THE RISE OF A BODY ART MOVEMENT

THE RISE OF A BODY ART MOVEMENT
In the early 1990s, journalists and sociologists began writing about what
they called a “tattoo renaissance,” which reflected not only a rise in the
number of tattoo parlors, but also a rising interest in tattoos from among
the middle class, including women. The shift was also aesthetic—for instance,
tribal-style “blackwork” tattoos, which look radically different
than the tattoos generally used in America and Europe, were becoming
increasingly popular.1 But what was happening was much more than an
evolution of the Western tattoo. Body art was being employed by people
who did not consider themselves part of tattooing communities, and in
ways that would have caused great consternation at tattoo conventions.
In addition to tattoos, body modifiers embraced the rituals and adornments
of indigenous groups, and invented many of their own. Among
their practices were scarification, a practice borrowed from Africa in

which the skin is cut with a sharp implement to produce keloiding—the
production of scar tissue—in various shapes; branding, or burning the
skin, usually with heated metal, to create carefully designed scarring;
body piercing; subdermal implants, in which pieces of metal or other material
are inserted through and placed under the skin, creating a 3-D
image from the flesh; and earlobe stretching, reminiscent of some African
tribes, in which an insertion is made and then stretched over time to produce
a permanently large hole and hanging lobes. Not only were body
modifiers undertaking practices like these that even established tattoo
communities would find shocking, but in cities like New York, Seattle,
London, Amsterdam, and especially San Francisco, body modifiers undertook
public acts of body marking. In SM clubs, at alternative music
festivals, at art events, and elsewhere, body modifiers would scar and
brand themselves, drive nails into the skin, perform flesh hangings where
bodies would hang from hooks inserted into the chest or back, enact
“ball dances” with weights pinned to the flesh, and wear Kavadi frames
that held spears poking into the body.2 The rituals and aesthetics of
African, Hindu, Native American, Polynesian, and many other cultures
would be appropriated and celebrated, alongside other practices inspired
by the techno/leather/latex aesthetic of SM and fetish subculture. In
these instances, body art would be conceived as a “tribal” ritual, a personal
or political statment, or an erotic performance. Later, body art
would be celebrated as an act of technological invention. Cyberpunks
would appropriate biomedical and information technology for body
modification, using medical implements to create new body styles, such
as the subdermal implant and laser-created brands. The explosion of
styles and performances of body modification, the rise of studios catering
to the interest in nonmainstream forms of body art, and the advent of a
whole host of magazines, websites, exhibitions, and books celebrating
and debating the practices culminated in what became known as the
body modification movement.
The movement borrows from a number of recent and established
traditions and subcultures, including performance art, punk, queer ac-

tivism, pro-sex feminism, SM/leather fetishism, New Age spiritualism,
and Western tattooing. Tattooing is the most established form of nonmainstream
body art in the West, having been practiced by modern
Europeans and Americans for many centuries. Tattoo historians identify
Captain Cook’s voyage, which brought tattooing from the South
Pacific to England in the late eighteenth century, as inaugurating the
modern wave of Western tattooing, and the tattoo in the West has signified
a whole host of meanings and associations since then.3 Initially
embraced not only by sailors but also by some European aristocrats, the
tattoo eventually became associated with working-class identity and,
eventually, deviance and marginality. Between the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as tattoo scholar Margo DeMello describes in her
history of Western tattooing, Bodies of Inscription (2000), professional
tattoos in America were largely consumed by sailors, servicemen, and
other working-class men. Their tattoos primarily used Westernized,
masculinist, and patriotic symbols such as eagles and flags and commemorations
of war battles. These kinds of tattoos, which are now considered
old-school, operated as signs of class-specific, masculine group
status. As DeMello sees it, the “Golden Age” of tattooing in America
was the early twentieth century, during which tattoos provided a marginal
but nonetheless positive medium for (largely male) working-class
feelings of community and belonging. Midway through the twentieth
century, though, tattoos were becoming more closely associated with
stigmatized groups like bikers, street gangs, and convicts. As sociologist
Clinton Sanders writes, by this time tattooing “was firmly established
as a definedly deviant practice in the public mind.”4
The stigmatization of the tattoo allowed for it to become a mark of
disaffection for groups who sought to stage symbolic rebellion and create
