Body Modification

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness.

This chapter examines the cultural history of Naga tattoo through the voices of Naga elders, a contemporary Naga tattoo artist, Naga writers, among others. One hundred years ago, tattoo was considered everyday wear with a precise and detailed system of codes and socio- religious meanings attached to it. Post-missionization the Naga tattoo was demonized, condemned, and gradually abandoned until the last decade with the re-emergence of an ethnic fashion and cultural revival movement that includes the neo-Naga tattoo. I argue here that Naga artists and writers are actively reshaping the future of the Naga tattoo through art, design, and innovative publications. They give new expression to an inerasable and unquestionable mark of ethnic identity, and in the process may revive the Naga tattoo from the brink of extinction.

ABSTRACT In the article, we make an attempt at discussing what it means that our reality is commodified, what the consequences of this are, how we commodify our bodies and what role in this process is played by cyborgization, as well as what the relation between commodification and disembodiment is. These issues seem to be significant, because when the consumptionist and neoliberal discourse is reconstructed, the aspect of commodification of a human through cyborgization is omitted or marginalized. And such a context of commodification seems to be especially important, as it constitutes the idea of radical questioning of a biological body as a commodity of high market value. Thus, it constitutes the paradox of the commodification of body, i.e. a situation when the most attractive (from the consumer’s point view) body is a body that is disembodied to the maximum.

Le corps fait l'objet de nombreuses manipulations sociales sous forme de rituels ou d'opérations chirurgicales qui visent à le modeler selon un modèle idéal du corps, défini, entre autres, d'après des normes de genre androcentrées. La médecine héritière des Lumières souhaite réparer les corps mutilés, différents, indifférenciés, ambigus, afin qu'ils entrent dans la catégorie de l'acceptable, du complet, du défini, voire du beau et du monosexué. De ce point de vue, la finalité des techniques médicales comme la nymphoplastie ou la clitoridoplastie-et également celles relatives à l'intersexuation et la transsexualité comme le montrera le deuxième volume de ce numéro-ne se distingue pas de celle des rituels d'excision et de circoncision qui visent également à trancher dans le vif de la chair pour sexuer les corps. Le terme même de sexe en latin vient de secare, couper, comme si la coupure qu'elle soit physique à travers les opérations ritualo-chirurgicales de sexuation, ou catégorielle au niveau du langage, à travers la binarité des genres 1 , présupposait une indifférenciation originelle qui menace l'ordre social en tant qu'elle apparaît comme bisexuée. Car, si le genre apparaît à beaucoup comme relatif et le sexe absolu, celui-ci peut revêtir également une certaine plasticité, ainsi qu'en témoigne les rituels d'excision, de circoncision, et d'infibulation, mais aussi les interventions chirurgicales comme l'hyménoplastie, la 1 Corinne Fortier, « Inscribing Trans and Intersex People in the Dominant Binary Categories of Gender », in Value,

In the 1960s and 70s, videogames emerged as a new form of software technology which allowed people to experience innovative ways of playing games in a virtual context via a controller and a screen. Ever since, the gaming industry has grown exponentially and continues to attract new users and designers across the globe. Even though we are not going to go over the history of videogames or games in general. We will still explain some play and games concepts which we think to be relevant in the context of this research concerning videogames related advertisements and the gamer's body. Throughout this paper, I will use the term " gamer's body " to refer to any individual's body who's accustomed to playing videogames and the word " gameplay " to talk about the actual play experiences (the uses of the virtual gamer's body or the uses of the gamer's body in-game) which videogames are valued to be delivering especially in ads. However, the readers must keep in mind that they are different degrees and reasons to why an individual might identify himself as a gamer and 'play or be invested in a specific videogame.' Each game has an impact on the overall industry especially if it has been experienced and reviewed positively by a significant number of gamers. Similarly, each gameplay experience as well as each gamer's experience derived from a videogame's gameplay via the gamer's body will influence their next choice when buying a newly released one. Basically, we will argue that the social significance of videogames lies within the use of the gamer's body which able us to experience other appearances, in designed virtual worlds full of challenges and roles, that would otherwise be physically impossible to undertake. As a result, it will able us to draw conclusions about what ideas surround the gamer's body as both socially significant in the virtual worlds of games and the real physical life body.

