THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE NEW BODY TECHNOLOGIES

THE CULTURAL POLITICS
OF THE NEW BODY TECHNOLOGIES
I explore in this book how radical body art practices reflect, consciously
and otherwise, the social and political locations of individual
bodies in the larger power relations of society. My approach is influenced
by the social theories of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and
feminism. I situate body modification in this theoretical context in
chapter 1. Throughout the book, I consider a number of questions
about body modification that are shaped by this theoretical framework.
How do nonmainstream body practices reflect, and contest,
contemporary norms and values about the body? What are the roles
of the body in social, political, and economic relations, and how do
individuals negotiate these? What is the subversive promise of radical
forms of body alteration? What are the limits of radical body practices
for cultural politics? To what extent are the meanings of bodies
shaped by individual bodies and selves, and to what extent do collec-tive histories, cultural values, and patterns of inequality and social
stratification shape them?
Body modification by women—both straight women and lesbians—
has generated a great deal of debate, both in the mainstream
media and among feminists. Proponents stress how body modification
has subversive potential, particularly for women, whose bodies are so
often pressured by cultural norms of beauty or are the victims of sexual
or physical abuse. In these cases, they argue, women can reclaim their
bodies from physical or symbolic victimization by creatively and ritually
modifying them. Piercing, branding, scarification, heavy tattooing,
and the like challenge conventional beauty ideals, often resulting in
shocked condemnation from the media. Some feminists have also expressed
deep reservations about subcultural forms of body modification,
seeing them as yet another denigration of the female body. The
practices, especially when they are used by women, have also been read
as pathological by some feminists, mental health workers, and journalists.
In chapter 2, I explore the debates surrounding women’s body
modification. What contexts of oppression and constraint shape
women’s body modification? If body modification is understood by
participants as a means to reclaim a sense of ownership and control of
the body and the self, how does this actually work for particular
women? What are we to make of the charge that such practices are
pathological? How else might feminism respond to women’s body
modification practices?
Gay, lesbian, transgendered, and SM body modifiers have used body
marking as a form of “queering” the body, rejecting mainstream culture,
and creating sexually subversive ritual. In chapter 3, I describe painful,
pleasurable body modification rituals undertaken in public subcultural
spaces, such as gay SM clubs, as displays of radical sexual politics. These
rituals, often simulating non-Western rites of passage, are often used to
affirm queer sexual identities and to promote a subculture that welcomes
what are elsewhere stigmatized bodily pleasures. I explore the
subversive possibilities of gay, lesbian, and queer body modification.How does the oppression of gays, lesbians, and the transgendered influence
the ways they use radical body practices and how the broader culture
responds to them? How are sexual mores challenged in queer body
modification? How are radical body art practices linked to the issues of
assimilation that are pressing for gay and lesbian communities? How is
the marked body, which is sometimes exposed in one setting and hidden
in another, linked to the “closet” issue of gay visibility and concealment?
Also, how do queer body modifiers link themselves, through their
modern primitivist aspects, to images of cultural Others?
Many body modification practices are informed by images of non-
Western, indigenous cultures, whose body rituals and norms of embodiment
are contrasted with those of the West. In chapter 4, I take up
a more sustained analysis of modern primitivism, the embrace of body
modification as an expression of solidarity with, and nostalgia for, indigenous
cultures. In modern primitivism, tribal or indigenous cultures
are often seen as more authentic, spiritual, and natural, while the contemporary
West is seen as fraught with environmental, social, and spiritual
problems. I explore, among other issues, the historical context for
this nostalgic embrace of the “primitive.” How does modern primitivism
fit in with the West’s historical treatment of indigenous groups
and its representations of cultural Others? Also, how does modern
primitivism work as a radical style of the body? While modern primitives
often articulate radical political perspectives, they have been criticized
for the ways they appropriate indigenous cultural rites and for
their romantic ideas of so-called primitive ways of life. At the same
time, they have also been celebrated and emulated in museum exhibits,
high fashion, and youth culture. I explore here the cultural politics of
modern primitivism as it is expressed in multiple sites of marginal,
popular, and high culture. Through the critical perspectives of postcolonial
and feminist theories, I explore the political problems of its
representation of non-Western cultures and bodies.
