Margot Mifflin

Margot Mifflin
Born	September 12, 1960 (1960-09-12) (age 51) Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Occupation	Book author, freelance journalist, professor, lecturer
Nationality	American
margotmifflin.com

A book author, freelance journalist, and feminist critic, Margot Mifflin has written about art, fiction, pop culture, and women's issues (specifically, popular culture from a feminist slant and the cultural politics of transgressive bodies) for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, The Believer, and Salon.com.

Mifflin is best known for Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, a seminal study of the implicit politics of tattooed women and female tattooists. In a review published in Women's Art Journal, the feminist cultural critic Claudia Springer quotes Mifflin's assertion, in Bodies of Subversion, that "positioned against the shifting social backdrop of Western culture in the last century, tattoos serve as touchstones for women's changing roles and evolving concerns during the most progressive era in women's history, and as visual passkeys to the psyches of women who are rewriting accepted notions of feminine beauty and self-expression."

In The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, Mifflin's 2009 contribution to the subgenre of American historical studies known as the pioneer captivity narrative, she recounts the slaughter of Oatman's family by marauding Yavapai Indians near the Gila River in Arizona, Oatman's abduction, and her subsequent assimilation into Mohave tribal culture---so much so that she consented to the chin tattoo that was a traditional signifier of femininity, among the Mohave. Mifflin considers Oatman's transformation from Mormon pioneer girl into what the Victorians melodramatically called a "white savage," analyzing the significance of her years among the Mohave and ultimate return to white society in light of Victorian gender politics.

On her blog Otherspoon, L.A. Neumann notes that Mifflin "works to correct the record about Oatman's tenure with the Mohave, releasing the story from the 'savage Indian' rhetoric so prolific at the time, and by calling into question the facts of the story, hitherto unexamined, as well as the implications of Oatman's 'marked' status as a woman returned to the white world....There is much evidence that Olive did not wish to return to the whites, that she was fully integrated in the soon-to-decline Mohave culture, and that she had found there the family that she desired after her own was slaughtered by the Yavapai...At a time when feminine modesty was culturally dictated, she displayed her chin tattoo to audiences across the United States."

Reviewing Mifflin's book in the June 2009 issue of E-History, Linda Long-Van Brocklyn argues that "Olive was both defiant and pliant, qualities that most likely aided her acculturation to the Mohave and then back to white middle class norms. At times, she used her very oddity as a tattooed former female captive to open doors to public authority and income. While much of the money and some of the acclaim went to Stratton, Olive enjoyed status derived from her experience and what she had to say about it. Her brother, on the other hand, despite his status as a survivor and crusader to recover his sisters, never enjoyed the same public role and fell on desperate financial circumstances several times over the course of his life. Likewise, Olive was able to successfully turn away from her life of travel and lecture to fashion a life as a middle class housewife. While friends and neighbors knew her story, she relegated it to the past, covered her tattoo, and built a new life with her husband and daughter...By most accounts, she was a Mohave upon her return to white America. She re-acculturated to white middle class life, hiding her fading tattoo to appear more like a 'normal' white woman."

Mifflin holds an M.A. in journalism from New York University and a B.A. in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she was friends with Barack Obama, an experience she has written about in her New York Times op-ed, "The Occidental Tourist."

She is an assistant professor in the English Department of Lehman College (City University of New York) and director of the Arts and Culture program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Bibliography

• Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. Juno Books, 1997. ISBN 1890451002
• The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ISBN 0803211481

External links

• Margot Mifflin, author website
• Department of English, Lehman College, CUNY website
• The Blue Tattoo, prologue
• "Taking It On The Chin"
• "Prof. Margot Mifflin Writes Biography of 19th Century Pioneer Olive Oatman"
• "The Occidental Tourist"
• Otherspoon review of The Blue Tattoo
• Blogcritics review of The Blue Tattoo
• Claudia Springer review of Bodies of Subversion
• "A Blank Human Canvas: The Literary Tattoo Leaps From the Page to Living Parchment"
• "This Toy Story Lacks Feminist Plot"
• "Lollipop Politics"
• Entertainment Weekly articles by Margot Mifflin
• The Real Calamity Jane
• The Hunger Artist
• The Shock of the Real: An Interview with Karen Finley
• Shrek is Not Shrek!

Persondata
Name	Mifflin, Margot
Alternative names
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Date of birth	1960-09-12
Place of birth	Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Date of death
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