By Victoria Pitts
The Nineties observed the dramatic upward thrust of extraordinary kinds of physique amendment, which incorporated the tattoo renaissance and the increase in physique piercing, the emergence of neo-tribal practices like scarification and flesh placing, and the discovery of latest, high-tech different types of physique paintings like subdermal implants. This ebook, in line with years of interviews with physique modifiers through the usa, is either sympathetic and significant and gives the main accomplished examine this phenomenon. From punk rock to "modern primitives," from queer sadomasochism to cyberpunks, sociologist Victoria Pitts presents perception into the complete variety of physique amendment subcultures. no matter if by way of turning themselves into girl punks, neo-tribal "primitives" or technological know-how fiction cyborgs, physique modifiers are engaged within the venture of "reclaiming" their our bodies from the computer of contemporary lifestyles. Pitts explores the connections among physique amendment and modern struggles over intercourse and gender, and common attitudes approximately id, intake, and the body.
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Extra info for In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification
Example text
To psychologist Corinee Sweet, it’s all just self-mutilation. “From my experience as a counselor, what we do on the surface nearly always has some deep structure behind it. 9 Among the problems of the self-mutilation argument is that it uncritically relies on a classical ideal of the skin as a pristine, smooth, 26 IN THE FLESH closed envelope for the self, and a notion of the body and self as fixed and unchanging. These notions were inherited from Enlightenment traditions that are undergoing major revision by contemporary theorists.
28 Margo DeMello argues in Bodies of Inscription that such notions of individual self-awareness informing new body art projects (especially tattoos) are middle-class ideas that originated in the self-help and pop psychology movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 29 In her account, the tattoo’s revival by the body art movement emphasizes the transformative effects of self-marking, in which individuals express their identities, social and personal commitments, and efforts at personal and spiritual growth.
In postmodern culture, the breakdown of modern power’s traditional authority over the body and identity appears to render possible new symbols, meanings, and options for the body. 18 For example, regimes of diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, spa practices, bodybuilding, and subcultural styles have involved temporary, permanent, and semi-permanent body modifications of the figure, skin, and hair. The body shrinks in size through some of these practices, is built and sculpted in other practices. It is painted, wrapped, oiled, stretched, cut, implanted, excavated, sectioned, measured, and otherwise transformed.