De la naissance à la mort, nous habitons notre corps, qui est un révélateur de ce que nous sommes. Dans nos sociétés développées, et surtout depuis la libération sexuelle, il est devenu pour beaucoup d’entre nous une préoccupation quotidienne.
D’« accouchement » à « yoga », en passant par « body-building », « ivrogne », « lesbianisme » ou « jeux vidéo », plus de deux cents
articles cernent le corps, et donnent à voir ses diverses pratiques et ses représentations.
Cette troisième édition permet d’ouvrir ce dictionnaire à des problématiques actuelles, mais aussi à l’analyse renouvelée des objets, techniques et expériences du corps.

Gyms are becoming a mass hobby: they are multiplying, their subscription costs are falling and the ways of working out are becoming standardized. This is the "fitness revolution" (Andreasson & Johansson, 2014a). If the injunctions to the body care date from the beginning of the 20th century, fitness is constituted like an important body shaping offer since the eighties. In a neoliberal zeitgeist where the individual must "take him-self in charge" to become an "entrepreneur of himself" (Castel, 2016), improving one's body capital (Mauger, 2018) is a central issue. The body is always interacting with the social, but how does the gym (re)produce the genre in this setting? A mixed ethnographic survey, quantitative and qualitative, was conducted intermittently in a gym for a year and a half. In order to study the gender relations in this frame as well as the careers (e.g., Goffman, 1961) of body shaping involved, we conducted analysis to compare practices between women and men. We relied on the following materials: a national survey on sports practices (EPPS, 2010); the production of a logic model; a map of the city's gyms; participant and numerical observations (492 observations, including 6,064 women, 13,035 men cumulative and not distinct); photos ; 26 in-depth interviews with clients (with different morphologies, social backgrounds and ages) and 2 informative interviews with the staff. We analyzed: the primary socialization of the respondents to identify the constitution of sexual dispositions; interactions in occupied spaces and body shaping. Three sequences emerge from the body shaping career, each with variations: in its structuring (eg, assiduity, planning), in its asceticism (eg, feeding changes) and in taste for practice (eg, unpleasant, pleasant and dependence). Primary sport socialization of the respondents was gendered, producing gendered body dispositions. Although starting a career at the gym is motivated by physical dissatisfaction (e.g., aesthetics, performance, health), these dispositions are revisited. In situ analysis reveals a socio-sexual division of space. Men favor bodybuilding over cardio training (79% vs. 21%), while women tend to occupy the two spaces fairly (44% vs. 56%). According to numerical observations and interviews, young women would limit their mobility in the area of bodybuilding being "afraid" of being harassed. In addition, men favor the shaping of the upper body compared to the bottom/center (80% vs. 20%), while for women the gap is smaller (38% vs. 62%). However, we note that monopolization of bodybuilding by men limits the free training of women. As a result, the gender of the actors influences their career, in which women can limit their commitment more quickly. Finally, any body shaping is not constituted in body capital, because it must be related to normative expectations of gender, so be a gendered body capital. The gym as an institution plays an active role in this process, it appears as a space of a second socialization where the habitus can be transformed, a technology of gender that can move the borders built by the social between women and men’s bodies, but also sometimes a way to trouble the gender.


