Bodily Modifications Research Articles

Bodily Modifications and the Criminal Law

This article critically evaluates the law on bodily modifications and consent in English criminal law. The law on consent to (serious) bodily harm has been looked at on numerous occasions by both academics and the judiciary. The current position is that conduct must fall within one of four broad categories for consent to bodily harm to be effective—surgery, regulated sports, chastisement of children and tattooing and ear-piercing. This article argues that extreme bodily modifications, which involves the infliction of grievous bodily harm, are not permitted when utilising the current category-based rationale favoured by the judiciary. This article posits that extreme bodily modifications are of such social disutility that their criminalisation must be correct. It is submitted that interference with personal autonomy is justified considering the significant inherent risks with such extreme procedures.

From ‘Tramp Stamps’ to Traditional Sleeves: A Feminist Autobiographical Account of Tattoos

ABSTRACTIn this article I use a feminist autobiographical approach to present my ‘tattoo narrative’ as a gendered, embodied account in which I map out key moments in my life over two decades through the images inscribed on my skin. Specifically, I examine how my bodily modifications have magnified the social responses to my body as a woman. For example, as a teenager, I acquired a naval piercing and trendy ‘feminine’, discretely located tattoos to satisfy a heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, as a woman in my late thirties, my tattoos satisfy a different purpose. They are larger, bolder, and more ‘masculine’ in line with the evolution of my feminist politics. However, as an academic, the social responses to my tattoos are more complex. In class defined social spaces such as the university where I work, my tattoos cause trouble because they challenge gendered and classed norms for femininity. I conclude by calling for women to engage in autobiographical writing about bodily modification as a critical feminist political act.

Reinterpretation of “Traditional” Bodily Modifications by Young People in Contemporary Zimbabwe

There is a rising critique against the dominant but negative Western discursive construction of ‘traditional’ bodily modification practices in Africa. This article takes issue with conventional representations of some African bodily modification practices as not only traditional but also disempowering.It draws on different and diverse accounts from urban middle class Shona women and men in Zimbabwe about ‘traditional’ practices of male circumcision and labia elongation. It also examines the different and complex connections people make between these gendered practices and issues of (sexual) desire, pleasure, and bodily aesthetics in relation to gendered identities. Based on my reflections of this research, the article demonstrates that the ways in which women and men make sense of their contemporary identities (in relation to these ‘traditional’ practices connected with sexuality) are embedded in a multiplicity of particular global and localised discourses on (anti)colonialism, religion, culture/tradition, modernity, and gender. In attempting to destabilise particular social categories, this article argues for the importance of engaging critically with people’s contradictory understandings and experiences of these practices in postcolonial African countries. Il existe une critique croissante de la construction discursive, dominante mais negative, des pratiques « traditionnelles » de transformation corporelle en Afrique. Cet article s'oppose aux representations conventionnelles de certaines pratiques de transformation corporelle africaine, non seulement traditionnelles, mais egalement paralysantes. Il s’appuie sur des temoignages aussi divers que varies, de femmes et d’hommes Shona de la classe moyenne des villes du Zimbabwe sur les pratiques « traditionnelles » de la circoncision et de l’elongation des levres. Il examine egalement les liens varies et complexes que les personnes etablissent entre ces pratiques de genre et les questions de desir (sexuel), de plaisir et d'esthetique corporelle en relation avec les identites de genre. Partant de mes reflexions sur cette recherche, l'article montre que la maniere des femmes et des hommes de donner un sens a leur identite contemporaine (par rapport a ces pratiques « traditionnelles » liees a la sexualite) est integree dans une multiplicite de discours mondiaux et locaux sur l’(anti) colonialisme, la religion, la culture/tradition, la modernite et le genre. En tentant de destabiliser des categories sociales particulieres, le present article insiste sur l’importance d’aborder de maniere critique les conceptions et experiences contradictoires de ces pratiques dans les nations postcoloniales africaines.

Psychotherapy in the Oncology Setting.

A person who faces the diagnosis of cancer is subjected to changes within his body, but also with regard to his view of himself and his social relationships. Cancer related psychological distress occurs frequently and has a different prevalence according to-among other factors-cancer type and stage of disease. The main psychiatric disturbances observed in patients with cancer are adjustment disorders and affective disorders (anxiety and depression), which in the majority of patients are due to stressors related to the occurrence and threat of the disease and pre-existing psychological vulnerabilities; however, they might also be a direct consequence of biological causes either resulting from bodily modifications induced by the cancer or from treatment side effects. This chapter provides theoretical and practical information on the main psychotherapeutic approaches for cancer patients, complemented by some reflections on their clinical and scientific evidence.

