1

The Post-Modified Body: invasive corporeal

transformation and its effects on subjective identity.

Matthew C Lodder
Body & Representation
MA in Critical Theory
October 2003

1
Image courtesy of Meghan Pryor
 2

Contents

Introduction

♦ Under the Knife…………….…………………………………………………………………………… p. 3

♦ Focus of the Dissertation………………………………………………………………………….. p. 5

Chapter One

Metamorphoses: Modified Body & Modified Mind

♦ Within the Skin: Describing the Technobody…………………………………………… p. 10

♦ Becoming Myself, Becoming Someone Else…………………………………………….. p. 13
♦ Unquenchable Desire and the Asymptotic Body Project…………………………. p. 17

Chapter Two

Stigma, Stereotype and Social Identity:

The Modified Body in Context

♦ Social Perceptions of the Modified Body……..…………………………………………… p. 24

♦ Somatic Wholeness and the Reflection of Pain……………………………………….. p. 25

♦ Corporeal Criminality and Bodies of Subversion………….…………………………. p. 29
♦ The Paradox of Conformity………………………………………………………………………. p. 31

Conclusion

♦ Becoming: The Impossibility of the Post-Modified Body…

….……………………… p. 34
 3

Introduction

Under the Knife

“The body is what I immediately am … I am my body”

– Being & Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre

We are no longer our bodies, or so it seems. Under the brutally precise, flashing
blade of the aesthetic surgeon’s scalpel, the 21st-century body is ever more
subject to bloody intervention in the unquenchable quest for a physical form
different from that bestowed by nature. Yet, in the eye of the sage and sensible
beholder, those individuals that willingly submit their bodies to cosmetic surgery
seem to be victims of a dangerous and persuasive beauty capitalism and dupes to
a hopelessly immoral system whose wheels are oiled by over-priced moisturiser
and litre upon litre of eviscerated fat.

Naomi Wolf is particularly scathing in her attack on what she views as a

pernicious and oppressive industry:

The current Surgical Age is, like the Victorian medical system,
impelled by easy profits. […] But as women get used to comfort and
freedom, it cannot continue to count on profit from women’s
willingness to suffer for their sex. A mechanism of intimidation must
be set in place to maintain that rate of growth, higher than that of
any other “medical speciality”. Women’s pain threshold has to be
raised, and a new sense of vulnerability imbedded in us, if the
industry is to reap the full profit of their new technology acting on
old guilt. The surgeon’s market is imaginary, since there is nothing
wrong with women’s faces that social change won’t cure; so the
surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception
and multiplying female self-hatred2

The modern cosmetic surgery industry that has emerged since the turn of the
20th century3 is the very epitome of the dark spectre of patriarchal hegemony
Wolf considers ultimately responsible for what she has so famously christened
‘The Beauty Myth’. Kathy Davis concurs, underlining that

[i]n a culture where feminine beauty is idealized, the “aesthetic

scaling of bodies” specifically structures the dynamics of gender
oppression, rendering ordinary-looking women ugly and deficient and
trapping them into the hopeless race for a perfect body4.

It is seemingly simple to dismiss the people in general, and women in particular,

who undergo violent, agonising, visceral treatment in search of supposedly empty
vanity and the myth of a prettier face as witless individuals coerced into parting
with pounds both of flesh and of the more pecuniary kind to risk disfigurement
and death merely to be more beautiful. It is easy to pity the ‘victims’ of the
culture of aesthetic surgery. It is obvious, it is claimed, that The System is to
blame.

The key problem with this approach, so often taken, is that it does reduce those
individuals with surgically modified bodies to victims, or worse to idiots and fools,

2
Wolf, 1991, p. 232
3
Haiken, 1997
4
Davis, 2003, pp. 5-6
 4

devoid of agency or intelligence. Kathy Davis, prominent feminist theorist in the

field of cosmetic surgery, admits that “within feminist scholarship, it is difficult to
view the woman who has cosmetic surgery as an agent who – at least to some
extent – actively and knowledgably gives shape to her life”.5 Even in texts
devoted to theoretical examination of the cosmetic surgery phenomenon, there
seems to be a deep-rooted disdain for both the procedures themselves and
women who choose, willingly, to become patients. No-one has anything positive
to say about plastic surgery, except, it seems, for the patients themselves.
Lamenting the very existence of aesthetic surgeons, Elizabeth Haiken, in Venus
Envy – A History of Cosmetic Surgery, claims that “the widespread adoption of
the surgical solution reveals a frightening vision of Americans as conformists,
bent on achieving a commodified, advertising-driven standard of perfection”6.

Frances Sand, a 29 year-old British woman now resident in the United States,
may disagree. She has undergone many hours of painful surgery and pseudo-
surgical procedures to transform her face, and, indeed, most of her body. Wolf’s
hypothesis of a coercive patriarchal system collapses on reflection in Frances’
mirror: no slave to idealised beauty, Frances bears intricately drawn bubbles
tattooed onto her forehead in delicate greys and pinks and a broad stripe etched
into her face running from crown to chin. A heavy 8mm-thick steel ring
transverses her nasal septum, two large spikes bristle at the corners of her lips,
an enormous hole between them plugged with a large oval of Teflon. The
piercings in her earlobes are stretched to well over 2 inches in diameter. Her
collarbone bulges, shaped through the use of sub-dermal implants carved from
silicone. Her forearms arms are similarly transformed, large beads prominent
under heavily tattooed skin.7

The procedures she has undergone in order to achieve these ends have been no
less expensive or painful than the procedures required for those who long for
fuller cleavages or smaller noses, and yet crucially she has chosen to have these
procedures performed outside the framework of which most feminist theorists
have been so critical. Frances does not long to be beautiful, at least not in the
narrow way Wolf defines beauty. She is not running the hopeless race that Davis
describes. She could never be described as conforming to idealised notions of
beauty. Her transformations are not catalysed by advertising, the media or the
oppression of others. A young woman subject to all the same pressures Wolf and
other feminist critics have deemed responsible for the burgeoning culture of
invasive transformation has chosen to take control of her body in ways many
have never even contemplated. Problematising the apparently clear-cut notions of
exactly why people choose to change their appearance, body modifiers across the
globe illustrate that the aesthetic plasticity of the post-modern body may be more
complex than has previously been thought.

Previous analyses of transformed bodies have focussed almost exclusively on the

questions of afflictive and coercive beauty in a contemporary Western framework
- an approach which I feel to be fundamentally problematic. Only a new approach
can shed further light on this question, and only a radical reappraisal can begin to
unravel its obvious complexities.

5
Davis, 2003, p.74
6
Haiken, 1997, p.15
7
An interview with Frances, entitled Beauty and Inspiration, appears at
http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/frances/index.html. She is the
de-facto centrefold in Victoria Pitt’s text In The Flesh, and has a private journal
page accessible on the Internet at http://iam.bmezine.com/?dunebug for
members of the on-line body modification archive BME.
 5

Focus of the Dissertation

The question of precisely why individuals choose to transform their bodies

through the use of invasive technology seems simplistic, precisely because of the
obvious contradiction body-modifiers like Frances provide, as well as the clear
indication that there are as many motivations as there are individual bodies. My
particular interest, and the focus of this dissertation, is how the body transformed
differs from its predecessor. How is the embodied subject altered once the very
fabric of its embodiment becomes mutable? In fact, by approaching this topic
from an inverse angle, I anticipate that I may be able to undertake a reflexive
comparison of differing forms of body transformation and perhaps afford some
agency and legitimacy even to those popular and highly visible forms of
transformation such as rhinoplasty deemed repulsive by a great number of
theorists and academics. Victoria Pitts suggests that “[w]hile body practices that
conform to normative ideals of beauty are deeply problematic, those that seem to
reject such ideals can be perceived as instances of […] assertion of agency in
relation to their bodies”,8 and I sincerely hope I will be able to demonstrate this in
the course of this discussion.

Cosmetic surgery clinics have, since their inception, advertised their alchemy by
using Before and After images of their patients, the miraculous transformations of
ugly ducklings into swans aptly demonstrated by the juxtaposition of flabby,
protruding, wrinkled lead and pert and buxom gold. For most scholarly
investigations of this phenomenon, it is the Before images that merit the bulk of
the investigation. These individuals, it is tirelessly claimed, are driven to feel that
this drastic solution is necessary because of a socially constructed fabric of beauty
within which we are all complicit. The After, the body transformed by technology,
science and cold, hard cash, has become lost in the furore concerning its
forebear.

This is hardly surprising. Dr Armando Favazza admits that there is “a mysterious

aura that surrounds self-mutilation”.9 Indeed, in the conclusion to his book Bodies
Under Siege, he further confesses that “the desperate measures [of self-
mutilators] are upsetting to those of us who try to achieve [a healthy mind in a
healthy body] in a more tranquil manner”.10 Even those devoting their efforts to
understanding these phenomena cannot fully empathise with the subjects of their
investigations. The integrity of the body, or more precisely its fragility and
visceral, bloody enervation, is a particular quotidian obsession of human
existence, and dwelling on the sanguine mechanics of viability is disgusting, if not
disturbing. “There are few things more unnerving and disgust evoking than our
partibility.” states William Ian Miller in Anatomy of Disgust. “Consider the horror
motif of severed hands, ears, heads, gouged eyes.”11 Consider, additionally,
metal spikes protruding from the forehead or broad, crimson scars left by face-
lifting surgery. The visual spectacle of a transformed body is a manifest sign of
this severability and certainly uncomfortable for many individuals to contemplate.

8
Pitts, 2003, p.54
9
Favazza, 1996 [1987], p.4. I do not use the term mutilation as Favazza
chooses to – that is in reference to both pathological and non-pathological body
modifiers, those with navel piercings to those who enucleate their eyes, as I
believe the term is heavily burdened with negative associations more applicable
to the latter end of the spectrum. I prefer the more neutral “modification”, using
mutilation only when quoting others, or when specifically referring to pathological
self-harm behaviour.
10
Favazza, 1996 [1987], p.323
11
Miller, 1997, p. 27
 6

I believe that the discourses of coercive and oppressive beauty are of course
interesting, and yet fundamentally flawed in that they fail to take into account
this whole picture, ending, as they do, once the integrity of the body is
compromised and the first drop of blood pools on the surface of the body. Such
an approach cannot help but belittle those subjects that decide to invest in a new
face. Instead, I feel a detailed dissection of the post-modified body may be more
useful, examining the inter-woven discourses of sociology, philosophy,
ethnography, aesthetics, ethics and science to understand how embodied
subjects interact with the world, and how the world interacts with them, once
their body is made unnatural.