Les salles de sport deviennent un loisir de masse : elles se multiplient, leurs coûts d’abonnement baissent et les façons de s’entraîner se standardisent. C’est la « révolution du fitness » (Andreasson & Johansson, 2014a). Si les injonctions à la préoccupation du corps datent du début du XXème siècle, le fitness se constitue comme une offre de façonnage corporel importante depuis les années quatre-vingt. Dans un zeitgeist néolibéral où l’individu doit « se prendre en main » pour devenir un véritable « entrepreneur de soi » (Castel, 2016), améliorer son capital corporel (Mauger, 2018) est un enjeu central. Le corps est toujours en interaction avec le social, mais comment la salle de sport (re)produit elle le genre dans ce cadre ?
Une enquête ethnographique mixte, quantitative et qualitative, a été menée de façon discontinue dans une salle de sport pendant un an et demi. Afin d’étudier les rapports de genre à l’œuvre ainsi que les carrières (e.g., Goffman, 1961) de façonnage corporel en jeu, nous avons réalisé des analyses permettant de comparer des pratiques entre les femmes et les hommes. Nous nous sommes appuyés sur les matériaux suivants : une enquête nationale sur les pratiques sportives (EPPS, 2010) ; la production d’un modèle logic ; une carte des salles de sport de la ville ; des observations participantes et chiffrées (492 observations, dont 6.064 femmes, 13.035 hommes cumulé·e·s et non distinct·e·s) ; des photographies ; 26 entretiens approfondis auprès de client·e·s (ayant différentes morphologies, origines sociales et âges) et 2 entretiens informatifs auprès du personnel de la salle. Nous avons analysé : la socialisation primaire sportive des enquêté·e·s pour identifier la constitution de dispositions corporelles sexuées ; les interactions dans les espaces occupés et le façonnage corporel. Trois séquences émergent de la carrière de façonnage corporel, chacune possédant des variations : dans sa structuration (e.g., assiduité, planification), dans son ascétisme (e.g., changements d’alimentation) et dans le goût pour la pratique (e.g., déplaisant, plaisant et dépendance).
La socialisation primaire sportive des enquêté·e·s était genrée produisant des dispositions corporelles sexuées. Bien que débuter une carrière à la salle de sport soit motivé par l’insatisfaction physique (e.g., esthétique, performance, santé), lesdites dispositions sont revisitées. L’analyse in situ révèle une division socio-sexuée de l’espace. Les hommes privilégient la musculation par rapport au cardio-training (79 % contre 21 %), tandis que les femmes ont tendance à occuper de manière équitable ces deux espaces (44 % contre 56 %). Selon les observations chiffrées et les entretiens, les jeunes femmes limiteraient leur mobilité dans l’espace de la musculation ayant « peur » d’être harcelées. Par ailleurs, les hommes privilégient le façonnage du haut du corps par rapport au bas/centre (80 % contre 20 %), alors que pour les femmes l’écart est plus faible (38 % contre 62 %). Toutefois, on remarque que la monopolisation de la musculation par les hommes limite le libre entrainement des femmes. De ce fait, le sexe des acteur/trice·s influence leur carrière, au sein de laquelle les femmes peuvent limiter plus rapidement leur engagement. Finalement, tout façonnage corporel ne se constitue pas en capital corporel, car il se doit d’être en lien avec les attentes normatives du genre, donc être un capital corporel genré. La salle de sport en tant qu’institution joue un rôle actif dans ce processus, elle apparaît comme un espace d’une seconde socialisation où les habitus peuvent se transformer, une technologie de genre qui peut déplacer les frontières construites par le social entre les corps des femmes et des hommes, mais aussi parfois une manière de troubler le genre.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century around the Bering Strait, ornate pieces of carved fossil ivory bearing decorations unlike anything previously known from the Eskimo region began appearing in museum collections. These small, deeply patinated artifacts, which originated from ancient village sites across the region and passed from the pockets of Indigenous collectors to American whalers, teachers, traders, and museum curators, were evidence of a distinctive and scarcely known prehistoric maritime culture of northwestern Alaska and neighboring Siberia. Beautifully incised harpoon heads and socket pieces, animated zoomorphic drum and box handles, anthropomorphic figures inscribed with tattoos and body ornaments, and other objects of “unknown use” largely comprised the “high fossil ivory culture” of a society that appeared to have been centered on St. Lawrence Island,
parts of the adjacent Asiatic coast, the Diomede Islands, and portions of the Seward Peninsula of Alaska (Hrdlička 1930:174).

By the mid-1920s anthropological interest in the origins of these Paleo-Eskimo peoples peaked (Collins 1937:iii), resulting in a series of archaeological expeditions to the Bering Strait that continues to the present day. On St. Lawrence Island and the neighboring Chukotka Peninsula of Russia, excavations revealed a succession of closely
related and partially overlapping cultures—Okvik/Old Bering Sea (~50 to 800 CE) and Punuk (800 to 1200 CE)—whose settlements and cemeteries exhibited some of the finest art ever produced by a hunting society.1 Lured to the Bering Strait by vast herds of ivory-bearing sea mammals like walruses and large whales, these maritime peoples from Asia were led by shamans, whaling captains, and notable warriors. Both men and women of these peoples tattooed their bodies and crafted human figurines, or “dolls,” that often displayed ornate and naturalistic personal adornments, including amulet straps, beaded headbands, and permanent body markings that have counterparts in recent history and practice.

Tattooing is a form of radical feminist identification. Jaylin, a Suicide Girl, is a part of an alternative genre of feminist actors who perform the pain of beauty in order to upset beauty’s hegemonic control on women’s bodies. The tattoos of Jaylin speak to the contradictory performances of gendered actors in light of Butler’s theories on agency to highlight the ways in which agents subvert imposed subjectivities. This paper argues that beauty is thus not only a system of control, but also a means by which the individual can resist power structures through positive articulations of one’s agency.

This paper explores how Varys, a supporting character of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, represents several tropes about eunuchs. The paper also touches on the Unsullied and Theon Greyjoy, other characters who are, for better or worse, made into eunuchs over the course of the series, and how this castration shapes their growth as dynamic characters.

