Body Modification

Front Cover
Mike Featherstone
SAGE, Jun 6, 2000 - Science - 347 pages
This fascinating collection explores the growing range of body modification practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants, which have sprung up recently in the West. It asks whether this implies that we are returning to traditional tribal practices of inscribing identities onto bodies on the part of 'modern primitives', or is body modification better understood as purely cosmetic and decorative with body markings merely temporary signs of transferable loyalties?

Contributors address the question of the permanence of body transformation through fitness regimes and body building; look at the French performance artist Orlan and the Australian performance artist Stelarc who explored Western standard o

From inside the book

Contents

An Introduction
1
NonMainstream Body Modification and Racialized Representation
15
Towards a Sociology of Body Marks in Cool Societies
39
Anchoring the Postmodern Self? Body Modification Fashion and Identity
51
Dealing with Differences
77
Marinetti Chopin Stelarc and the Auratic Intensities of the Postmodern TechnoBody
93
Alternate Intimate and Involuntary Experiences
117
Interview with Stelarc
129
The Sacrificial Body of Orlan
185
Towards a Return of the Embodied Will
209
A Field Analysis of Body Culture within Fitness Gyms
227
Lyotard Kafka and the Visible human Project
249
A Variable Project
267
Body Modification SelfMutilation and Agency in Media Accounts of a Subculture
291
A Literary Approach
305
RealVideo Surgery and the Anatomy Theater
317

UnNatural Selection in the Work of Stelarc and Orlan
149
An Interview with Orlan
171

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About the author (2000)

Mike Featherstone is Professor of Communications and Sociology at Nottingham Trent University. CONTRIBUTORS OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA : Zygmunt Bauman University of Leeds Henning Bech University of Copenhagen Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim Universtiy of Erlangen Mary Evans University of Kent at Canterbury David Frisby University of Glasgow Mike Hepworth University of Aberdeen Eva Illouz Tel-Aviv University Maria Esther Maciel Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Michael Richardson SOAS, University of London Laura Rival University of Kent at Canterbury Andrew Travers Somerset Jeffrey Weeks South Bank University Sasha Weitman Tel-Aviv University Sam Whimster London Guildhall University Elizabeth Wilson University of North London Cas Wouters University of Utrecht