Unconsciously, and without intervention, our bodies are changing with every
passing moment. The biological mechanisms of replenishment, repair and ageing
ensure that no body remains stable, static, constant. Cells die as new ones are
born. Cuts and scars fade with time. Deep wrinkles carve dark furrows in leathery
skin. “My body seems always to be dissolving,” laments Robert Wilson, “failing in
one way or another, needing supplements.”12 The body is inconstant, even in its
natural state. We, humanity, are condemned to exist in impermanent, imperfect
embodiment even without intervention. To this end, this dissertation will focus on
visual alteration of the body through invasive means, and how subjectivity is
modified following deliberate modification of the flesh. I wish to focus on
corporeal enhancement which is entirely elective - bodies voluntarily augmented
by technology - which precludes psychiatric patients and self-harmers, and which
also discounts invasive technological procedures such as hip replacement, which
are necessary to return the body to its “natural” state. My interest is profoundly
carnal, and as such I will not be dwelling on technologies such as Prozac or Viagra
which temporarily functionally modify the body but without direct interaction with
the flesh. Broadly, then, I shall be focussing on the after-effects of voluntary
procedures undertaken with sound mind, which draw blood and result in a
permanent or semi-permanent alteration of the body – cosmetic surgery,
piercing, tattooing, implantation of foreign bodies under the skin, elective
amputation, scarification.

The breaking of the skin is crucial. By puncturing the flesh, we are engaging with
our bodies in the most direct way possible. As the gateway between our bodies
and the world, the skin is so basic in our understanding of the limits of the body
and of our subjective identity, and by deliberately modifying the skin to our own
ends we are toying with this very understanding. Jay Prosser underlines that as it
is “[s]ited on the borders between psyche and body, skin appears as an organ
enabling and illustrating the psychic/corporeal interchange of subjectivity”.13
Furthermore, Miller eloquently suggests that

[s]kin defends us from the outside world […]. It is also somewhat

magical and bears a heavy symbolic load: […] as a covering for the
deeper self inside it allows us to entertain the illusion of our own
non-disgustingness to others, if not ourselves. Skin not only covers
our polluting and oozing innards but also allows us the illusion that
the heart can be a seat of love and courage rather than just a
pulsing slithery organ. […] Skin, especially in young women, was
held to be the chief contributor to beauty, and its exposure always
evoked the erotic and the sensual. But its fragile and transient
attractiveness made it a locus of some of the worst forms of the
disgusting. There is nothing quite like skin gone bad; it is in fact the

12
Wilson in Featherstone & Burrows (eds.), 1995, p.239
13
Prosser, 1998, p.72
 7

marrings of skin which make up much of the substance of the ugly

and the monstrous.14

Why is the breaking of the skin so problematic? What is it about the penetration
of the skin which causes so much consternation? Why is voluntary editing of the
body met with such vocal discontent, and why are those volunteers met with such
mistrust of their objectives? At a very primal level, the deliberate infliction of
wounds unnerves us. The constructed coupling of marred skin and
unattractiveness deeply ingrained in our social psyche is perhaps one of the most
simplistic explanations of the theoretical distaste for body modification. But Miller
touches here upon a much more subtle observation – we have a very delicate,
very confusing and very volatile relationship with our own bodies which manifests
itself in our flesh. Crucially, this is not merely a question of beauty - it is a
question of relationships: relationships between an individual and their bodies,
and their bodies and the world.

I intend to make reference to, amongst others, post-operative transsexuals,

cyborgs, women, men, circus freaks. I do not pretend that every type of
corporeal modification results in the same type of modified subjectivity, but it is
clear although these disparate groups do not share catalysts for their changes,
they all inhabit bodies under their own personal technological control. This
investigation will be broadly divided into two parts. The first – Metamorphoses:
Modified Body and Modified Mind - concerns itself principally with mind/body
interaction. I will begin by explaining what the modified body is and what
frameworks can be used to understand it. The chapter will then deal with how
modifying the body alters the subject’s own ideas of identity and how changing
the external flesh modifies how the subject actually feels as an individual. From
the basic phenomenological concept of the embodied subject, I will outline
various personal narratives of mind/body interaction and examine how each
stands up to scrutiny in the face of transformative technology. I will attempt to
compare pre-modified with post-modified subjects through the reported discourse
of those engaging in body modification and juxtapose theoretical conceptions of
the body with their dynamically expressed experiences. Additionally I will attempt
to draw these disparate experiences together in order to attempt to construct a
model of the post-modern, plastic and commodified body which makes sense in
light of these investigations.

Brian Turner, in an essay which appears in a volume boldly entitled Body

Modification, suggests that, for a modern modifier, the very weight of history and
the fact that modern modification practices draw heavily, in an acutely post-
modern way, on ancient and primitive practices for inspiration negate any
comprehension of contemporary body-modification as meaningful or important.
He concludes that for the contemporary Western bearer of ink,

[h]er tattoos are surface indicators of identity and attachment.

Furthermore, the modern tattoo is merely a cliché, borrowing from
and adapting Polynesian patterns, Japanese motifs and Chinese
military emblems. The aesthetic and sexual tattoo of the middle
classes is a product of the thin/cool relationships of a postmodern
culture in which there is an exhaustion of idiom. In such a culture,
primitiveness must necessarily be simulated and ironic.15

Additionally, Elizabeth Grosz, discussing philosopher Alphonso Lingis’ opinion of

tattooing, suggests that

14
Miller, 1997, p. 52
15
Turner in Featherstone, 2000, p. 49
 8

Lingis claims that the processes by which the primitive body is

marked or scarred seems to us, in the West, to be painful and
barbaric. Like the tattooing of the Western body, there is something
facile and superficial about the permanent etching on the body's
surface. It offends Western sensibility [...] that a subject would
voluntarily undertake the permanent inscription of a verbal or visual
message on its skin. Its superficiality offends us; its permanence
alarms us.16

In this section, then, I will also explain why I believe that Turner and Lingis,
amongst others, have fundamentally misunderstood and misrepresented the
experience of all body modifiers and why the ironic and playful discourse of
postmodernism, which has rejected biological essentialism in favour of notions of
constructed and evanescent identity, is fatally flawed when considering the
physical manipulation of the natural body.

The second half - entitled Stigma, Stereotype and the Social Body: The Modified
Body in Context - will deal with how the subject’s social identity is modified. How
is the modified individual perceived by his or her cultural environment, and how
does this perception manifest itself? This will also lead to an investigation into
how the actual post-modified body diverges from the modified body the subject
had intended to create before undergoing their chosen procedures. The role of the
body in society will be touched upon, alongside the transient nature of this
relationship once a subject takes control of his or her appearance. In contrast to
traditional discourse, which has been preoccupied with cultural influence on the
pre-modified body, I also intend to demonstrate that the exertion of cultural (and
sub-cultural) pressure continues on those who have already modified their bodies,
and question what this means for our preconceptions of the body beautiful and
the complicity of society in the transformative process.

I am no sociologist. In a limited space such as this dissertation affords, and with

neither the resources nor the time to conduct detailed, in-depth, statistically valid
interviews with those who have chosen to go under the knife, I will draw upon the
many detailed case-studies available in secondary texts for examples of individual
experiences of body modification. The thrust of the dissertation, however, will be
primarily theoretical, and I will be drawing upon specific case-studies only for
illustrative purposes. I plan to illustrate the problems inherent in much academic
theory on the subject of cosmetic surgery in particular by using atypical
modification such as tongue splitting as a counter-point, by firstly establishing
whether these two acts can be considered to be part of the same phenomenon
and secondly by demonstrating that much of the thinking on the nature of
culturally sanctioned body modification can be proved to be problematic when
applied to less common or less visible forms of corporeal invasion.

16
Grosz, 1994, p.138
 9

Chapter One

Metamorphoses: Modified Body & Modified Mind

“You're in touch. You realize that you have a body. Ninety percent of the people,
though, don't realize that there is anything below the head. They think the head
is carried around by something very mysterious, and they're not aware that it's
the body, something they should be in tune with.”

– Arnold Schwarzenegger, interviewed by Oui magazine, August 1977

17

17
Image: “Michael (iam:blackdeath)” from BMEZine.com
 10

Metamorphoses: Modified Body and Modified Mind

Within the Skin: Describing the Techno-body

body /’bodi/ n 1. the physical structure, including the bones, flesh and organs, of
a person or an animal, whether dead or alive – Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth
Ed.

From science fiction comes the visual metaphor of the cyborg or cybernetic
organism - the union of human and machine portrayed so often with portentous
doom as awe-inspiring, destructive and maliciously dangerous. Kevin Warwick,
professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading and a self-professed cyborg
himself, suggests that cyborgs are, or more accurately will be, “upgraded
human/machine combines”18, functionally enhanced humans that can “go beyond
the normal limits of either the animal or the machine”.19

Cyborg bodies, claims David Tomas, cross thresholds

in the perception and social construction of the human body,

between conceptions of the organic and inorganic, the body and
technology, the human and non-human, and, indeed, of machines
themselves insofar as they can also ‘be considered as organs of the
human species’ [sic]20

Although Warwick’s tentative experiments seem inordinately different from

science-fiction’s fantasy cyborg, both share an important characteristic. Cyborgs
are fascinating because they are not simply vulnerable humans wielding powerful
tools. It is the bodily unity of cyborgs, and the profound integration between the
organic and non-organic elements that gives these images such power. They blur
the extent to which technological components can be considered part of the body
or body image, and the extent to which their enhancements are analogous to
removable prosthetic tools (spectacles or wrist-watches) or ornamentation such
as jewellery or clothing.

Moreover, the cyborg, both in its representational history and its nascent reality,
poses ontological questions pertinent to all humanity. Donna Haraway eulogises
the cyborg as the embodiment of contemporary cultural transgression and a site
of political resistance.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our
politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and
material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of
historical transformation.21

If we are all cyborgs, the discourse and narratives of body modification have a
relevance beyond the immediate. The most striking examples of corporeal
transformation, those courageous individuals pushing the limits of their cultures
and their physiologies, merely serve as large-scale embodiments of a much more
subtle process.

18
Warwick, 2002, p.298
19
Warwick, 2002, p.61
20
Tomas in Featherstone & Burrows (eds.), 1995, p.22
21
Haraway, 1991, p.150
 11

Theoretical models of the body have focussed almost exclusively on the body’s
intrinsic, organic form. The physical limit of the body, it is accepted, is the skin,
containing and concealing our mucous humanity within. Once subject to the
invasive influence of technology, however, the body becomes changed. The actual
nature or function of the invasion, be it a pacemaker keeping the subject alive or
a pair of heaving, synthetic breasts, is less interesting than the invasion itself.
The modified body - a symbiosis of the natural and the manufactured, a synthesis
of the bestowed and the desired, a union of the unadulterated canvas of flesh and
the vivid flash of the artist’s blade - is no longer merely flesh and bone. Even if
the modification in question does not involve the addition of synthetic prostheses,
such as, for example scarification or amputation, the very process of selectively
altering the body transcends its very profanity and mediocrity. The natural body
is quotidian and base, disgusting, sinful and delicately human. The modified body
is body become art, body become machine, body become project, body become
more than human.