a subcultural style, and, eventually, to create personal and political
body art. In Sanders’ terms, tattooed persons were perceived by the second
half of the twentieth century to be “marginal, rootless, and dangerously
unconventional,” and so tattooing became appreciated as “a
symbolic poke-in-the-eye” directed at mainstream society.5 Other

forms of body alteration (also often borrowed from non-Western cultures)
were also being deployed as rebellious practices in the mid to late
twentieth century. British punks in the 1970s, for instance, appropriated
the Native American “Mohawk” hairstyle and facial piercings
along with tattoos. Punks combined body modifications with torn tshirts
and pants, military jackets and boots, hair painting, metal studs
and spikes on belts and wristbands, and even the swastika. The effect
of punk depended on the mismatch of pastiche as well as the embrace
of the shocking and the vulgar, as Dick Hebdige pointed out in his Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (1979). Hebdige’s work, which comes out
of British cultural studies and is anchored in semiotics and Gramscian
theory, focused on how the medium of style—its street-level inventiveness,
disconcerting mismatch, and offensive imagery—was part of the
message of punk. That message, as both Hebdige and, more recently,
punk scholar Daniel Wojcik see it, was focused on confrontation,
anger, and resistance to authority.
Wojcik positions the current body modification movement as an
outgrowth of punk in his Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art (1995), but
identifies it as a movement that privileges the transformative potential
of modifying the body over its ability to shock and express anger.
Wojcik may be underestimating how shock value is also sometimes
privileged in new body art, but he is right to point to other significant
themes raised by the movement. These include issues raised by the
feminist, gay liberation, and New Age movements. These movements,
taken together, have politicized the body as a primary site of social
control and regulation, but also as a site upon which to imagine a new
culture of the body that is more spiritual, healthful, empowered, and
sexually liberated.6 Feminism, for instance, has described how the female
body living under patriarchy has been denigrated by numerous
forms of social control and violence, but also how it can be reconceived
as a space of pleasure and empowerment for women. What has
been called “pro-sex” feminism in particular has explored feminist
porn, female fetish practices, and other emerging expressions of

women’s liberated sexuality. The New Age and alternative health
movements have considered how the body has been repressed by Western
patriarchal religious traditions, as well as turned into an object to
be dominated and controlled within conventional Western medicine.
Each of these movements has turned to non-Western cultures as resources
for establishing new ways of thinking about and caring for the
body. Gay liberation, which has been variously assimilative and radical
since the late 1960s, has spurred a whole range of discussions, practices,
and identifications related to sexuality. Some of these celebrate
alternative sexual pleasures and encourage so-called deviant body
styles, including the use of leather, tattooing, and piercing within
fetish practices and SM, as well as transgendered dress, adornments,
and permanent and semi-permanent modifications, including the use
of “tight-lacing” corsetry, which over time can alter and “feminize” the
shape of the waist in both men and women. Queer activists in particular,
who make up the most radical segment of the movement, have
argued against gay assimilation into the mainstream, instead championing
more radical, in-your-face body styles and pleasures that can
push at the boundaries of sex and gender norms.
Out of these interests in non-Western cultures, gender, and sexual
politics came a focus on the body itself. Around the late 1980s, body
modification began to emerge as a cultural movement that brought together
a range of interests and traditions related to the body, culminating
in a network of overlapping subcultural groups with diverse
interests, who eventually began identifying themselves and each other as
“marked persons” or as body modifiers. What they shared was that they
all positioned the body as a site of exploration as well as a space needing
to be reclaimed from culture. The affective aspects of the body—for instance,
its experiences of pain and pleasure in sexual practice and in non-
Western tribal rituals—and its political significance became a primary
focus of body modifiers. Instead of an object of social control by patriarchy,
medicine, or religion, the body should be seen, they argued, as a
space for exploring identity, experiencing pleasure, and establishing

bonds to others. A “deviantly” altered body was, as it had been in the
past, also framed as a way to express social disaffection and rebellion and
to establish one’s membership in an alternative community, as well as a
way to establish one’s own individual, unique identity.
