous tattoo can't be described and it wasn't my choice. It doesn't represent an idea of the self as is, it represents an idea of the self as it can and has been. The second tension is demonstrated through these two absolute gems. That are [00:04:30] permanently attached to me. Though they look solid enough, this one was done in a horse cart on a random setting. Saturday by a guy who took vape breaks, and this one is too many leaks. They, in looking at tattoos as art, are complete and utter failures. I literally wheel these out as parties to make people laugh. I cried. When I got the spider, genuinely, I left the studio and just had a rom com run through the wind to my mate's house. I was [00:05:00] just sobbing on their doorstep. It's the only tattoo I actually genuinely regret. The horse cart, though it's messy and not that meaningful and probably technically worse, because one of the hands looks broken in some way, is a tattoo I would never take back. I got it exclusively to make a friend happy, to provide something so ridiculous that she would have no choice but to laugh at it. From the reasoning that I game, magic should take too long to start, to the [00:05:30] tattoo itself, the aftercare that came in a ketchup sauce container, and the fact that my legs went dead so I fell out of the cart on the way out. There's absolutely no dignity in this tattoo. But she laughed, and we still reference it, and that makes it worth it. For indigenous tattooing, it is the process which matters just as much, if not more, than the design itself. It is the relationships built and sustained, the environment and the shared narratives built, which gives the [00:06:00] tattoo reason to exist at all. For queer and often white tattooing, it is the design that matters. What it means and represents of the self, what it indicates to others, and its use as a tool of empowerment. Artists are often found based on their ability to tattoo the design, not because of who they are. The third tension comes from this piece, and I want to say thanks mum for taking the photos, I see you are on here. The shark initially had meaning as the name of my tribe and the [00:06:30] hammerhead's role in saving us from Parata when we migrated from Hawai'i. This tattoo is coupled with an octopus on my opposing arm to signify the whakatauki kau e mate wheke e mate ururoa. But these meanings have since faded into the background. A new meaning has risen, which happened on December 25th of 2021. I was on the beach with my brother, having the dreaded experience of an insecure fat kid walking back from swimming. My shorts were clinging to [00:07:00] me, my hair was wild, and my face was bright red. I then encountered the greatest enemy I have ever known. Male youths. Immediately, I jumped to the worst. I was on a beach. Come on, there's a whale joke to be made there. Without thinking, I turned around to walk backwards, bearing my shark tattoo to them. I walked straighter, confident that they wouldn't see the squish of my arms, but be drawn instead to the massive shark on them. Came back to Wellington with a new mission. Tattoos were no longer fun little things I wanted to [00:07:30] remember. I needed to be covered. Rather than plowing down the self love tract, which hadn't worked for the better part of a decade and is relatively difficult to maintain, when there is a 224 billion market in weight loss, a search for the word fat on Twitter pulls up genuinely the most unnecessary cruelty, and 63 percent of my peers are genuinely afraid of looking like me. I fashioned myself into a sketchbook. Comments on my body have since shifted from [00:08:00] somewhat well meaning remarks about how I could be pretty if I lost weight, somehow lost four inches of height, and straightened my hair, while also embracing my curves, embracing my curls, and focused on growing to a supermodel height, to, oh, wow. Whether they love them or hate them, people be commenting on these tattoos. For the first time since I was 12, I've routinely worn singlets and bared my arms. My body has gone from something threatening unintentionally to something I can understand. I [00:08:30] can blame the side eyes, the crossing the street, and the general discomfort people have with my body on those, not the body features or the person themselves. I'm not saying that queer people or white women don't exist. from their bodies. Certainly restrictions on gender affirming care and reproductive agencies would show they do. But tattoos for these groups are almost always framed as self empowering. Asserting a true self which is at odds with what is expected of them. Crucially, these markings are voluntary, and to kind of [00:09:00] pick up from Ezra, they take place on a blank canvas. My father, before getting his Tamilcore, was already marked. He was a tall, big, brown man. Before I had tattoos, I'm fat and vaguely ethnic, although my pale skin lets me get away with a lot more than my darker family. As much as you shouldn't need to, and there's something to be said about validating feelings, which I'm not very good at, You can hide queerness, and white women can perform femininity and be rewarded for it. [00:09:30] Indeed, a lot of queer people and white women are drawn to tattooing explicitly because it marks and stigmatizes them. It makes a normative body queer and a white feminine body dangerous. Tattooing is an easy way for visibly privileged people to bridge the gap between their