To what extent can material additions to the body (read: implants, piercings) be
considered part of the body itself? How can the disruption of the limits of the
body be understood? Simply, what is a modified body, and what frameworks are
available for conceptualising a body which is not, or more than, organic?

Freud claimed that “Man has […] become a kind of prosthetic God [sic].”22 When
using tools, vehicles and implements affording him seemingly limitless power and
opportunity, the Freudian ego, the subject’s own idealised perception and
phantasy of self, is able to subsume these instruments into its projection and
assume a temporary, fleeting megalomaniacal image of its own potency and
worth. Freud also added a disclaimer: “these organs have not grown onto him
and they still give him much trouble at times”.23 The encasement of foreign
bodies under the skin to incorporate (literally) the prosthetic into the organic
begins to reflect this egotism and phantasy onto the ‘natural’ body. The
functionally modified body is the prosthetic god made flesh.

For the subject’s body image this transubstantiation is complex. Once the
“natural” body is tampered with, it must undergo a two-fold process of
assimilation, the first stage of which is simply a re-imagination and reacceptance
of the body’s geometry. Freud tacitly acknowledges that the ego extends beyond
the boundaries imposed by the body, and yet his description of a phantastically
expansive ego does not fully account for the volatility of the flesh. For the
modified individual, rather than a libidinal imagination of technological
incorporation, the prosthesis actually becomes a part of the body itself. It ceases
to be a prosthesis, in fact, and becomes a wholly incorporated organ. The subject
must undergo a fundamental psychical re-evaluation of the limits of his or her
own body and redraw their body-image in light of the shifting parameters of
embodiment.

The simplest understanding of body-image is a proprioceptive comprehension of

spatial embodiment. “[My] whole body for me is not an assemblage of organs
juxtaposed in space”, explains Merleau-Ponty. “I am in undivided possession of it
and I know where each of my limbs is through a body image in which all are
included.”24 Body image, however, is more than simply understanding the
location of your own body-parts at a specific moment. It is a complex and multi-
layered construction which succinctly describes not only a subject’s
comprehension of his or her body in space, but also the role and appearance of

22
Freud, 1929, p.92
23
Freud, 1929, p.92
24
Merleau-Ponty, 1945 [2002], pp. 112-113
 12

the body as the locus of interaction with the world. Using anosognosia25 as an
illustration of this, Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that

[t]he fact that the paralysed limb of the anosognosic no longer

counts in the subject’s body image, is accounted for by the body
image’s being neither the mere copy nor even the global awareness
of the existing parts of the body, and by its active integration of
these latter only in proportion to their value to the organism’s
projects. [sic]26

He summarises that body-image can be understood not as a “spatiality of position

but a spatiality of situation”.27 The body-image is dynamic, but only in that it
changes in response to need or action.

To account for body-modification, though, it becomes necessary to postulate a

body-image that is reactive rather than simply dynamic. Expanding on Merleau-
Ponty’s ideas, psychiatrist Paul Schilder explains that body-image can be
considered playful, and is capable of accounting for the reactive dynamism that
body modification demands. Discussing this issue directly, he claims:

The body-image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the

outside world and can take other parts into itself. […] It is a new
proof of the lability of the body-image that whatever comes into
connection with the surface of our body is more or less incorporated
in the body. We know that many attempts are made to change the
body-image. Pictures may be drawn on the skin. Tattooing changes
the optic part of ourselves.28

This enlargement or contraction of body-image, able to incorporate organic and

non-organic change, is the first stage the modified body undergoes following
intervention. The second stage is more complex, and encumbered with heavy
sociological baggage. The modified body is not simply expanded flesh. The
mutation of the body involves a psychical reappraisal of “self”. This is not simply
a question of the body-image’s changing volume. Post modification, the subject
must reconsider not only the dimensions of the body, but their own relationship
with it.

Schilder suggests that

[t]he image of the human body means the picture of our own body
which we form in our mind, that is to say the way in which the body
appears to ourselves. […] We may call it ‘body image’. The term
indicates that we are not dealing with a mere sensation or imagination.
There is a self-appearance of the body. It indicates also that, although
it has come through the senses, it is not a mere perception. There are
mental pictures and representations involved in it, but it is not mere
representation.29

25
A failure or refusal on the patient’s part to recognise the existence of a disease
or disability. See Merleau-Ponty (1945 [2002]), p.88
26
Merleau-Ponty, 1945 [2002], p.114
27
Merleau-Ponty, 1945 [2002], p.115
28
Schilder, 1950, p.202
29
Schilder, 1950, p.11
 13

This imagined projection of bodily-appearance, simply “What does my body look

like?”, is, however, only one side of the equation. The other is “What do I look
like?”, which is subtly and yet crucially distinct.

Becoming Myself, Becoming Somebody Else

Our personal understanding of our own identities is formed, in part, by the

appearance of our bodies. Conceptions of gendered and racial identity, for
example, are based at least to an extent on the external mien. Corporeal
alteration has important ramifications for incorporeal identity and our
fundamental relationships with ourselves. Emphasising this, Victoria Pitts explains
that

Cyberpunk surgeries have a lot in common with their culturally

legitimised counterparts. They are informed by a sense of identity
ontologically freed by the breakdown of the body’s limits. Cyberpunk
subjectivity, like that of the cosmetic surgery consumer, is seen as
the product of individual choice to shop, invent, and create bodies
and identities through technological means.30

Carl Elliot claims that “the Western self is (among other things) a moral concept,
a locus of pride and shame”. He equates this moral concept – ‘self’ - with
“identity” , and goes on to explain that when a person

changes her nose with cosmetic surgery […], what is at issue is not
simply whether the change is for better or worse, or even whether
the change has been mediated by technology, but the mere fact that
the person has changed. She may not have exactly become a
“different person”, even in a figurative sense, but her identity may
well have changed in a way that would strike many of us as morally
significant.31

The specificities of this identity change are complex, and beset with linguistic
contradictions. Those undergoing body modifications describe their experiences in
relation to self-hood in two opposite ways, each of which describes a
fundamentally different interrelationship between the body and the self. Many
describe undergoing modifications to realign their body with their body-image –
that is, their phantastical body image is divergent from their physical bodies, and
this divergence is psychically uncomfortable or even distressing. They claim to be
driven to undergo surgery to feel “more like myself”, a discourse which seems to
be particularly prevalent amongst transsexuals and cosmetic surgery patients,
although the narrative is repeated across all spectra of permanent or semi-
permanent body transformation. Kathy Davis discusses this exact pattern of
‘wrong body’ discourse amongst the narratives of the cosmetic surgery patients
she has interviewed. Her subjects, she explains, “didn’t feel at home in their
bodies; this particular body part just didn’t “belong” to the rest of her body or to
the person each felt she was [sic]”.32 Carl Elliot, in reference to apotemnophiles
(those individuals electing to have a healthy limb or appendage removed) finds
himself “struck by the use of the language of identity and selfhood in describing
their desire to lose a limb. ‘I have always felt I should be an amputee.’ ‘I felt, this
is who I was.’ ‘It is a desire to see myself, be myself, as I ‘know’ or ‘feel’ myself

30
Pitts, 2003, p.183. “Cyberpunk” in this context is used to refer non-normative
body-modification practice.
31
Elliot, 2003, p.26
32
Davis, 2003, p.76
 14

to be.’”33 Under this wrong body hypothesis, invasive transformation

technologically liberates the “true self” from its natural prison. Jay Prosser, a
female-to-male transsexual and academic, clarifies that the wrong-body
metaphor is so pertinent because “being trapped in the wrong body is simply
what transsexuality feels like”.34 The very term “self-expression”, particularly
pertinent when discussing aesthetic modifications such as tattoos, scarification or
piercings, implies a similar relationship, wherein the skin functions as the canvas
of the self and the scalpel is the ego’s paintbrush. God, it is said, created man in
his image, and yet this model describes man creating himself in his very own
image. It seems that in this metaphor, in this mode of description, the identity
has remained stable, but the body has been altered to fit it.

This is perhaps ironic considering that transsexuals and body-modifiers in general

have been crystallised in recent theory as living proof of the performativity of
identity. If it is possible, it is claimed, for identity and biology to be radically
different, it must surely be the case that all identity is constructed, playful,
mutative and performative, even if not completely free from external influence.
The transsexual narrative has been appropriated by post-structuralists and
deployed as proof of the performativity of gender, transsexual subjects
embodying the distance between gender and sex. In the her influential and oft-
cited work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler outlines her contention that both bodies
and genders are socially constructed. “If sex and gender are radically distinct”,
she ponders, “then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given
gender; in other words, “woman” need not be the cultural construction of the
female body, and “man” need not interpret male bodies.”35 The ontology of
gendered identity, gender roles and gender itself are not enchained to the biology
of the natural body. Furthermore, she presents as evidence of this distinction the
transsexual:

Transsexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual

pleasures and bodily parts. Very often what is wanted in terms of
pleasure requires an imaginary participation in body parts, either
appendages or orifices, that one might not actually posses, or
similarly pleasure may require imagining an exaggerated or
diminished set of parts.36

This is all very convincing, and, to a certain extent true. It is indeed the case that
fantasy must be the first stage of the transsexual process. Where Butler’s
argument collapses, though, is that for the transsexual is not an imaginary
participation in body parts that is desired or required, but an actual one. A
transsexual is not a transsexual, they have not “crossed sex”, until a corporeally
invasive operation has been completed. Granted, the genesis of the transsexual
process must begin with libidinal imagination of inverse gender, but it concludes
with the very real, very messy and very biological alteration of the body itself. I
would argue that the transsexual is not the proof that biological essentialism is
flawed, but in fact that it is very justifiable. Why go to such extraordinary lengths
to have new genitalia synthesised if the gulf between the body and gender is as
wide as Butler would have us imagine? If the body is unimportant or secondary to
identity, why do transsexuals opine such disgust with their bodies and push so
strongly to be permitted to have them altered?37

33
Elliot, 2003, p.211
34
Prosser, 1998, p.68
35
Butler, 1990, p.112
36
Butler, 1990, p.71
37
See Prosser, 1998, ch.1
 15

It is, however, possible, to conceive of an impermanence of identity that can

simultaneously account for the primacy of the body. I have encountered no
example of the discourse of this second group, striving to become someone else
through modification, using modification as a tool to create a new, more
satisfactory self, than that of Cora Birk. Cora is a pre-operative male-to-female
transsexual very much in the process of becoming. She is not trying to uncover
her true self, in fact very much the opposite. Through passionate, powerful and
moving prose, she expresses a desire to alter her body precisely because she
resents her angry, bitter, resentful male identity:

I was told before I started that there was nothing to fear, that I
would not become a different person; I'd simply be confirming what's
between my ears by reconciling it with what's below them. I'm not
sure that this is the case with me. I have a hard time comprehending
— especially from the inside — that a person can have their
perspectives and vision changed completely and not end up being
very, very different. The closest people to me tell me that I am
indeed becoming a different person. I accept it gracefully; I wouldn't
have started this whole thing if I was happy with who I was.38

As for the first conception, Cora’s body is still the locus of her discomfort. Unlike
Davis’ interviewees, however, Cora’s discomfort was caused because her body
was as masculine as the aggressive, misogynistic self that she so despised. In her
on-line column Shapeshift, documenting the long, expensive and painful process,
she describes, in great detail, the utter self-loathing she felt towards not only her
male/masculine body but also the rampant masculinity it enclosed:

I hated women for their bodies. I hated them for their asses, their
hips, their tits, their stomachs, their cunts and their wombs. I hated
that they could wrap their legs around their man's back and get
fucked like a girl. I hated their scent, I hated their softness, and I
hated their blood.