Papua New Guinea is the second largest island in the world. Roughly the size of California, it is one of the most rural countries on the globe, with only 18 percent of its six million inhabitants living in urban areas. Incredibly, over eight hundred Indigenous languages are spoken in PNG, accounting for 20 percent of the world’s total.

Just as Papua New Guinea (PNG) is linguistically diverse, it possesses numerous tribal tattooing cultures. And as far back as elders can remember, tattooing has been a local tradition of nearly every coastal people. Here, among the Motu, Waima, Aroma, Hula, Mekeo, and others, women were heavily tattooed from head to toe,1 resulting in some of the most complete body coverage in the Indigenous world.

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, however, tattooing largely disappeared in PNG for a variety of reasons: tribal warfare ceased, missionaries discouraged initiation ceremonies, and tattoos associated with highly ritualized Motu trading voyages (hiri) became obsolete as these seafaring traditions were gradually abandoned (Ryan 1970).

Classical sociologists like Max Weber pointed out the relationship between processes of modernization and cultural discontents. In this chapter it is argued that such discontents where at the heart of the critique of the romantic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s on “the system” – a cultural critique that has been appropriated over the last decades by the commercial culture industry and is nowadays informing many of its media products. This study addresses two popular genres – ‘fantasy’ and ‘conspiracy culture’ – as articulated in various novels, movies and computer games and analyses the exact ways in which they express and address cultural discontents in contemporary culture.

Permanent body modification is an often-overlooked variable in the behavioral sciences. While a correlation between at-risk human behavior and body art is in need of further study, related research on self-harm practices offers similarities where non-traditional and extreme forms of body modification can become a potential physical diagnostic indicator of underlying psychopathology including maladaptive impulse control and childhood psychological trauma. Discussion includes initial guidelines for differentiating common and socially accepted body art methods from those that can be viewed as risk criteria.

"Azriona's story "The Heart in Him" quoted in the title is an example of Omegaverse slash fan fiction, where characters develop supplementary gender identities at puberty. We can have male or female alphas, and male or female omegas. Male omegas can become pregnant and bear babies. This is an example of how slash complicates gender and sexual identities beyond habitual categories. We could see slash, then, as a liberatory mechanisms for questioning gender and sexual politics (Cicioni 1998; Jenkins 1992; Woledge 2006). However, a more pessimistic way of reading Omegaverse slash would be to suggest that it simply re-assigns strict gender and sexual roles, producing a form of highly essentialised normativity. We can even question the categorisation of Omegaverse fiction as slash because of its homophobic overtones. We could already find forms of covert homophobia in slash. The "we are not gay, we just love each other" trope allows male characters to have sexual relations with other men while distancing themselves from being gay. Moreover, the genre of slash at large has been accused of misogyny in its reimagining a world almost without women. In this paper, I examine examples of sexism, biological determinism and heteronormativity from Omegaverse fan fiction, and consider them in relation to prevalent neoliberal homonormative discourses.

For thousands of years, Native Americans throughout the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains used the physical act and visual language of tattooing to construct and reinforce the identity of individuals and their place within society and the cosmos. The act of tattooing served as a rite of passage and supplication, while the composition and use of ancestral tattoo bundles was intimately related to group identity. The resulting symbols and imagery held important social, civil, military, and ritual connotations within Native American society. Yet despite the cultural importance that tattooing held for prehistoric and early historic Native Americans, modern scholars have only recently begun to consider the implications of ancient Native American tattooing and assign tattooed symbols the same significance as imagery inscribed on pottery, shell, copper, and stone.

"Drawing with Great Needles" is the first book-length scholarly examination into the antiquity, meaning, and significance of Native American tattooing in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains. The contributors use a variety of approaches, including ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts, ancient art, evidence of tattooing in the archaeological record, historic portraiture, tattoo tools and toolkits, gender roles, and the meanings that specific tattoos held for the Dhegihan Sioux and other Native American groups, to examine Native American tattoo traditions. Their findings add an important new dimension to our understanding of ancient and early historic Native American society in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains.