One of the prominent architects of new body art discourse was Fakir
Musafar, a white, urban Californian who took his name from a
nineteenth-century Iranian Sufi. Musafar is often credited with founding
“modern primitivism,” having coined the term in 1978, which links body
modifications to non-Western, spiritual, communal rituals. In the 1970s,
he was part of an early tattooing and piercing group that met in Los Angeles.
He later began promoting flesh hangings and other practices modeled
after those of indigenous cultures. In 1985, he appeared in the
documentary Dances Sacred and Profane, in which he enacted the rituals
of a Native American Sun Dance. Modern primitivism also promotes
scarification, tribal tattooing, ball dancing (dancing with items hung from
the flesh), and many other practices used by indigenous cultures.
A pivotal moment in the rise of body modification as a subcultural
movement was the publication of V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s Modern
Primitives, a highly popular book of interviews and photographs Musafar
had inspired that focused on the tribal theme. In the words of writer
Catherine Dunne, the book, which explored “ancient forms of body
modification mingling the spectrum of spiritual quests and political
statements,” had an “enormous impact on the underground and avantgarde
art world,” 7 selling more than 60,000 copies in 6 reprints by
1996. (Its first printing was in 1985.) Here and elsewhere, Musafar and
other modern primitives present indigenous practices as alternatives to
Western culture, which is perceived as alienated from the body’s spiritual,
sexual, and communal potential. They also articulate disaffection
with mainstream Western attitudes toward the body. Musafar writes of
the earliest pioneers of modern primitivist body art,
Whether we were Native Americans returning to traditional ways or
urban aboriginals responding to some inner universal archetype, one

Through the revival of non-Western, “primitive” body rituals, body
modifiers aim to demonstrate symbolic control over their bodies by experiencing
and adorning them in ways prohibited by Western culture.
In addition, the practices are conceived as eroticized forms of “body
play,” and Musafar’s body modification magazine links primitivist practices
to sexuality. His Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly, begun
in 1991, promotes a number of sadomasochistic and eroticized practices
including corsetry, flagellation, branding, and genital piercing.9
Piercing had been used for decades by gay men, and both neotribal and
eroticized forms of body piercing, plus scarification, branding, and
corsetry, spread in popularity within gay and lesbian SM communities
in the late 1980s and 1990s. Queer body modification flourished in
urban centers such as San Francisco, a city that also hosted numerous
body art performance events, including Bob Flanagan’s SM self-torture
and public scarifications by HIV-positive performance artist Ron
Athey. In 1990, London saw the establishment of Torture Garden, Europe’s
largest monthly fetish and body art club. In the United States,
queer, fetish, and SM gatherings organized performances of cuttings
and brandings, including Boston’s Fetish Ball, Blood Fest in Texas,
Cleveland’s Organ Grinder’s Ball, and the Black Rose conference in
Washington, D.C. During the 1990s, SM and queer communities were
also rallied by a number of controversies surrounding gay body modification,
including the arrests in Britain of the so-called Spanner men,
a group of consenting sadomasochists, and the body piercer Alan
Oversby. The Spanner men were prosecuted (and some were jailed) for
causing bodily harm to each other, and with that case as a precedent,
Oversby was prosecuted for piercing his (consenting) lover’s penis. In

the United States, there was political turmoil in Congress surrounding
the National Endowment for the Arts funding for the performance art
of Ron Athey and others. These controversies galvanized queer body
modifiers, who, as the queer writer Pat Califia describes, defended their
practices as a form of sexual expression and free speech.10
The message of self-control over one’s body through self-inscription
resonated deeply in women’s alternative communities, and also sparked
much controversy among feminists. Women’s body modification is situated
in the larger context of feminism, the sex debates over sadomasochism,
and feminist struggles over the political significance of the
body and bodily roles. The body is extremely important in feminist theory