I hated women for their minds. I hated them for their insidiousness.
I hated them for their dishonesty, their deceit, their drama, their
selfishness, their sadism, and their foul and brutal treatment of each
other. I hated every woman that was my friend, and I hated every
woman that was my lover.

I hated women because they possessed an innate something that I

didn't have, that I would have sacrificed anything to get. Every
woman in the world had it, and I despised them ferociously for it. It
felt terrible to be filled with such jealousy and loathing, but there
was precious little that I could do to quell my feelings.39

By firstly cross-dressing, and later changing her body and ingesting copious
amounts of oestrogen, she manages to become more sensitive, caring,
empathetic, more feminine:

I'm astounded by the power of hormones. In the nearly nine months

that I've been replacing the testosterone in my body with estrogen,
my sense of self has completely changed. I'm a different person.
[emphasis added]40

38
Birk in “Guide to Getting Started” from Brik, 2003
39
Birk in “Mindshift” from Birk, 2003
40
Birk in “Mindshift” from Birk, 2003
 16

This is not simply a reversal of the wrong-body model. For Cora, it is not the
distance of her (male) body from her identity which causes her discomfort, it is its
abhorrent proximity. Her body and her identity are not alienated, they are too
close. It is not the case that she has ‘put on’ a body that suits herself ‘better’
rather than shed one she finds displeasing. Whereas the wrong-body model
describes an essential identity and a malleable body, Cora’s model is more
flexible. Both identity and the body are able to be transformed, and, crucially,
both are able to transform. The relationship she describes is not simply a
unilateral one in which identity is expressed through the body, as evidenced by
her descriptions of altered identity. Nor is it a case of the body being the sole
modifier of identity: the shape-shift is conceived and undertaken as a voluntary,
purposive project, so that in essence her identity is complicit in its own
reinvention, providing the catalyst for transformation and utterly in control of any
intervention on the body but, crucially, submissive to its results.

Identity is labile and yet simultaneously assertive. In order to fully comprehend

this contradiction It becomes necessary to add further layers of distinction to the
body/self duality already mentioned and uncouple identity from self, requiring a
re-imagination of the body/self relationship. Although Elliot equates self with
identity, if we posit a tri-partite distinction between self, body and identity as
markedly distinct but intricately interrelated, it is possible to construct a model
wherein wrong-body theory, biological essentialism, post-structuralism and the
particularities of Cora’s experience are not mutually exclusive. Shannon Larrat,
who Victoria Pitts describes as “part of the vanguard in the body modification”41,
asserts that

[i]f a person gets all dolled up in their makeup and designer clothes
[…] they are not actually doing so on the basis of who they are –
they are doing so on the basis of how well they can disguise who
they are and how well they can pretend to be something they may
not be. […] Tattooing, of course, is still a disguise, but it’s a disguise
you can never take off. When a person chooses to present their
identity using permanent body modification, they are inexorably
changing who they are. They are becoming the ideal illusion, thereby
making the illusion real. [sic]42

On closer inspection, this description is one of the distinction between self, body
and identity, and their fundamental interrelationships. To paraphrase: when a
person uses their body to express their desired identities, their self is changed.
Human beings, it seems, cannot become something before they have first
pretended to be it. The self uses the body to project its fantastical identity and,
once that fantasy is permanently expressed through the medium of the body, the
self transforms accordingly. The body allows the self to ‘become’. For those
expressing feelings of dysmorphic bodily experience, the feelings of being in the
wrong body are not caused by having a, say, female self and male body, they are
caused by having a male body but a female identity. For Cora, this is similarly
applicable, although her discomfort is more explicit – she is acutely aware of the
lability of self. She is able to select certain attitudes, feelings and conceptions of
her own self and, by acknowledging the body’s role, is able to dissect, remove
and re-sculpt those parts she finds distasteful. She is actually able to use the

41
Pitts, 2003, p.167
42
Larrat, in “Tattoos = Slutty” from Larrat (2003)
 17

scalpel to create an incision in her self and actually dispose of a whole portion of
her very being.

Yet, despite the eagerness expressed by many to undergo procedures, despite

the naïve hope that the modified body is the simple, single-step method of
achieving a radically altered sense of self, the experiences of many post-modified
subjects paints a subtly different picture. “Cosmetic surgery is not the answer to
the women’s problems with their appearance”, explains Kathy Davis. “A new body
does not automatically provide a brand new self.”43

Unquenchable Desire and The Asymptotic Body Project

Once this process of becoming is initiated by the self, once it has made a decision
to engage with its body as a tool of expression, once it has decided to take
control of its presented identity and by doing so alter its own nature, when does it
cease? Initial engagement with the body through invasive means seems, often, to
be only the start of a long process of consecutive procedures, an unquenchable
thirst to cut, sculpt, mould and change. A nose job follows a breast enlargement.
Liposuction follows face-lift. One tattoo quickly becomes a whole sleeve of bold
ink. The experiences of the heavily modified, those individuals whose bodies have
become practically unrecognisable from their naturally bestowed forms,
demonstrate fascinating nuances of the process the body undergoes following
corporeal intervention. Descriptions of repetitive body-altering procedures seem
more common than single interventions, and I believe that this phenomenon may
further highlight certain intricacies of the body/self relationship and the ever-
increasing visibility of radically altered bodies.

The simplest explanation for a predilection to bloody transformation, and an

explanation espoused by a large majority of people, is that this is a sickness. For
many, body-modification is considered a culturally-triggered malediction or a
treatable pathology, a consuming, destructive illness analogous to drug addiction.
Deliberate and purposive injury to be body, including but not limited to body-
modification intended by the individual to produce a permanent and visible result,
is, variously, the result of neuropsychological dysfunction such as a
neurochemical imbalance of substances such as serotonin, or symptomatic of a
mental or personality disorder such as bipolar disorder or psychopathology. In
psychiatry, “piercing and branding are linked to anorexia, bulimia, and what has
been called ‘delicate self-harm syndrome’”.44 The post-modified body is merely
the somatic representation of psychological disorder. This explanation is certainly
applicable to some who seek numerous procedures, although I am sceptical that
this hypothesis is universally pertinent. Dr Armando Favazza is clear in his
equation of all purposive body-modification and pathological illness - indeed, the
entire thesis of Bodies Under Siege is to make precisely this connection. For
example, his compendium of self-mutilative disorders uncomfortably lists

Desire to be Female. A man sliced open his urethra to make himself

“more like a woman”; years later he castrated himself, saying “I
resented the penis because I had been born wrong and then blamed
for it” […] A transsexual who had wanted to be a female ever since
his childhood and obtained employment as a licensed practical nurse
in a urology department. After becoming familiar with surgical
equipment and procedures, he neatly cut off his testicles.45

43
Davis, 2003, p.77
44
Pitts, 2003, p.25
45
Favazza, 1987 [1996], p.236
 18

He further classifies transsexuality as ‘major self-mutilation’ similar to “congenital

sensory neuropathy, schizoid personality disorder, mental retardation and acute
and chronic encephalitis”.46 Even more shockingly, he suggests that

People often describe psychopaths as callous, self-centred, arrogant,

superficially charming […], hedonistic and sexually exploitative,
easily bored, and prone to malingering, depression, tension, drug-
abuse and getting multiple tattoos. [emphasis added]47

Favazza proposes a particularly radical correlation between all body modification

and curable pathology. It seems to me risible, though, to suggest that a
transsexual that has carefully, sensibly and sanely spent their entire lives learning
to alter their body in a safe and sterile manner by first training to become a
urologist could be described as mentally ill or pathologically insane. Although this
individual did remove their own testicles, an action simultaneously terrifying and
repulsive to a swathe of humanity, it was carried out in the most calculated,
careful manner imaginable. I doubt people who choose to undertake other
dangerous yet fulfilling or exhilarating activities are subject to such offensive
scrutiny. Although pathological illness may account for a certain number of
compulsive body-modifiers’ repetitive procedures, the fact that many, and
possibly most individuals undergoing such radical change as effected by sex-
reassignment surgery do not approach the procedures lightly discounts a
pathological explanation for all.

Favazza’s hypotheses does separate culturally sanctioned modifications (such as,

in a contemporary context, breast enlargement) from those defined as culturally
deviant. By this reasoning, Frances Sand’s modifications, as mentioned earlier,
are classified as pathological and the repetitive beautification procedures of
someone like Michael Jackson are tolerable and easily accounted for as the result
of cultural pressure. Jackson is arguably the most visible cosmetic surgery patient
ever and his dedication to completely transform his appearance has been the
subject of an unquantifiable amount of speculation, discussion and derision. “The
greatest joy I ever had was knowing I had a choice about my face”, he has
claimed, adding “I’m a work-in-progress”.48 One procedure has followed another
until his body has become increasingly a hollow, ghostly shadow of its former self.
He is unrecognisable now from the chubby, Afro-American child who graced so
many bedroom walls as the baby-faced singer of the Jackson Five throughout the
1970s, having undergone countless hours of surgery. The explanation for
Jackson’s repetitive procedures may, of course, be pathological, but I believe that
the fact that his procedures have clearly been informed by the most extreme
forms of culturally-defined, white hegemonic beauty suggest an alternate
explanation.

