UCSF UC San Francisco Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Healing Marks: Body modification in coping with trauma, identity, and its ramifications for stigma and social capital Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vc6j77m Author Keagy, Carolyn D. Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Healing Marks: Body modification in coping with trauma, identity, and its ramifications for stigma and social capital by Carolyn Diane Keagy DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Sociology in the GRADUATE DryISION ofthe UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO Copyright 2015 by Carolyn Diane Keagy ii Dedication and acknowledgements This work is dedicated to the members of my sample. These were friends, friends of friends, and strangers that went out of their way to generously donate their time to this project for no perceivable compensation. For many this meant trusting me with the most sensitive stories of their lives, and for that reason this work is ultimately for them. This is not to ignore the immeasurable support from my family, advisor, committee members, employer, and multiple counter culture communities that support me. This project would not have been completed without that support and is truly invaluable. iii ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to expand the knowledge base on the experience of living as an individual who engages in body modification. Body modification is the intentional and voluntary alteration of the body for non-medically necessary reasons and not meant to intentionally “harm” oneself. The study seeks to understand how individuals negotiate the personal, emotional, and social experience of engaging in body modification. The specific aims of the research are to: 1. Understand the place of body modification in one’s life narrative, and how it can be reflective of major transitions and changes. 2. Explore subjective experience around the physical and mental health, social, and identity related experiences of people who engage in body modification. 3. Increase the knowledge base on how this practice shapes the social experiences of individuals who elect to modify (e.g., at work, with seeking medical or mental health care, in their peer group, with legal authorities, etc.) 4. Understand how those who engage in body modification practices negotiate pain and how pain impacted their experience. The methodological approach used in this study includes both interviews and ethnographic immersion. The understanding of how these practice impact one’s life is produced through a co-constructed coding rubric created by both the researcher and participant. The researcher works with the participant to represent their lived experience as a modifier by also drawing on their own experiences on the subject. The major contributions of this research is 1) an increased understanding of personal trauma, and its healing through modification and 2) the iv expression of stigma in medical realms that has previously been unexamined. Additional findings include notions of a priori social difference in the choice of modification that impacts stigma, continued stigma from legal representatives, and the intersectional nature of modified stigma with other social status categories. Finally, this work also further documents the general finding of increased acceptance of body modification in society. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 1 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 3 Classical Social Theories: The Profane, Parallel Social Structures, High Culture/Subculture 3 Chicago School Deviance and Labeling Theories 9 Foucault, The Abnormals, and Theories of the Body 16 Identity Theories: Early Symbolic Interactionism 19 Anselm Strauss on Identity 22 Goffman 25 SUBSTANTIVE LITERATURES 27 Fashion 28 Body Modification: Fakir Musafar and Modern Primitives 31 Tattooing 35 Modification and Body Politics 45 Resistant Subcultures 49 Emotional motivations 53 SAMPLE 57 METHODS 59 Recruitment 65 Safety measures 66 ANALYSIS 67 Codes 67 RESULTS 70 Inter-subjectivity Regarding Recruitment and Sample 70 Communities 74 Trauma and Repair 88 Sarah 90 Olivia 99 Daniel 105 Jacob 114 Jessie 119 Emily 124 David 127 Noah 131 Pain, Rites of Passage, and Being a “Badass” 139 Marked Difference 152 Mutilation 163 Institutionalized Bias 171 Mental Health Stigma 176 Medical Stigma 179 Legal Stigma 192 General Stigma 198 vi Sexual Stigma 203 Employment Restrictions 211 Social Capital and Widespread Acceptance 215 CONCLUSIONS 225 REFERENCES 236 APPENDICES 247 Appendix 1: Interview Guide 247 Appendix 2: Informed Consent 250 CONSENT 253 Appendix 3: Mental Health Resources Sheet 254 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Type of modification done and order of acquisition 80 Table 2: Publication short list from before 2000 172 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Body modification world map 79 vii STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM While unorthodox, possibly the best way of explaining why the topic of body modification is worthwhile is simply by sharing how its insidious tendrils have worked their way into my identity. Over the years I have pierced and significantly tattooed most of my body allowing me to function in counter culture environments. To those of the heteronormative dominant paradigm I bear the label of “different” and have to hide or manage my alternative embodiment. However, the stigma with body modification is rather relentless because it is an alternative embodiment I chose. Hence my perspective is one of stigma management through most of the 1990’s and 2000’s, and only in the Bay Area in the last 10 years has the social perspective of body modification shifted wherein it is simultaneously a stigma to be managed and social capital in the correct environments. Thus, the prime focus of this research is to further knowledge of the lived experience of modified individuals such as myself, but in particular explore problems of social disparity that may or may not still exist. Body modification is a symbol that in counter culture, and the Bay Area, grants significant social entrée, but in other more formal environments, such as professional careers it is still taboo. For a select number of participants their personal modifications even functioned as bodily capital in their careers as modification professionals. Similarly, I have witnessed white cisgender—those whose gender identity matches their physicality—males with educations who do not think twice about their very visible full sleeve tattoo at their engineering job. Conversely, I have seen poor, minimally college educated cisgender white males lose jobs and get in fights in the street because of their modifications. This speaks to an interesting transition in the status of body modification such that while it is now become more commonplace and widely culturally 1 accepted, especially in the Bay Area, it still connotes stigma in individual situations. More often than not, participants used the symbol to show their affiliation with counter culture and maintain a lifestyle in accordance. As a result, their modifications did not need to be managed for stigma, but were instead a source of social capital. The noteworthy exceptions were with legal officials, medical and dental practitioners, and some mental health practitioners. Those who interacted with more working class origin professionals, such as nurses, commented on their greater acceptance and appreciation of the practice. It is this very issue of stigma that going forward the reader needs to remain critical. What assumptions they bring to the practice and how that affects their interactions with those bearing the symbol has the greatest power for the shifting tides of structure, particularly in mental health. Almost every individual in this sample had some major emotional hardship they gave a voice to through body modification. Sometimes it helped solidify an identity post trauma, sometimes it helped mark closure, and sometimes it was merely catharsis for the pain trapped in their psyche that need to be made manifest. It is hard to escape the framework of clinical approaches, diagnostics, and mental health with this finding. However, it is my request that readers see the positive and therapeutic aspects of modification in the lives of these people rather than providing them a diagnostic label, or assuming they need some form of sanctioned Western treatment. A finding of this work is that body modification is a way of dealing with profound emotional realities in a social web of meaning that allows an individual to find a highly social community through their marked difference. 2 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Classical Social Theories: The Profane, Parallel Social Structures, High Culture/Subculture One of the earliest and clearest examinations of the social divide between acceptable behavior and deviant status is Emile Durkheim (1915) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, wherein he shows that designations of “right” and “wrong” are extensions of the categorization of “sacred” and “profane.” More importantly, he shows there is nothing inherently wrong with that which is construed as “profane,” and that such designations are relative. These labels of sacred and profane change across cultures, and are empirically supported by the multitude of religious and cultural systems worldwide. Durkheim uses the example of the Churinga to illustrate the relative and arbitrary ascription of “sacred” or “profane.” The Churinga is merely a piece of wood until there is the inscription of markings that transform it in the eyes of that culture into a sacred object. The sacred is something like a contagion that is religiously imparted into objects, people, or spaces, and “it is thus that the objects themselves get a religious value which is not really inherent in them but conferred from without”(Durkheim, 1915, p. 324). From a multitude of empirical examples, he shows the relative and culturally constructed ascription of “good” and “bad.” Such systems reveal the world around us as a uniquely social creation. Ultimately, this implies that what is labeled deviant is essentially the profane of local current cultural standards.