and activism. Feminists have described how women regularly find
that they are not in control of their own sexuality, health, and bodily
safety. Many body modifications that women regularly undertake, such
as plastic surgery and compulsive dieting, are seen by the feminist movement
as harmful results of the enormous pressures women face to be
youthful, thin, and beautiful. In addition, far too many women have
found themselves victims of sexual harassment and assault, and all
women face these as potential threats. There has been a range of feminist
responses to victimizations of the female body. Some radical feminists,
for instance, have deplored all forms of body modification as instances of
patriarchal abuse. Other, so-called pro-sex feminists have embraced alternative
body styles and expressions of sexuality. Many female performance
artists, for instance, including the famous Annie Sprinkle, have links to
fetish and SM cultures, and their work has been focused on celebrating
perversity and on undermining traditional norms of female sexuality that
require women to be passive and undesiring. Sprinkle, Hannah Wilke,
Karen Finley, and other performance artists have also explored various
kinds of bodily degradation to provoke attention to how women’s bodies
are violated in patriarchal culture. These efforts have not been uncontroversial.
The feminist status of such art, as well as of sadomasochism and
other displays of female desire that appear to violate the body, has been
hotly debated since the 1980s.The prominent role of the unconventional and adorned female
body in pro-sex feminist SM culture expanded in the 1980s. In the face
of political and social pressures, SM lesbians began rebelling by being
public about their interest in sadomasochism and defending what they
saw as sexual freedom. Late in the 1980s, some women in San Franciscan
lesbian SM groups also began ritualizing bodily adornment, linking
body marking to both SM and to neotribal spirituality. One jewelry
maker and body piercer, Raelyn Gallina, is now well known for promoting
piercing and scarification as a spiritually significant and empowering
women’s practice. In 1989, she argued in Modern Primitives
that women who have been victimized by violence or oppression can
“reclaim their sexuality in a way by having a nipple or labia piercing;
this becomes a reclaiming ritual that helps undo a lot of shit from their
past.”11 The 1991 underground film Stigmata, which included interviews
with Gallina and the cyberpunk writer Kathy Acker, among others,
articulated this message in graphic visual detail. Fakir Musafar
reiterated the link between body modification and women’s recovery
from victimization in his epilogue to Bodies Under Siege, Armando
Favazza’s book on self-mutilation that situated body art in the psychiatric
context. By the late 1990s, reclaiming rituals had spread beyond
San Francisco, had been described to the straight world in Vogue and
Ms., had been adopted by girl punks and others, and had become a
focus of disagreement for feminists already divided by the sex debates.
These practices have been received with both repugnance and fascination
by mainstream culture. Mainstream journalists, therapists, psychiatrists,
and radical feminist critics framed the practices as an
emerging social problem, calling them instances of self-mutilation. At
the same time, by the late 1990s some of the least offensive practices,
such as neotribal tattoos and facial and body piercings, had become
highly popular youth fashions. The fashionability of body modification
and its spread to suburban youth was assisted in part by its promotion
in the alternative music industry, including the alternative music tour
Lollapalooza. Begun in 1990 by the tattooed-and-pierced singer PerryFarrell, the tour mixed music, green politics, and alternative fashion. By
1992, the tour included an act called the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow,
which presented body art in the manner of old-style circus sideshow
performances, which had mostly died out by the 1950s. The sideshow
was extreme and shocking, even by the standards of many body art enthusiasts,
but following in the footsteps of punk, the tour and its
sideshow effectively linked the new adornments to music, and less directly,
to alternative politics. Eventually some of the practices, especially
tattoos and body piercings, were appropriated by MTV and the
catwalk, and by the late 1990s, these had become wholly acceptable, if
alternative and hip, forms of fashion.