For Jackson, as for many others seeking body-modifications to realign their

bodies with cultural norms, it is possibly the case that the transformation that
modifying the body entails is not as drastic as they had imagined before they
chose to proceed with the change. Encouraged by the vagaries of beauty
capitalism, they spend their lives convincing themselves that their problems, lack
of self-esteem, bad luck in love and even long-tern unemployment are directly
and tangibly related to a perceived bodily ‘defect’, a body part that they, and
often only they, see to be “too different, too abnormal, too out-of-the-ordinary to
be endured”.49 In this climate, once it becomes apparent that their breast

46
Favazza, 1987 [1996], p.234
47
Favazza, 1987 [1996], p.248
48
Brown, 2003, p. 63
49
Davis, 2003, p. 76
 19

augmentations or nose-jobs have not made their lives easier, more bearable,
more glamorous or more exciting, it is hardly surprising that the subject may feel
driven to further procedures.

The fact that body-modification may not be life changing is understandably hard
to bear given that many, it seems, choose to undergo operations only because
they believe it will be. Recent studies among women in America, Finland and the
US have suggested that women who have had breast augmentations are three
times more likely to commit suicide than those who have not, and it seems that
this may be due to surgery’s inefficiency in resolving problems it is marketed to
treat. Discussing this disturbing correlation, Dina Zuckerman, president of the
National Center for Policy Research for Women & Families in the USA angrily
suggests that “we can’t just go along with the manufacturer’s assumptions that
implants are great for women’s mental health”50. Modifying your body is no
remedy, no magical solution to psychological problems.

Modification does not cure, this much is clear. Yet the modifying the body for the
purposes of therapy is not a universal characteristic of body-modification
narratives. Certain modification narratives demonstrate that the body can be re-
appropriated from medical and psychological discourse and that it is not
obligatory that body modification necessarily be seen as a tool to achieve an aim.
Giddens, for one, has described the post-modernisation of the Western body as
project, suggesting that “body regimes and the organisation of sensuality in high
modernity become open to continuous reflexive attention, against the backdrop of
plurality of choice. […] We become responsible for the design of our own
bodies”.51 Paul Sweetman agrees, postulating that body-change is used to create

a coherent and viable sense of self-identity through attention to the

body and, more particularly the body’s surface. […] contemporary
tattooing and piercing can indeed be interpreted in these terms, as
attempts to anchor or stabilize one’s sense of self-identity, in part
through the establishment of a coherent personal narrative”.52

This third conception of the modified body lies outside of this pseudo-medical
construction, and although I feel it may provide a model applicable to most body
transformation, it is one more obviously applicable to body projects which lie
outside of mainstream beauty frameworks.

Returning to the cyborg metaphor, Donna Haraway suggests that the prevalence
of cyborg imagery and the encroaching reality of the cyborg into 21st-century
living

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the

boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The
last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into
amusement parks.53

Former doctoral candidate and philosophy degree holder Erik Sprague is

nowadays better known as “The Lizardman”, blurring the lines between human
and animal, although perhaps not in the way Haraway had initially imagined. The
chronicles of his transformation provide a fascinating counterpoint to both
Favazza and Birk’s understandings of body and self. After appearing on countless

50
Kaufman, 2003
51
Giddens, 1991, p. 102
52
Sweetman in Featherstone (ed.), 2000, p.53
53
Haraway, 1991, p.152
 20

documentaries and in numerous magazines, he has become something of a

superstar within the modified community and an increasingly recognisable face
outside of it. His body modifications have been undertaken with a strict aesthetic
drive towards resembling a lizard, or at least a representation of one. He is widely
credited as being the first human being to bifurcate his own tongue, splitting it to
resemble the forked tongues of reptiles, a procedure which has since been
imitated by thousands worldwide. He is working towards virtually full tattoo
coverage depicting green scales and has reptilian-esque “horns” implanted in his
forehead. He has had his teeth sharpened to glistening points, and partially
thickened his fingernails so that they resemble claws. Erik’s perception of his own
body is compelling, as it is clear that, for him, his body really is a project much in
the way Giddens has theorised. Sprague has made a conscious decision to re-
imagine his body as a work of art for his own consumption. He has selected an
aesthetic direction and pursued it to the very extreme, employing his body as a
canvas of expression in ways many could never even imagine.

His modifications do not follow the patterns Favazza suggests necessary to

classify them as pathological. Neither has he attempted to render himself more
beautiful or to efface a perceived deviance from the norm. His example is
extreme, but one which allows the construction of a model applicable to much
body-modification of whatever stripe – a model allowing non-pathological agency
even within a framework of repetitive procedures. In one of his regular online
columns, Sprague was asked when he would know that his “work” was
completed. His reply was esoteric, and yet enlightening:

I don't know when, but when I am, I will know. I suspect it will be
much like knowing when to walk away from a painting or a
drawing.54

Of course, the body-as-art concept is not unusual – French artist Orlan has
become infamous for exploring these very boundaries – and yet the absorption of
this art project into his quotidian existence certainly is. Orlan is art only as long
as the cameras are turned on her, only as long as she is performing. The meaning
of her art is essentially provided in the context of performance, and although she
must live with her scars and stitches and sutures and subdermal implants even
after the performance has finished, one senses with Orlan a detachment and
disavowal of the body uncommon amongst most modifiers. Sprague’s example is
of a body itself become art for art’s sake, a playful revelling in the body’s
plasticity that one senses may, in fact never cease. Body projects, as Jackson and
Sprague so vividly illustrate, are perhaps never finished. Once the subject
becomes aware that the body is infinitely malleable, it is impossible to ever
conceive of it as concrete again.

The modified body can be explained as being asymptotic. The asymptote, a model
taken from mathematics, is a line that continually approaches a given curve but
does not meet it at a finite distance. The asymptotic line progresses towards its
goal but can never reach it, just as the asymptotic body does. Step by step, the
body approaches the self’s desired end-point, and yet the goal is tantalisingly
always beyond reach.. At the turn of the 20th century, Russian philosopher
Michael Bhaktin conceptualised the disgusting bodies of the Mediaeval carnival
described by Rabelais as ‘grotesque’, and in doing so painted descriptions which
seem remarkably pertinent to the current context. The modified body, in all its
exsanguination, is indeed grotesque. Fascinating and yet repulsive, it intrigues as
much as it troubles He suggested that

54
Sprague, Erik from “The Lizardman Q&A Part Two” in Sprague (2003)
 21

the grotesque body […] is a body in the act of becoming. It is never

finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds
and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world
and is itself swallowed by the world.55

Simply, by constantly absorbing cultural and trans-cultural references,56 by

imitating and inventing, the body become grotesque is the body liberated. It is
not that the goal-posts are moving, that a perceived defect is ignominiously
shunted from one ugly body-part to another, it is simply that the modified body
can never reach its conclusion. Neither is the process aimless, as Sprague and
transsexuals illustrate. Indeed, Alphonso Lingis has suggested that Western body-
projects tend to “signify something, […] aim at something, […] tend toward
something”57 – there is a catalyst provided by the self and yet the destination
remains unreachable.

The first incision is merely the trigger for the initial stage of the project. Once the
volatility of the body becomes apparent, the body is thrown into a purposive,
cathectic and yet infinite process of becoming from which it can never escape.
This model is interesting as it can account for many of the contradictions
prevalent in body-modification narratives already discussed. Firstly, it allows a
parallel acceptance of repetitive procedures alongside a static destination. As one
procedure becomes complete, so it becomes clear the goal is still some way in the
distance and further procedures must be undertaken. Of course, not all body
projects are as clearly defined as Erik Sprague’s, and yet it seems that most
body-modifiers are progressing towards something, even if they themselves are
unable to eloquently explain its exact form.

Secondly, the asymptotic model can account for imitative citationality and post-
modern theories of identity without recourse to accusations of meaningless and
hollow irony. Post-structuralism and its correlate post-modernism has theorised a
world of identity tourism,58 a world where it is possible to appropriate attitudes,
behaviours and modes of identity from across history and culture and incorporate
them into our own. Brian Turner has suggested that this trans-cultural
appropriation of primitive practices such as tattooing or earlobe-stretching must,
as it is essentially citational, be ironic and meaningless59, but this can only make
sense if the procedures are to be considered ends in their own right. It is true
that having a moko tattooed on your face does not make you a Maori, nor does
subincising the penis entitle you to membership of the Yiwara tribe of Australian
aboriginals, but to view cultural appropriation as the impetus to modification is to
miss the point entirely. Just as an artist takes inspiration from life, so too does
the body-modifier.

Schilder explains that

The body-image is not a product of the appersonization of the bodies

of others, although we make take parts of the body-images of others
into our postural model. It is also not gained by identification with
the body-images of others, although we may enrich our body-image
perception by such identifications. There is no other way out than to
formulate that our own body-image and the body-images of others
are primary data of experience, and that there is from the beginning

55
Bakhtin, 1968 [1984], p.317
56
“Citationality” of the type Butler suggests in Bodies That Matter.
57
Lingis, 1983, p.25
58
Pitts, 2003. p. 180
59
Turner in Featherstone, 2000, p. 49
 22

a very close connection between the body-image of ourselves and

the body-images of others. 60

In this way, the surgically-enhanced woman can perhaps be considered not to be

culturally coerced into desiring larger breasts but merely aesthetically inclined to
do so. Within the framework of the asymptotic body project, each procedure
must be considered merely one further step towards the unconquerable summit:
the steel, silicone and ink are the media creating the completed project.

Even if these bodies and identities are inspired to some degree by the bodies and
identities of others, that is to say even if the process is mimetic, avaricious or
aspirational, the individual’s choice to deploy them remains crucial. Schilder
again makes this very point, explaining that a

Person who imitates somebody else in dressing and entertainment

has previously taken over his feelings and desires. Imitation goes,
therefore, […] from inside to outside, but it also from above to
below. Defeated nations imitate the victors; the nobility, the court.61

In a contemporary context, this top-down process flows from celebrities to the

general public. Rather than being ironic or desperate, citational body-
modification, such as teenage girls having their navels pierced after seeing
Britney Spears or women having breast implants longing to resemble Pamela
Anderson can perhaps more accurately be described as intertextual, referencing
another source but re-appropriated for deeply personal reasons.

The cumulative effect of this is that the asymptotic model, by removing

suggestions of capriciousness, permits the self agency in relation to the body in
ways that most discussions do not. For Sprague, and for others pursuing body-
transformations both inside and outside of cultural understandings of beauty, the
body has ceased to be imprisoning. By realising that the body is completely free,
bound only by technological restraints,62 the self can only become empowered.
They are the cyborgs Haraway described, taking “pleasure in the confusion of
boundaries and […] responsibility for their construction”63.

Modifying the body can never be without consequence. The mere act of changing
your appearance involves a delicate and profound transition as the self and its
identity respond and react to the liquid topographies of the body. Even if the
decision to alter your body is triggered by cultural coercion or self-loathing, for
example, the process of change is common to all. In Western society, we are
free. Free to make choices about our bodies and ourselves. Despite the opinions
of theorists such as Naomi Wolf, culture does not force people to change their
bodies. That drive, quite simply comes from within, a decision taken for an
admittedly broad spectrum of reasons but a decision which initiates an
irreversible process of transformation which impacts upon the very depths of our
understandings of ourselves.