Body modifiers often argue that the individual can author her identity
through altering the body and symbolically changing its meaningsand significance. Of all the styles of body modification, cyberpunk
body art pushes this idea to its limits. Cyberpunk appropriates tools
and knowledges from doctors, surgeons, computer technicians, and
other specialists of technology in order to explore the body as a limitless
frontier of exploration and invention. What are we to make of the
cyberpunk notion that body technologies are theoretically limitless,
and that through them human identities are wholly malleable? In the
world of postmodern consumer capitalism, how is cyberpunk ideology,
which often champions individual freedom to customize the body, distinct
from consumer ideologies? How do issues of social stratification
and inequality impact upon technological promise? In chapter 5, I explore
these issues and offer a critical perspective on the power relations
of body technologies.
Body modifiers highlight how the body is a site of significant social
contest. This is nowhere more evident than in the debates about “selfmutilation”
that surround subcultural body modification. In chapter 1,
I address how the media has framed body modification as an issue of
mental illness and pathology, and in chapter 2, how radical feminists
have done so. These views suggest that body modification is primarily
a mental health matter, and that nonmainstream body modifications
are a form of self-harm. In this interpretation, body modifications that
are not socially acceptable, or that do not beautify the body according
to social norms, or that are painful, are seen as self-mutilating. The
prevalence of this perspective would be hard to ignore. Mainstream
print and television journalists were framing “deviant” body modification
as a social problem throughout the 1990s. Within the academy,
throughout the period of my own research on body modification, I
have been asked many times by readers of my journal articles, audiences
at conference talks, and colleagues to draw a line between sick,
pathological, and unacceptable forms of body modification and those
that are morally and medically acceptable.
However, I have resisted such an approach. I critically interpret
body modification practices throughout this book, but I do not relyon a medical or psychiatric model of normalcy to do so. My refusal to
adopt this position is not simply a postmodern relativism. Although I
use postmodern theories in this book, I do not subscribe to the relativist
view that all body modifications are homogenously significant. I
also take issue with any suggestion that we are all equally free to
choose our bodies and identities. Neither am I joining in the optimism
of celebrating the “cyborg” that characterizes some segments of
postmodern theory, although I consider the political promises of technology
for progressive cultural politics as laid out by feminist scholars
of technoscience like Donna Haraway. Rather, I am interested in exploring
how body technologies are multiply significant, and how both
the manner and the political context in which they are used impacts
upon their social meanings. These meanings, I believe, are often erased
or made invisible by assumptions that socially deviant bodies inherently
suggest mentally ill selves. Claims of mental pathology have been
an all-too-common way to discredit behaviors, bodies, and subjects
that we may find disturbing or challenging. In my view, scholars must
treat pathologization as a very serious matter, because as the symbolic
interactionist Erving Goffman showed us, to assert that a subject is
mentally ill is an extremely powerful way of undermining her social legitimacy,
and thus, her very subjectivity. Moreover, because certain
groups are more closely scrutinized under the medical gaze, and
pathologized more readily than others (women, people of color, sexual
minorities), pathologization is never politically neutral. Often, it is politically
devastating for the people so labeled, as it was for gays and lesbians
until “homosexuality” was removed from psychiatry’s official list
of disorders in 1973.18 For these reasons, and because I think radical
body modifications are socially and politically interesting and significant,
I do not use the mental health perspective to frame my discussion.
Instead, I employ a different, more political approach to body
modification, which is informed by poststructuralism, feminism, and
other cultural studies perspectives. In this approach, the mental health
perspective appears not as an authoritative truth, but rather as oneparty among many that contributes to constructing how the practices
are socially meaningful.