non normative self and normative body by tapping into a cultural property associated with marginalization. Indigenous and police bodies don't need this. We have it already. Indeed, every time a white queer gets a tattoo in a [00:10:00] visible place to signal they're an outsider, or cool, or butch, it means that the communities the stigma derives fromindigenous, incarcerated, and working class people have that stigma reinforced, and can't escape the negative implications of that. So we have three tensions. The tattoo for the self or the other, tattoos as a process or as a body modification, and tattoos as the first or final mark on the skin canvas. This is not to say that all non indigenous tattoos are selfish, or all [00:10:30] indigenous tattoos are selfless, just that these are the trends the designs tend to follow. I've ran out of ideas. Where tattoos have tried to bridge, it's been a problematic train work that you kind of have to admire. Brutal Black is a project by two white artists explicitly focusing on the process and obligations of tattoos. Which sounds great. Until one of the artists said their style was ignorant, violent and primitive, and the other said their goal was to make people look like [00:11:00] savages. Primitive and tribal when Western tattoos try to challenge the individual design ethos They tend to just rip off the indigenous mode and you end up with weird neo primitives who connect to their base animal Instincts by going native clearly less civilized when indigenous tattooers cater to individual sensibilities It's hardly any more successful. Last year, a woman went under fire for receiving her moko kauai, traditional chin tattoo, in white ink. Her [00:11:30] reasoning was to be different, not harsh, and more elegant than the darker tattoos. When Māori then challenged her on it, she switched to say she got white explicitly because it was bolder. Trying to make moko kauai unique to the bearer doesn't actually work because it isn't right for the bearer to make those decisions. So how do we resolve this? We do the anthropology thing, and we look at the people. My tattoos are Māori and queer, because I am. I chose not to ask for a facial [00:12:00] moko as I knew that moko kauai now means woman and mataora now means man. I chose the graphic illustrative style and red accents of my non Māori tattoos because they blend with my moko. To break down that final line, people are not just queer or native. Tattoos are not just social or personal. How the self is perceived as a relational entity seems anti theatrical to the purposes of tattoos, which bi practically can't be shared, unless you take off your skin like the world's worst secret [00:12:30] Santa. Yet despite the fact that overwhelming consensus characterizes tattoos as the exteriorization of the interior, indigenous peoples have seen them as signs that the interior and exterior Self and social are one and the same. Queerness, slowly moving away from prioritizing the perfect representation of an individual to something more collective, is also making moves to position gender as something both placed and held by a person. Within this messy dialogue, [00:13:00] tattoos provide a startling permanence. Their existence can't be denied or rewritten. Similarly, the individual and relational nature of people can't be denied or rewritten. I have two chairs tattooed on my arms. They mean absolutely nothing. I haven't even retrospectively been able to put meaning on them. They're chairs. They're just chairs. They're mine, on my body, of my choice. Probably not an informed one, but of my choice. But they are also [00:13:30] others. They impact how people see me, what they make of me, and what they think a tattoo should be for. We're back to taste classifies and classifies the classifier, because what is a social scientist if not the shadow of Bordeaux? Kia Ora. The full transcription of the recording ends. A list of keywords/tags describing the recording follow. These tags contain the correct spellings of names and places which may have been incorrectly spelt earlier in the document. The tags are seperated by a semi-colon: 2010s ; 2020s ; Maia Berryman-Kemp ; People ; Rainbow Studies Now: Legacies of Community (2023) ; Ta moko ; Wellington ; accents ; bisexual ; body art ; broken ; butch ; choice ; class ; collective ; colour ; coming of age ; communal identity ; connect ; design ; deviant ; dignity ; empowerment ; entertainment ; environment ; escape ; face ; family ; fat ; feelings ; femininity ; fire ; fun ; gender ; hair ; hate ; horse ; identity ; indigenous peoples ; individual ; legs ; lesbian ; loss ; love ; mania ; media ; nature ; other ; outsider ; parties ; police ; queen ; queer ; queer theory ; relationships ; representation ; school ; self expression ; self love ; ships ; shorts ; signs ; social ; stigma ; swimming ; symbolism ; takatāpui ; tattoo ; tension ; theatrical ; tika ; time ; top ; truth ; walking ; whakatauki ; wind ; wish ; women ; work ; working class. The original recording can be heard at this website https://www.pridenz.com/rainbow_studies_now_maia_berryman_kemp.html. The master recording is also archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.  For more details visit their website https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.1107378. Please note that this document may contain errors or omissions - you should always refer back to the original recording to confirm content.