60
Schilder, 1950, p.235. He further defines ‘appersonization’ as when “the
individual does not want to play the role of the other person, but wants only to
adopt a part of the emotions, experiences and actions of the other person” –
p.251.
61
Schilder, 1950, p. 243
62
Erik would dearly love a prosthetic and prehensile tail, and yet this seems, for
the moment, beyond the possible.
63
Haraway, 1991, p.150
 23

Chapter Two

Stigma, Stereotype and the Social Body: The

Modified Body in Context

"When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth.

You are what they see."

- The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

64

64
Image: “Jason (iam:jasonthe29th)” from BMEZine.com
 24

Stigma, Stereotype and the Social Body:

The Modified Body in Context

Social Perceptions of the Modified Body

The body does not just appear as a hazy reflection in the subject’s mirror. The
body is the projection of self, and yet not just to the self. The body is an object
whose role it is to allow the self to communicate with the world, and when
undergoing invasive corporeal transformation, it is not just the subject’s own
relationship with his own body that becomes altered, but the very nature of this
communication.

Erving Goffman speculates that

Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the

complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members
of each of these categories. […] When a stranger comes into our
presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate
his category and attributes, his ‘social identity’ […].65

Essentially, how someone appears, what their body looks like, forces us to
instantly place them into one of innumerable sociologically-defined pigeonholes,
and begin to judge them and make assumptions about their character, behaviour,
class, gender and attitudes. Although the conclusions drawn from the first
appearance are not purely defined by the physical body (they may, for example,
be based on language, dialect, clothing, property, context or personal prejudice),
it seems fairly obvious to suggest that the topography of the flesh plays a major
role.

The violence of aesthetic procedures has proved ethically controversial since their
(re)emergence at the beginning of the 20th century and evidence of having
undergone invasive aesthetic procedures still functions as a suggestion of
undesirability. The modified body has been a cultural taboo in recent Western
history, and although this is changing, it is indubitably a slow process. To have a
modified body still provokes shock, disgust and revulsion amongst the non-
modified and shame for those who have undergone procedures. Elizabeth Haiken
suggests that until very recently, “cosmetic surgery remained a dirty little
secret”66. Because the Hippocratic Oath seems to preclude inflicting wounds with
vain intent,

those surgeons who considered themselves “reputable” […] believed

that by placing healthy patients at risk, cosmetic surgery
contradicted the fundamental tenets of the medical profession;
“beauty surgery” was the province of quacks and charlatans.67

Furthermore, she insists that

Americans have had some misgivings about expanding the definition

of self-improvement to encompass the surgical approach. These

65
Goffman, 1963 [1990], p. 12
66
Haiken, 1997, p. 162
67
Haiken, 1997, pp. 1-2
 25

misgivings have not slowed the specialty’s growth, […] but they have
made some patients uneasy about their decisions68

If even those who have made the conscious decision to undergo invasive
aesthetic transformation feel troubled on the one hand by their own status as
modified individuals and on the other by the negative social image the possession
of a modified body presents, it seems obvious that the social role of the modified
body is highly problematic.

Goffman continues, describing the process he terms stigmatisation:

While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his
possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the
category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable
kind – in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or
dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole
and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.69

Exactly what causes such queasiness and uneasiness towards the technologically
modified body? Precisely what are the reactions the post-modified body
engenders, and how can these be explained? From Haiken’s descriptions, it may
be assumed that suggestions that the stranger before us may have been moulded
by technology fit into the categories of evidence Goffman had in mind. An initial
explanation for the widespread suspicion directed towards the modified is
revealed on close linguistic analysis of Goffman’s exclamations, wherein the
anomalous stranger is not a “whole” person, but “tainted.” Although this is
intended as a metaphor, it is perhaps interesting to note that certain tropes of
description conceptualise modification itself in precisely the same way. Invasively
altering the body is the very epitome of the stigmatising attributes Goffman
describes, the virgin flesh tainted by synthetic materials, the excision of
unwanted rolls of gelatinous flab violently erasing the integrity of the once whole
body. And yet this analysis is simplistic. Goffman’s explanation does not fully
explain why tainted or incomplete humans should be considered any less valid,
nor why purity and plenitude are such valued characteristics.

Somatic Wholeness and the Reflection of Pain

Firstly, we are all quite fond of our bodily wholeness, and the violence inherent in
modification procedures is unsettling as it threatens these dearly held notions of
unity. Cutting the flesh threatens this unity, and so it is arguably somewhat ironic
that the natural “wholeness” of the human body was actually cited by some as a
justification for reconstructive (as opposed to aesthetic) surgery. Haiken
describes an interesting exchange between various religious leaders which took
place in 1962 in order to establish the ethicality or otherwise of plastic surgery
procedures:

Predictably, none had trouble with the question of reconstructive

surgery. For Protestants, Reverend Reeves wrote, the two most
relevant principles were that of personal honesty […] and what might
be termed wholeness […]. Reconstructive surgery, defined as
“restorative, reparative and remedial” was clearly consistent with
these two principles. “With this class of surgery,” Reeves concluded,
“I cannot see that there is any ethical issue involved”. Father O’Leary

68
Haiken, 1997, p. 161
69
Goffman, 1963 [1990], p. 12
 26

similarly found reconstructive surgery consistent with the Catholic

Principle of Totality, in that the violation or destruction of parts,
while not to be undertaken lightly, was acceptable when undertaken
for the good of the whole. [emphasis mine]70

Only in the preservation of corporeal totality can surgery be justifiable. Aptly

illustrating our preoccupation with wholeness, this symposium seems to explain
why breast enlargements are generally deemed acceptable following
mastectomies but frowned upon otherwise. It may also explain why the most
extreme of negative reactions towards the various shades of body modification
are reserved for apotemnophiles, those individuals who desire the elective
removal of a psychologically troubling yet otherwise healthy limb or extremity.
Although I do not wish to dwell on apotemnophilia here particularly, Carl Elliot
does describe that, on presenting an article on the topic to a magazine editor, he
was met with the comment that “This is definitely the most revolting query I’ve
seen for quite some time”.71

Furthermore, the obsession with wholeness is closely linked to our general

aversion to suffering. We do not, as a rule, enjoy pain. In a recent column in the
Guardian, for example, William Leith draws a picture of a whole generation
overcome by anaesthesia.

We live in an age of quick fixes. These days, we expect everything to

get faster - cars, lifts, food. When we suffer psychological distress,
we take Prozac and Seroxat. More people are having their wisdom
teeth extracted under general anaesthetic. Caesarean section is on
the increase. Half a century of the NHS has softened us up, and the
sheer success of modern medicine has made pain something of an
anomaly.72

Ours is a society increasingly quick to numb the often painful realities of

embodiment, and the visual spectacle provided by a modified individual, an
individual who has willingly, even voluntarily submitted to and paid for the
deliberate violation of his or her bodily integrity, seems utterly incomprehensible
to many, which possibly accounts for the fact that the most common question any
visibly-modified individual is asked is probably “Did [or often ‘does’] that hurt?”.
Quite simply, humans tend to be proud of their intact and complete bodies, and
go to great lengths to ensure their continued cohesion. By contrast, the modified
are the walking wounded; their bodies dissected.

Suffering is, usually, something to be banished, and not sought out. Indeed,
Naomi Wolf’s principal criticism of cosmetic surgery is the supposedly excruciating
pain she imagines is involved in the procedures. “The cosmetic surgery industry”,
she spits, “is expanding by manipulating ideas of health and sickness”.73 “Today,”
she continues, “what hurts is beauty”.74 As Favazza and Davis have suggested,75
there is almost a mental equation between being cut with a scalpel to lift the face
and being stabbed in the chest. No sane individual would ever demand to be
stabbed in the chest, they reason, and thus cosmetic surgery patients must (for
Favazza) be pathologically deviant or (for Davis) culturally duped.

70
Haiken, 1997, p. 163
71
Elliot, 2003, p.235
72
Leith, 2003 The Guardian 26/04/03 “Confessions of a ten-a-day Man”
73
Wolf, 1990, p.220
74
Wolf, 1990, p.219
75
See Footnotes 4 & 9
 27

There has been a vicious backlash against the modified body, compelled by this
precise type of reaction. Pitts, who has actually undertaken a study of the
descriptions of body-modification in the media76, presents a case that

some mainstream journalists and therapists have framed body

modification as a new social problem of delinquency, sickness, and
perversion. Such critics view the practices as attacks on the body
that reflect both self-abuse and social disaffection. Because the
practices are often painful, and because they often create
permanent inscriptions that work against Western beauty norms that
idealize smooth and pristine skin, they are considered by some to be
mutilative. Body-modifiers are depicted not only as defiant, deviant
or shocking, but also as self-hating, ill and out of control. Permanent,
painful and non-normative adornments are described as forms of
self-injury.77

What the avulsion to pain prevalent in such rhetoric illustrates is that there is a
essentially a dearth of empathy for the modified. There is a pernicious inability to
separate purposive body-transformation from injurious self-mutilation. If you do
not share the drive to transform your body, if the very idea of piercing your flesh
turns your stomach and makes your skin prickle, then it is undoubtedly difficult to
comprehend. It is only human nature to coddle the sick and cradle the wounded.
In fact, it is Naomi Wolf’s irascible polemic which is again pointedly useful as an
illustration. Although setting herself outside of normative conceptions of
appearance, it seems baffling that she is so willing to subscribe to normative
conceptions of bodily behaviour. Writing before the easy availability and blanket
media coverage of genital re-sculpting surgery for male patients, she angrily lists
a selection of modes of modifying male genitalia as if to suggest that their
existence was so far-fetched as to be ludicrous:

Imagine this: penis implants, penis augmentation, foreskin

enhancement, testicular silicone injections to correct asymmetry,
saline injections with a choice of three sizes, surgery to correct the
angle of erection, to lift the scrotum and make it pert. Before and
After shots of the augmented penis in Esquire. […] Civilised people
will agree that these are mutilations so horrible that a woman should
not even be able to think them. I recoiled when I wrote them. You, if
a woman, probably flinched when you read them; if you were a man,
your revulsion was no doubt almost physical.78

We must no longer imagine. Ignoring the fact that male genital modification has
gone on for centuries, and so will it continue, the underlying message of this
dystopic presentation is that these are procedures so intimately painful they
should not, and would never be endured. As long ago as 1990, descriptions of
such procedures seemed shocking and unimaginable. Now, thirteen years later,
all has come to pass. Beauty, Wolf repeatedly stressed, was the oppression of
women by men, and yet the emergence of the type of beauty surgery she
deemed impossible almost undermines her entire hypothesis.