Consumer Transformation: Cosmetic Surgery as the Expression of Consumer Freedom or as a Marketing Imperative?

McCracken’s analysis of identity construction in contemporary culture sees the drive to transform oneself as the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom. Transformation is accessible through cosmetic surgery, enabling consumers with funds to purchase a ‘whole new me’. This consumer is an active participant in the transformation process, not content with observing beauty but actively engaged in the creative construction of new improved selves. In doing so, they have “mastered the codes of cultural production” making themselves “co-creators in the culture they consume” (McCracken xvi). An alternative and far less positive narrative of consumer transformation focuses on the pervasive influence of promotion on individual identity. Marketing and promotion constructs a deficiency in the lives of consumers which, marketers imply, can be remedied by the purchase of cosmetic surgery. Rather than being powerful co-creators of their own fluid identity, consumers are constructed as victims of a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ and preys on consumer vulnerabilities (Fatah 1). In this paper I draw on consumer blogs, industry webpages and regulatory and professional publications to explore the tensions between these competing narratives of bodily transformation. In doing so, I argue that there is an inherent paradox in the discourse of consumer transformation which advocates consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to certain forms of ideal beauty which can be marketed by the promotional industries.

"[G]azing into the synaptic chasm": the Brain in Beckett's Writing.

This paper argues that Samuel Beckett's interest in functions of the brain is not only evidenced in his notebooks, taken from a number of psychology and psycho-physiognomy texts in the early 1930s, but is also explored and expanded in his fiction and drama. This paper investigates Beckett's fascination with the limits of "cerebral consciousness" and the brain's failure to consciously perceive certain bodily modifications especially when processing emotion. Like Antonio Damasio's definition of emotion as essentially the bodily modifications that include chemical changes, Beckett often exploits the idea of emotion as sorely a bodily phenomenon by creating characters who are unable to consciously perceive and process their emotion. For example, when talking about his own weeping, the narrator of The Unnamable attributes the tears to the malfunctioning of the brain, "liquefied brain", denying, displacing or making physical the feeling of sadness. By examining the ways in which Beckett emphasizes a somatic dimension of emotion and its relation to the brain function and perception in his writing, this paper reveals how he explores the idea of the self and extends the idea to what he calls the "impenetrable self" that cannot be consciously recognized. I argue that if, for Joseph LeDoux, the "notion of synapses as points of communication between cells is […] essential to our efforts to understand who we are in terms of brain mechanisms", for Beckett to expose such unconscious biological mechanisms and "gaps" becomes his own artistic challenge.

A metric assessment of evidence for artificial cranial modification at the Boisman 2 Neolithic cemetery (ca. 5800–5400 14C BP), Primorye, Russian Far East

The Middle Neolithic (ca. 5800–5400 14C BP) shell-midden cemetery Boisman 2, located on the Russian coast of the Sea of Japan, is one of only three Neolithic sites in all of Primorye at which human remains have been recovered, and therefore it is the key site representing a major cultural reorganization in which terrestrial foragers adopted a more seasonally-sedentary, marine-based subsistence economy. Previous research at the site has described a variety of forms of artificial cranial modification. As a permanent bodily modification that is applied to infants, cranial modification is one important method of symbolizing ascribed social identities and so can be useful for archaeological investigations into inter- and intra-group social relations. The aim of the present study is to re-evaluate the evidence for cranial modification at Boisman 2 using two sets of discriminant function analyses designed to provide a more objective means of identifying modified and unmodified crania. Our results confirm the use of artificial cranial modification at the site, making Boisman 2 one of the earliest – if not the earliest – documented example of the practice in Holocene East Asia; however, our metric analysis identified only six crania as modified, instead of the 11 previously identified through visual assessment. Further research is required to determine whether this discrepancy is a product of the conservative nature of the discriminant functions, the potential that the discriminant function produces inaccurate results for crania from this population, or whether normal or incidental variation in this population resembles artificial cranial shaping. Finally, as a means of introducing some potential hypotheses for future research, we discuss preliminary associations between the presence of cranial modification, age, sex, and burial cluster.

Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964 – 2007

In this article the authors explore the dramatic shifts in the business of baseball that drove the medicalization of the game and players' bodies. Before the advent of salary arbitration (1974) and free agency (1976), ballplayers were disposable parts in a high-risk work environment. Buoyed by exploding television revenues, the free agent market drove players' salaries into the millions, transforming the economics of bodily management. Enticed by the prospect of riches, players and teams harnessed fitness training, reconstructive surgery, biomechanical analysis, and performance-enhancing drugs to reduce wear and tear on players' bodies and, ultimately, radically alter them for profit. This interplay between economic incentives and medicine created what the authors call “bionic ballplayers”: bigger, stronger, and at times more fragile than their predecessors. By attacking individual ballplayers' morality, commentators have obscured the more salient issue: baseball is representative of the fact that Americans increasingly live in an age of biotechnology in which bodily modification for profit has become the norm and often an unstated job requirement. In this postindustrial age, the body remains a crucial means of production. Thus, the authors suggest that the question raised by steroids is not only individual morality but also the morality produced by a political economy of labor that calls for both services and body parts rendered.

The Chronopolitical Order of Things: Technologies of the Quantified Self in Andrew Niccol's In Time and Michael Anderson's Logan's Run

As a film about a science fictional future in which genetic engineering is used to guard against the threat of overpopulation, Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011) bears a remarkable resemblance to Michael Anderson's environmental dystopia Logan's Run (1976). This article traces the narrative similarities of these two dystopian ecocinematic Hollywood productions, while demonstrating how they succeed as social critiques of technoscientific social regimes that wreak havoc on the Earth and its inhabitants. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's theories of a biopolitics of the population, this article argues that both film-makers' works contribute to our understanding of the potentially culturally and environmentally devastating implications of genetic engineering. Seen through the lens of Foucault's ideas about the disciplinary technologies of the self-regulated subject, the article suggests that Niccol's In Time is particularly noteworthy for its creative problematizing of the increasing normalization of high-tech bodily modification, enhancement, and digital quantification.

'Homens trans': novos matizes na aquarela das masculinidades?

O artigo discute de forma exploratória a emergência de uma nova categoria identitária no Brasil, a de 'homem trans'. Essa se constrói diferenciando-se da identidade lésbica e, também, de expressões de gênero de outros grupos que tiveram seus corpos assignados como femininos ao nascimento, mas que contestam essa assignação sem, contudo, se afirmarem 'homens' de forma constante. Afirma-se que a emergência dos 'homens trans' tem sido potencializada pelo estabelecimento do processo transexualizador no SUS. Discutem-se o uso do termo "homem trans" e algumas características comuns a tais sujeitos. Problematizam-se a complexidade de seus processos de autorreconhecimento e construção de masculinidades, sua rápida capacidade de indiferenciação a partir de modificações corporais e, alguns dos efeitos políticos e subjetivos, da visibilidade e da indiferenciação.

Bodily Integrity and the Surgical Management of Intersex

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, previously termed ‘intersex’ conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and ‘chrononormativity’, this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term ‘chrono-abnormalities’ of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve ‘abnormal’ bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the ‘natural’, ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal ‘immersion into the forthcoming’; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities.

Physiognomy, Reality Television and the Cosmetic Gaze

In this article we argue that our present-day mode of looking at bodies expresses a cosmetic gaze, that is, a gaze already informed by the techniques, expectations and strategies of bodily modification and a way of looking at bodies as awaiting an improvement. The cosmetic gaze, as we see it epitomized in contemporary media phenomena like reality makeover shows on television, is also a physiognomic gaze in that it creates a short-circuit between inside and outside beauty. Our article traces some of the history of the present short-circuit between an inside and an outside and analyzes how different visual media have informed and shaped the gaze in historically specific ways, but also how aspects of that history inhere in media practices today. More specifically, we will analyze John Caspar Lavater’s hand-drawn portraits, Francis Galton’s photographical composites, the anthropometrically defined but still intuitively discovered ideals of the ‘Aryan body’ in Nazi Germany, and today’s reality television makeover shows in order to understand some of the continuities and discontinuities of the cosmetic gaze.

All hail the new flesh: some thoughts on scarification, children and adults

Body art as expressed through non-therapeutic bodily modification is extremely popular, with techniques ranging from the commonplace such as ear piercing to the more esoteric forms such as tongue splitting....

