Body Modification as Self-Mutilation by Proxy

Abstract

Forms of cutting up the human body from piercing to leg amputation have become market opportunities in the West in the present stage of consumer capitalism. These are boom times. A variety of perpetrators, that is those carrying out the mutilations on aspirants, are presently making profits from these activities. Piercers and tattooists operate from high street shopfronts putting in nipple rings and doing scarification on the side. Surgeons carry out a range of forms of cutting from cosmetic surgery to transgender surgery, and in some cases, these days, voluntary limb amputation. The practices are escalating in their severity. Those engaging in them are largely drawn from socially despised constituencies, women, lesbians and gay men, the disabled, men and women who have experienced severe sexual and physical abuse or bullying. There is a medical literature which sees these practices as exhibiting an individual pathology, and which links them to suicidal ideation and practice (Favazza, 1996; First, 2004). The most common approach in the burgeoning popular and academic literature that has accompanied the boom is liberal individualist, however, often in its postmodern variety, stressing agency and transgression and explicitly rejecting the medical approach as stigmatising (Camphausen, 1997; McCorquodale, 1996; Sullivan, 2004, 2006).