Wolf’s repulsion at painful processes is not unusual. Pain is a universal human

characteristic. Even Shakespeare’s bedevilled usurer Shylock employed
metaphors of blood, suffering and sensation to convince Salerio of his humanity.
For those against modification, the willing submission to pain is further evidence,

76
in Featherstone (ed), 2000
77
Pitts, 2003, p.24
78
Wolf, 1990, p.242
 28

if any were needed, of these individuals’ inhumanity. In the manifesto

accompanying her surgical projects Carnal Art, though, Orlan redraws her
surgery, her art, and her body, as a victory over pain rather than a submission to
it. “Carnal Art judges the famous ‘You will give birth in pain’ to be anachronistic
and ridiculous […] now we have epidurals and multiple anaesthetics as well as
analgesics, long live morphine! Down with pain!”.79 In fact,

[t]he only pain surgery causes her is when she too looks at the
images her operations have generated: ‘I am sorry to make you
suffer, but remember, I am not suffering, except like you, when I
look at the images.80

There is no masochism inherent in the procedures, only in spectatorship. Looking

upon representations of the severable body invokes the intermeshed emotions of
disgust, horror and fear, representations which are “understood in the world of
the uncanny to included the deformed, the mutilated, corpses and madmen,
these poor souls who remind “normals” just how fragile, transient and partible
they are.”81 It is perhaps not far-fetched to suggest that the disgust and horror
of the spectator is often more acute than the pain felt by the modified individual
during the procedure, especially when considering relatively painless procedures
such as earlobe stretching. When Goffman’s stranger appears, stigmatisation is
conferred upon the modified body not just because it is extraordinarily
incomplete, but because the subject seems to revel in its incompleteness by
apparently refusing to feel the pain the spectator feels.

This is the beginning of an irreversible process of stigmatisation. Turning once

more to Goffman, it becomes clear that this process is far from rational, but one
tightly connected to the uncanny as Miller describes. Fear of partibility is the one
stage of a process of stigmatisation that continues to paint the modified individual
as less worthy, less intelligent, less human:

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not

quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of
discrimination, through which we effectively , if often unthinkingly,
reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma theory, an ideology to
explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents,
sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences,
such as those based on social class. We use specific stigma terms
such as cripple, bastard, moron in our daily discourse as a source of
metaphor and imagery, typically without giving thought to the
original meaning. We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections
on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute
some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast,
such as ‘sixth sense’ or ‘understanding’.82

On this basis, the aversion to modifications becomes merely the foundation of a

pyramid of negative stereotypes and unjust assumptions. The initial stigmatising
mark assumes a broad spectrum of significance, and provides the basis for
discrimination and suspicion which are difficult to overcome.

79
Orlan quoted in Ince, 2000, p.62
80
Ince, 2000, p.63
81
Miller, 1997, p.27
82
Goffman,1963 [1990], pp. 15-16
 29

Corporeal Criminality and Bodies of Subversion

That said, it is certainly true that the stigma attached to the modified body cannot
simply be explained by disgust. The modified body is not just a transgression of
the boundaries between whole and incomplete or between sensitive and
anaesthetised but also the bearer of heavy sociological baggage, burdened by
socially constructed conceptions of acceptable behaviour and appropriate
appearance.

Most obviously in the case of tattoos, certain tropes of body modification are
inextricably connected to the social discourse of groups already stigmatised for
other reasons, and seen as socially transgressive. There are two reasons for this,
the first of which is that certain already-marginalised groups use(d) tattoos as a
signifier of the group identity in the face of sociological oppression, as markers of
tribal identities and to communicate their apparent disaffection with the status-
quo. Anthropologist W.D Hambly, for example, cites nineteenth century author M.
Lombroso, who claims that “le tatouage fut un usage des barbares et des
galeriens”.83 Less tersely, Brian Turner describes that

[t]attooing during the period of nation formation was often part of an

oppositional culture in which working-class males expressed their
class solidarity or occupational solidarity through body marks. State
strategies of governmentality interpreted tattoos as part of the
culture of the criminal or the underclass. Body-marking was now
used for classification and stigmatisation.84

Like the tattoos themselves, this cultural interconnection has proven quite
indelible. The second reason is more nefarious, as it suggests not that the
underclass were drawn to tattoos but the inverse: that a tattoo was an
unmistakable sign of criminality. Distressingly, this conception did not only have
currency in popular opinion, but from the beginning of the 1900s were endorsed
by apparently reputable scientists. Robert Bogdan states that

A new branch of science, “criminal anthropology”, began to explore

the links between body markings and crime. Cesare Lombroso, […]
who some consider the father of the scientific study of crime, stated
flat out that tattooing was a sign of criminality – or more accurately,
that tattoos were the stigmata of a distinct physical form of human,
the “criminal man”. […] According to him and his scientific followers,
the practice of permanently marking the body was at atavistic
revision, evidence of an individual’s regression to a more aggressive,
antisocial form of being. As he put it, “Tattooing is, in fact, one of the
essential characteristics of primitive man, and of men who still live in
the savage state.85

Having been appropriated by marginalised groups as markers of deviant identity,

and being designated for over a hundred years as symbolic of unsavoury
countenance, tattoos have had difficulty fully emerging from the shadows of their
alienated past. Even as normative cosmetic surgery has been recast as the
deviant proclivity of porn-stars86, it seems as if the very process of modification,
no matter what its intended or achieved aim, has been constructed as a marker
social deviancy. In the context of Goffman’s model of stigmatisation, pre-

83
Hambly, 1925, p.197 – “the tattoo is a habit of barbarians and galley slaves”
84
Turner in Featherstone (ed.), 2000, p. 45
85
Bogdan, 1988, p.249
86
Wolf, 1991, p.246
 30

judgement based upon opinions of modification carries all the weight of the
transgressive procedure coupled with an extra layer of stigmatised association. As
this judgement is pre-conscious and irrational, stigmatisation becomes virtually
inescapable.

This process is further exaggerated when it is noted that not only is body-
modification assumed to be a social signifier of criminal behaviour, but also that
certain forms of body-modification are actually criminal acts in their own right,
and that interacting with your own body in ways deemed socially irresponsible
makes you liable to punishment. Further explaining the widespread distaste for
modification, in subverting the hegemonic structure of Western medicine, wherein
practicing surgery without a licence is a criminal offence, the modified body
becomes a symbol not only of personal transgression, but of outright political
subversion.

In May this year, following the similar actions in the state of Michigan, the Illinois
state legislature moved to introduce the following amendment to the State’s
criminal code:

Amends the Criminal Code of 1961. Prohibits a person other than a

licensed physician or dentist from performing tongue splitting.
Provides that a physician or dentist authorized to perform tongue
splitting may perform tongue splitting on an individual only if there is
a therapeutic or clinical basis for performing the procedure on that
individual. Makes a first offence a Class A misdemeanour and a
second or subsequent offence a Class 4 felony.87

Although packaged as a health-care bill, the fact that this bill restricts tongue-
splitting to cases of therapeutic need reveals its true intention – the outright
prohibition of the practice across the state. As Erik Sprague points out, “This
language is sure to be interpreted by doctors and their lawyers as effectively
banning them from the procedure. Tongue splitting is a purely elective
procedure”88. Thus, as the body politic struggles to control the individual body,
the modified individual becomes ever further stigmatised. And this case is hardly
unique. In the United Kingdom, too, surgeon Robert Smith was prevented from
carrying out surgery to amputate healthy limbs of patients deemed, apart from
their psychical discomfort with their extremities, showed no evidence of mental
health problems. Shannon Larrat provides an example of the case of Californian
“cutter” Todd Bertrang, arrested for performing radical (yet consensual)
clitorodectomies to numerous women. He explains that

body modification artist Todd Bertrang was arrested under charges of

practising medicine without a license via "Operation Safe Medicine"
in December for performing female genital cutting and other unusual
procedures. Even though the procedures were all consensual, and
Todd Bertrang has one of the highest customer satisfaction levels in
this community, the state medical board investigators referred to the
people getting the procedures as "victims" and called the procedures
"illegal and disfiguring".89

He further points out that, as no reputable, qualified doctor would even actually
perform this procedure for risk of being struck off, the ramifications of Todd’s

87
Taken from the Illinois General Assembly website at
http://www.legis.state.il.us/legislation/93/hb/09300hb3086eng.htm
88
Sprague, in “The [Modified] Body Politic” from Sprague (2003)
89
Larrat, in “Should Todd Bertrang Go To Jail?” from Larrat (2003)
 31

arrest are essentially that no-one may undergo a clitorodectomy, even if they so
desire. The depiction of these women as victims is disturbing, as in choosing to
modify their bodies (or have them modified), these women have actually
rescinded all possibility of competent and purposive action and have been
reduced to helpless, prone incapability. The very act of expressing their desires
towards their own bodies leads to the erasure of their personal and political
autonomy. Additionally, because their desires stand outside the culturally
accepted norm, their bodies become, in the eyes of the law and of the state,
disfigured.

The body belongs, at least in part, to the state. It is placed in the care of the
medical establishment to such an extent that many individuals now have little
direct interaction with their bodies at all. With rigorous laws in place across the
Western world restricting permission to carry out invasive procedures unless
sanctioned by the government, any non-normative practice that is, in effect,
illegal renders the post-modified body a potent symbol of political resistance,
even if that was not the individual’s original aim. Pitts highlights that “the
subcultural discourse of body art [positions] women’s body modifications as
rebellious acts of ‘reclaiming’ the female body”90, the implication being that the
female body can be reclaimed from dominant ideologies, and yet in this context
body-modification represents not just ideological but also legal reclamation,
returning the property of the body to its rightful owner.

The Paradox of Conformity

As previously mentioned, Goffman explains that the process of stigmatisation is

necessarily both cultural (that is, informed by cultural norms) and communal (a
crucial trait which marks the distinction between, for example, stigma and
prejudice). Rosemarie Garland Thomson elaborates:

In essence, stigmatization is an interactive social process in which

particular human traits are deemed not only to be different, but
deviant. It is a form of social comparison apparently found in all
societies, though the specific characteristics singled out vary across
cultures and history. Most important is that these social devaluations
are collective, part of a communal acculturation process.
Stigmatization creates a shared, socially maintained and determined
conception of a normal individual […] sculpted by a social group
attempting to define its own character and boundaries. Though any
human trait can be stigmatized, the dominant group has the
authority and means to determine which differences are inferior and
to perpetuate those judgements.91

As socially and politically deviant, it seems almost unnecessary to explain that

body-modification is also fundamentally non-conformist. As already discussed, the
modified body is stigmatised because deviates from normative behaviour as
defined by the dominant social group. In general, it has been assumed that this
transgressiveness has formed an integral part of body-transformation’s essential
appeal. The tattoo seems to be a simple shortcut to illustrate your rebellious
credentials. In fact, it is irrefutable that people have chosen to engage with their
bodies in manner which is perceived to be anti-social only because they wish to
convey that they, as an individual, do not subscribe to the proscriptive ideals of

90
Pitts, 2003, p. 49
91
Thomson, 1997, p.31
 32

the socially dominant. For many, their modifications are purposively emblematic
of alienation and disenfranchisement.