Techno-Orientalism, Nanotechnology, Posthumans, and Post-Posthumans in Neal Stephenson's and Linda Nagata's Science Fiction

Asian subjects figured prominently in reinvigoration of mass-market North American science fiction (SF) because among variety of genres published by industry, one of most heavily marketed has been cyberpunk, where all things Asian proliferate. (1) Owing much to genre of cyberpunk, nanopunk followed by investigating next revolutionary technology to gain widespread business and government funding--nanotechnology, named after nano, a billionth of a meter or six carbon atoms in width. Writers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson earned a great deal of acclaim and financial remuneration in 1980s and 1990s through their use of Asia as a marker for advanced technology in cyberpunk, which relies on computer-based technologies. (2) Following widespread acclaim for Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), his The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995) moved attention from cybertechnology to nanotechnology. (3) Bypassing cyberpunk, Hawai'ian-based writer Linda Nagata's 1990s texts incorporate and query nanotechnology concepts or products, particularly bionanotechnology, which relies more on molecules than binary digital code. Although Nagata's The Bohr Maker (1995) interrogates topics similar to Gibson's and Stephenson's and shares same publisher, her novel has not been accorded equal attention. (4) Full of ethnically diverse characters who actively seek or unwillingly endure bodily modifications, nanopunk texts are ripe for investigations of ethnicity, gender, class, and other markers of difference. To avoid constructing cybercultural studies as a rigid field, this article begins by interrogating its genealogy. I first examine techno-Orientalism in cyborg figure and in cyberspace before proceeding to an analysis of posthuman, looking primarily at disembodiment imagined through digitization technologies, and post-posthuman constructed by nanotechnology. Whether technologies are cyber- and digital-based or nano-and molecular-based, instances of techno-Orientalism abound. Just as cyborg, cyberspace, digital-based technology, and Internet form an enabling network, so too does confluence of rise of posthuman and nanotechnology/nanoscience, with strong overlaps between cyborg and posthuman, at least in realm of SF. (5) It is nearly impossible to reclaim human, given prevalence of viewing posthuman as its evolutionary heir, to use N. Katherine Hayles's phrase (Life Cycle 321). Instead of championing disembodiment, concept of post-posthuman recognizes cyborg bodies as integrated and integral with, rather than split from, self, mind, or consciousness: The last two sections examine techno-Orientalism in Stephenson's The Diamond Age and post-posthuman in Nagata's The Bohr Maker. These texts shift focus from cyborgs and cyberspace--with digital data accessed through computers--to posthuman cyborgs, post-posthumans, and nanospace--working on molecular level experienced as tactile space. John Johnston argues use of nanotechnology by Stephenson and Nagata means the ageold distinction between mechanical entities and biological organisms will begin to break down, with far-reaching implications for both our definition of life and kind of human culture that will then emerge (243). The Bohr Maker and The Diamond Age share a similar plot involving theft of a crucial and fetishized nanotechnological object that mistakenly falls into hands of an impoverished female character, having been initially stolen by a privileged male character, but texts' faith in bionanotechnology differs radically. In The Diamond Age, bionanotechnology called Seed is outlawed for all, and New Atlantans (mostly Anglo-Americans) are especially afraid of allowing Chinese to use it. In contrast, The Bohr Maker concludes with an Indonesian character deliberately sharing an unsanctioned bionanotechnology called Bohr Maker with impoverished people. …

Playing with corpses and worshipping skulls: bodily modifications and gender transformations in rural West Bengal

The paper describes the concluding rite of the gajan, a major hierogamic celebration of West Bengal. The night before the end of the festival, ascetic devotees dance with rotten human corpses and human heads in honour of Dharma Thakur, a local fertility deity. After giving a description of the ritual, I try to enlighten the relation between the fertility leitmotif of the gajan and its climax: the danse macabre (dance of death). The practice of sporting with corpses and their ritual beheading will be analysed by furnishing a psychoanalytical and cross-cultural interpretation. In order to do that, it will be suggested that the ritual behaviour of Dharma's devotees is due to the gender modification of the actual recipient of the service. Only if we accept that the object of worship is female (the Goddess, Dharma's spouse), will it be possible to explain the psychical crises occurring to male devotees and their efforts to become ‘ritual women’. The paradigm of the ‘guilty male’ of agricultural societies will be further analysed by comparing the Bengali maā khelā (playing with corpses) with similar practices within different cultural environments, including Sanskrit Puranic lore, Greek mythology and Italian popular Catholicism.