Introduction / Carol Diaz-Granados and Aaron Deter-Wolf
1. Native American Tattooing in the Protohistoric Southeast / Antoinette B. Wallace
2. Needle in a Haystack: Examining the Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Tattooing  / Aaron Deter-Wolf
3. Swift Creek Paddle Designs as Tattoos: Ethnographic Insights on Prehistoric Body Decoration and Material Culture / Benjamin A. Steere
4. Tattoos, Totem Marks, and War Clubs: Projecting Power Through Visual symbolism in Northern Eoodlands Culture / Lars Krutak
5. The Art of Enchantment: Corporeal Marking and Tattooing Bundles of the Great Plains / Lars Krutak
6. Identifying the Face of the Sacred: Tattooing the Images of Gods and Heroes in the Art of the Mississippian Period / F. Kent Reilly III
7. Dhegihan Tattoos: Markings That Consecrate, Empower, and Designate Lineage / James R. Duncan
8. Snaring Life from the Stars and the Sun: Mississippian Tattooing and the Enduring Cycle of Life and Death / David H. Dye

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

From Winston Black in The Medieval Review 15.06.24...

'In the concluding essay, "The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination," Lila Yawn clearly takes the most chances and has the most fun in exploring the topic of medieval wounds and wounding. After a review of graphic and supposedly "medieval" dismemberments in modern movies and literature, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, or Pulp Fiction, Yawn poses the simple question of "how medieval cutting up living bodies really was" (218). In response, she gives a whirlwind tour of nearly two millennia of images and descriptions of amputation, dismemberment, fragmentation, and mutilation from Cicero to Thomas Jefferson. In so doing she demonstrates, as many medieval apologists have already noted, that there is no greater amount or degree of dismemberment in the Middle Ages than before or after, but what leads moderns to equate "medieval" with "dismemberment" is the medieval tendency to celebrate dismemberment and put severed body parts on display, be they of the criminal or of the saint.'

The Medieval Review 15.06.24
Kirkham, Anne, and Cordelia Warr, eds. Wounds in the Middle Ages. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. pp. xvi, 254. $124.95 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409465690 (hardback).
Reviewed by: Winston Black, Assumption College. black@assumption.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/19219/25339

The author discusses the methods of distribution and marketing that gave 1980's Indonesian exploitation films cult status among both local and Western audiences. He describes how both Indonesian producers and Western distributors selected films to fit Western spectators' tastes, while local audiences watched and collected these films through video cassette discs (VCDs) and alternative film festivals. He also explains how Legend films such as "Devil's Sword" and "The Warrior" positioned their villains as symbols of Suharto's New Order regime.

The first major scholarly investigation into the rich history of the marked body in the early modern period, this interdisciplinary study examines multiple forms, uses, and meanings of corporeal inscription and impression in France and the French Atlantic from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries.

Placing into dialogue a broad range of textual and visual sources drawn from areas as diverse as demonology, jurisprudence, mysticism, medicine, pilgrimage, commerce, travel, and colonial conquest that have formerly been examined largely in isolation, Katherine Dauge-Roth demonstrates that emerging theories and practices of signing the body must be understood in relationship to each other and to the development of other material marking practices that rose to prominence in the early modern period.

While each chapter brings to light the particular histories and meanings of a distinct set of cutaneous marks—devil’s marks on witches, demon’s marks upon the possessed, devotional wounds, Amerindian and Holy Land pilgrim tattoos, and criminal brands—each also reveals connections between these various types of stigmata, links that were obvious to the early modern thinkers who theorized and deployed them. Moreover, the five chapters bring to the fore ways in which corporeal marking of all kinds interacted dynamically with practices of writing on, imprinting, and engraving paper, parchment, fabric, and metal that flourished in the period, together signaling important changes taking place in early modern society.

Examining the marked body as a material object replete with varied meanings and uses, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France shows how the skin itself became the register of the profound cultural and social transformations that characterized this era.

Available at Routledge: https://bit.ly/37NqUT9


Contents

Introduction: The Impressionable Body

1 Seals of Satan: Demonologists and the Devil’s Mark

2 Demonic Marks, Divine Stigmata: The Female Body Inscribed

3 The Amerindian Tattoo: Signs of Identity in New France

4 Jerusalem Arms: The European Pilgrim Tattoo

5 Stigma and State Control: Branding the Deviant Body

Conclusion: Lasting Impressions


Reviews

This brilliant and gracefully written study weaves an eclectic and original corpus of primary sources into a compelling argument about the cultural implications of body marking in France and its colonies during the early modern period. In addition to being understood as magical signs, devotional gestures or material by-products of the power of the imagination, body marks also served as a powerful means of self-fashioning, and as signs of identification and authoritative control. The book is a must read for anyone interested in how the ancient practice of body marking became transformed into a product of the modern state.
—Allison Stedman, Professor of French, University of North Carolina—Charlotte