On the other hand, theorists such as Kathy Davis have claimed that, in their
experience, many people choosing to undergo cosmetic procedures do so not to
stand out, not to express their difference or individuality, but actually to fit in with
normative beauty standards and to be “more ordinary”. Her interviewees were
“not primarily concerned with becoming more beautiful; they just wanted to be
‘like everyone else’”92. Given that subscription to social norms is the only way to
avoid stigma, it may seem sensible to suggest that transforming your body in line
with normative standards would earn approval and reacceptance.

The truth is, neither hypothesis can be held to be entirely correct. Alienation can
never be totally achieved through body-modification as its adherents are so
tightly ensconced within such a narrow aesthetic. By deliberately challenging one
set standard, and by employing only a limited set of tools, the modified body at
once escapes social norms but establishes sub-cultural ones. Carl Elliot makes
this very point, pointing out that the

difficulty is that this kind of self-expression often becomes subject to

the same kind of problems that produced the need for it in the first
place. You are still expected to express yourself in accordance with
given social standards – not those of the world the movement is
rebelling against, but the standards of the movement itself.93

The post-modified body remains subject to sociological norms, even as it chooses

to step outside of them, and at the same time is subject to sub-cultural exertion
of a similar kind, only with an oppositional aesthetic. Thus the modified body
becomes somehow torn, never fully accepted by the normative world it rebels
against and whist the new aesthetic it has chosen to embrace remains inadequate
and incapable of permitting the changes in social identity it was selected to
achieve.

Body-modification can never, in itself, make you an ‘individual’, and in fact it

often does exactly the reverse, signifying group membership even if this is not
the individual’s intention. Goffman suggested that

all of us, sociology claims, speak from the point of view of a group.
The special situation of the stigmatized is that society tells him he is
a member of the wider group, which means he is a normal human
being, but that he is also ‘different’ in some degree, and that it would
be foolish to deny this difference.94

To society at large, the function and nature of an individuals body-modifications

are irrelevant. All that is important is the fact that the body is modified, and
therefore stigmatised. In fact, an individual may find that his or her status as the
inhabitant of a modified body actually supersedes every other personality or
character trait they may possess. The effect of the stigma is all-encompassing
and inescapable. The act of body-modification as expression of individuality and
self-fulfilment becomes neutered by the

Nor can the reacceptance hypothesis be taken for granted. Firstly, the surgically
altered body, once modified, can never again become normal. It exists in a

92
Davis, 2003, p.77
93
Elliot, 2003, p.202
94
Goffman, 1963 [1990], p. 149
 33

vacuum between normative and deviant appearance, trapped by its own actions
and condemned. Wolf would have us believe that “civilised people” find
modification abhorrent, and at the same time that it is the coercive cultural
pressure of these same people which compels women to surgery in the first place.
The very process of modification is stigmatising and can never bring an individual
completely into the folds of normative social acceptance.

Doubly frustrating is that, in post-modernity, in a world with so much apparent

choice, it is actually the case that “trying to fit in” is in itself a stigmatising
characteristic. In trying to remove a different sort of stigma, the stigma of
ugliness, the cosmetic surgery patient has this returned to her twofold. In
addition to the stigma inherent in modification,

to act in conformity with the mainstream is to give up. It is to

subordinate yourself to the desires of others. Self-fulfilment comes
not by simply accepting the values of the majority, but also by
discovering and creating your own. The notion that standards of
beauty are oppressive, then, is itself parasitic on other standards of
self-reliance and independence. These standards are in turn part of a
larger worldview in which rebellion winds out over conformity,
independence over self-sacrifice, self-fulfilment over social
solidarity.95

Trapped in this paradox, where non-conformism is stigmatised and conformism

equally so, where separating yourself from the herd can only involve being swept
along by another, where individuality and self-expression are the primary aims of
many transformative procedures but where the very act of transformation itself
involuntary binds you to a social stereotype, the post-modified body is an
enigma. It is transgressive, and yet not entirely, buffeted between each side of
every ephemeral boundary it dares to cross. This is the final, bitter irony which
befalls the modified body. Constantly becoming, it can never become.

95
Elliot, 2003, p. 202
 34

Conclusion
Becoming: The Impossibility of the Post-Modified Body

“The world’s a scene of changes, and to be Constant, in Nature were inconstancy”

- Abraham Cowley, The Mistress

According to Elizabeth Grosz, the body can be theorised as “a kind of hinge or

threshold: […] placed between a psychic or lived interiority and a more socio-
political exteriority that produces interiority through the inscription of the body’s
outer surface.”96 Our bodies are, quite simply, who we are. Crucial in defining
both self-hood and social identity, the body is situated between the self and the
world, functioning as an indicator of both internal and external pressures.
Invasively transforming the somatic shell has profound ramifications for both our
perceptions of our selves and the world’s perception of us.

Modifying the flesh is more profound than it seems. Body-modifiers have long
been accused of shallow vanity and hollow superficiality in taking control of their
appearance, but, as I have illustrated, beauty runs far deeper than the surface of
the skin. Modifying the flesh impacts inwards, even permitting a metamorphosis
of the fundamental self. Simultaneously, it impacts outwards, changing both our
perception of the world and how we are perceived. By seizing the flesh and
kneading it into the shapes so long imagined, an individual is able to intricately
renegotiate these relationships and assert a certain degree of control over what
traditional theory has suggested is essentially uncontrollable.

As I have sought to demonstrate during the course of this discussion, the

modified body is personally empowering but at the same time socially
problematic. It exists in suspended animation, having begun its voyage but
incapable of reaching its destination. It is in a continuous state of becoming, not
only personally but also socially. Throughout this dissertation, I have emphasised
the transgressiveness of the modified body: it breaches boundaries, and yet quite
tragically it is condemned to an existence of unceasing transgression. In all
senses, the modified body is transgressing, travelling, inconstant, but it is
destined to continue in this transgressive state in perpetuity. It is a collection of
contradictions, a walking oxymoron. The post-modified body is not wholly
organic, and yet not wholly synthetic, but a hybrid of the two. The post-modified
body is not totally active, nor totally passive, able to represent the self and yet
also to transform it. It is neither whole nor incomplete. It is not individual, nor is
it conformist, the very act of modification marking it as deviant. It is praised for
its individuality and yet condemned for its social deviancy. It is empowered,
reclaiming the body from political and social hegemony, and yet the process of
empowerment itself is often oppressive. It is not in pain, and yet it bears wounds.
It is both labile and assertive. It is both body, and not-body.

Despite these inconstancies, though, the post-modified body is not futile. Even if
the destination is forever beyond the horizon, the process of modification does
engender real, permanent and powerful change. Cora Birk, Erik Sprague, Jay
Prosser and millions of others have experienced and expressed the pleasure and
power caused by their various body projects. On a social level, although damned,
the modified body can still function as a sign of political resistance

These impossible contradictions perhaps illustrate why body-altering practices

have been so problematic for academics. By I have deliberately avoided

96
Grosz, 1995, p.33
 35

localising individual forms of body-modification, preferring instead to attempt to

construct a general picture of how the modified body may be conceptualised.
Although I have used specific tropes of transformation as illustrative, my central
contention is that all forms of invasive corporeal transformation share several key
characteristics whether culturally-normative or not. Underlining this, Victoria Pitts
describes that

in the contemporary West, body modifications are undertaken in

diverse realms and engender a differentiated “universe” of bodies
[…]. 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.97

No matter what drives an individual to go under the knife, the processes of

individual change and social stigmatisation are similar. All forms of invasive
corporeal transformation necessitate a base negotiation with the body involving
the slicing of tissue and the spilling of sacrificial blood – the end result is almost
only of aesthetic curiosity. Once the decision to change has been made, the
process of modification begins with a simple synthesis of organic and non-organic
matter, which the body must begin to account for as its own. Encompassing the
alien matter as part of its very form, the body must subsume the prosthesis and
re-conceptualise it as an organ of the body. Hoc est corpus meum. Once accepted
as part of the physical body, the subject must then undertake a complex re-
engagement with the modified spatiality of its body, reassessing the implications
of this newly presented visible identity has on his or her own understanding of
self in the context of self-presentation.

Once initiated, once liberated from its naturally enforce prison, the body and the
self are hurled into a vortex of contradictory re-establishment. This process of
becoming is an impossible one as the goal of the self can never fully be realised.
Although purposive, the body-project can never be completed because opening
the body to the world is so powerfully liberating. Once the self realises that the
body is infinitely customisable, it seems as if it begins a feverish exploration,
playfully and gleefully revelling in its new found infinity.

That said, no matter what the aesthetic direction of the body-project, recasting
the body as unnatural is considered socially deviant. By definition, the post-
modified body is abnormal. Burdened by centuries of social stereotype and
celebrating the very frailty of form so many find disturbing, the post-modified
body becomes a troubling sign of inconstancy when so many are seeking just the
opposite. Impermanence and instability are threatening. Criminal and
criminalised, the post-modified body is politically and socially subversive and
inescapably stigmatised.

There is hope, though. The very similarities between increasingly popular and
non-mainstream forms of bodily transformation which currently ensure the
continued stigmatisation of the former may eventually permit the latter to
become more socially acceptable. Whilst the crepuscular spectre of stigma
somewhat dampens Gidden’s dreams of a post-modern body project free to all
and the post-modern assertion of complete freedom of identity, what the
universality of the transformative body does illustrate is that, as more normative

97
Pitts, 2003, p.30
 36

forms of body modification become more widespread, this stigma may begin to
dissipate. With the increasing visibility of nose jobs, breast-enlargements and
gender-reassignment surgery comes the reduction in the assumption of shame.
Furthermore, as more and more ‘normal’ individuals prove that body modification
is not only not as painful as many suspect, the inherent disgust in looking upon
the transformed body will evaporate.

For too long the body has been held to be static. The leap of imagination to
consider the body not only plastic but capable of non-organic hybridism has
already been taken. The mutation of the body has proven to be life-affirming and
life-improving for literally millions of people in a contemporary Western context.
The remaining battles are ones of publicity, media perception and cultural
understanding. Only once these can be conquered, and with wave after wave
hitting the shore they must eventually be eroded, can the post-modern body
project truly become a liberating reality for all.
 37

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