In one sense, the new fashionability of body modification represents
a victory for body modifiers, since, as Musafar argues, “the kind of language
used to describe our behavior (‘self-mutilation’), was . . . a negative
and prejudicial form of control.”12 As was the case for British
punk, though, body modification’s commercialization has been problematic
for the movement, because many body modifiers see themselves
as outsiders and innovators, not as followers of “alternative”
fashion. (At the same time, some of the most dedicated body modifiers
make a living as body piercers, one of the very rare employment opportunities
where their modifications enhance, rather than eliminate,
their prospects.) So, commercialization is an ambiguous process that
forces body modification communities to define and reconsider the
meanings of their practices. Within the magazines, web sites, and other
texts of the movement, body modifiers have debated the “authenticity”
of their practices, have defended them as personally and politically significant,
and have negotiated the boundaries of who counts as one of
them. “Hard core” membership in body modification, to use sociologist
Paul Sweetman’s term, is diffuse, diverse, and links individuals from
multiple communities—for instance, gay men and lesbians, straight
women, and male and female cyberpunks.13 They share an interest in
producing new modes of embodiment that push the limits of normative
aesthetics and often link pain and pleasure.Far beyond the limits of fashion, cyberpunk now takes body modification
into cyberspace, biomedicine, and high technology. Cyberpunk,
probably the smallest and most marginal segment of the movement, distinguishes
itself in its relentless enthusiasm for technology and for framing
the body as a limitless frontier for technological innovation.
Cyberpunk often engages a mechanical, rather than a neotribal, aesthetic,
and cyberpunk body artists have accomplished modifications
previously imagined only in science fiction and high-tech medicine. The
performance artist Stelarc, for instance, has wired up his body electrically
and linked his neural responses to remote controls over the Internet.
He has also used medical technologies to film his body’s interior,
rendering visible its internal structure and interior movements as well as
recording its sounds.14 Other cyberpunk body artists have also pursued
the lay use of medical technologies, including anti-fashion cosmetic
surgery, aimed at highly unconventional body alterations, and selfsurgeries
like subdermal implants. Cyberpunks often celebrate highly
individual body customization, and sometimes talk about the how the
“natural” body is becoming obsolete in the high-tech and virtual world.
(In doing so, they directly challenge modern primitivism, which frames
the body as a natural resource for individuals and cultures, as well as
women’s interests in “reclaiming” the body.) They raise a number of
compelling issues about technology, including how technology might
impact upon embodied relations of power, like race and sex; who should
own and control expert-driven technologies of the body; and how technological
access operates as a form of social stratification in the postmodern
world.
In this book, I describe the world of body modification from the
viewpoint of some of the groups that had major roles in shaping the
movement in the 1980s and 1990s, including cyberpunks, radical
queers, leatherdykes and other radical women, and modern primitives.
One might call them the movement’s “vanguard,” as James
Gardner does in his book The Age of Extremism.15 Roughly speaking,
this is a white, gay-friendly, middle-class, new-age, pro-sex, educated,and politically articulate set of people that tend to find scarifications,
brandings, implants, earlobe stretchings, and other nonmainstream
practices as appealing as tattoos and body piercings.16 These groups
are diverse, but they do articulate recurrent themes, creating what
Daniel Rosenblatt calls a subcultural “metacommentary” that frames
the practices.17 In their magazines, books, web pages, performances,
interviews, and other spaces, radical body modifiers address a set of
themes and goals. These are: (1) to celebrate the discoveries of “body
play” (which mine the body for pleasures and other affective experiences);
(2) to promote technical and anthropological knowledges of
bodies; (3) to cultivate provocative bodily performance; and (4) to articulate
the body’s symbolic significance. The shared meanings of
body modification emphasize bodily self-ownership; personal, cultural
and political expression through the body; and new possibilities
for gender, sexuality and even ethnic identity.