Whole worlds of meaning were legible in the marks written by God and man, nature and the cosmos, on the delicate surface that clothed, however porously, the bodies of renaissance men and women. Wounds of many different provenances; tattoos on pilgrims from the holy land, on prisoners and on the native peoples across the globe; birthmarks of various colors and shapes spoke to matters of deep cultural exigency. In this book Katherine Dauge-Roth constitutes, explores and interprets beautifully a whole lost archive of writing on the body.
—Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, University of California—Berkeley

Signing the Body reveals how cutaneous marks were deeply embedded in early modern European culture. In this abundantly researched work, Dauge-Roth examines demonic marks and sacred stigmata, the branding of criminals, Amerindian tattooing, and the Jerusalem tattoos traditionally received by Christian pilgrims. These diverse dermal practices are united, Dauge-Roth argues, by the desire to make the human body a stable site of signification in an age of cultural upheaval and physical mobility. Signing the Body reveals the ubiquity of body marking in early modern Europe, confirming the relatively familiar status of European tattooing practices once thought extraordinary.
—Craig Koslofsky, Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Previous research indicates that historically humans will modify their bodies for various reasons, including cultural and aesthetic. Participants of this study were male and female undergraduate college students over the age of eighteen. Subjects were asked to rate the attractiveness of thirty various photographs of body modifications from different cultures. They were then asked to fill out a questionnaire that inquired how closely they identified with their culture. Results indicate that identification with race does not influence whether or not body modifications from their own ethnic background is attractive or not. Therapists working with patients who have body dysmorphic disorder may use this research when consulting patients, along with plastic surgeons who have patients who are looking into body modifications.
Keywords: body modification, attractiveness, culture, gender, students

Performanso meno laukas, kartu su vizualiųjų menų lauku, Lietuvoje patiria itin didelę atskirtį, nes yra
subordinuotas tiek meno, tiek kitų laukų atţvilgiu. Neretai performanso menas, apskritai, nėra laikomas meninio
diskurso dalimi. Galima manyti, jog tai vyksta dėl performanso meno apibrėţimo nesklandumų. Nors sąvokos
„performansas“ ir „performatyvumas“ naudojamos skirtinguose menuose, svarbu nepamiršti, kad jos taip pat plačiai
diskutuojamos ir sociologijoje, filosofijoje bei kitose disciplinose. Analizuojant mokslinę literatūrą ir įvairius šaltinius,
ima ryškėti šių sąvokų konceptualizavimo skirtumai ir panašumai bei jų vartojimo ypatybės. Šiame darbe, siekiama
išsiaiškinti kokiais bruoţais pasiţymi performanso menininkių kūniškasis hexis. Remiantis P. Bourdieu teorinėmis
prieigomis, pastaroji koncepcija išryškėja analizuojant santykį tarp performanso meno lauko ir šios meno srities
menininkių habitus.

Il 21° secolo ha inaugurato una ridefinizione del corpo attraverso gli sviluppi cibernetici e biotecnologici. Come vedremo in questo articolo, il concetto di “umano” è stato ampiamente contestato, mentre “postumano” e “transumano” sono diventati termini di ricerca filosofica e scientifica. Tali cambi stanno inducendo un cambio paradigmatico nella percezione ontologica ed epistemologica del corpo umano. Questo articolo presenta una riflessione originale sulla tematica della corporeità nell'era postumana, ponendo domande quali: gli esseri postumani avranno bisogno di qualche forma di corporalità? Per rispondere, analizzeremo concetti chiave come “umano”, “corpo” e “sé incarnato”, e poi presenteremo le risposte che danno il postumanesimo e il transumanesimo a tali quesiti, in modo critico e generativo.

Questo testo è la traduzione di Francesca Ferrando, The Body, in R. Ranish, S. Lorenz (eds.), Post-and Transhumanism: An Introduction , Peter Lang Publisher, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 213-226.

Abstract (in English)

The 21st century has ushered in a redefinition of the body by cybernetic and biotechnological developments. the concept of "human" has been broadly challenged, while "posthu-man" and "transhuman" have become terms of philosophical and scientific enquiry. These scenarios are inducing a paradigm shift in the ontological and epistemological perception of the human body. this article presents an original reflection on the topic of embodiment in the posthuman era, by asking questions such as: will posthumans need any embodiment at all? Posthumanism and transhumanism offer different answers to these questions. before presenting them, we will analyze key concepts such as "human", "body" and "embodied self", in critical and generative ways.