1. See Margo Demello, Bodies of Inscription (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer- Sity Press, 2000)

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. See Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2000). My argument is that contemporary body modifiers are often tattoo enthusiasts, but the rise in the body art subculture is not sim- ply an outgrowth of conventional tattoo subculture. In contrast to conventional tattoo culture, which has its roots largely in heterosexual and male working-class culture, gay men, lesbians, and other queer groups have been important innovators in body modification, along with “pro-sex” SM women, fetish enthusiasts, artists, and later, cyberpunk youth. 2. In “ball dances,” items like fruit, decorative balls, or other weights are pinned to the flesh. While the person is dancing, the items tug at the flesh. Kavadi frames are made from a series of inward-poking spears; when they are worn the spears poke into various places on the torso. 3. Ibid. As Clinton Sanders points out, ancient tribes in the West, such as those in the British Isles, were practicing tattooing, although in the Chris- tian era tattooing was often banned. Clinton Sanders, Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple Uni- versity Press, 1989). 4. Ibid., 18. 5. Ibid., 19. 6. Queer radicalism, for instance, has emphasized anti-assimiliationism not for its own sake, but as part of resisting stigma and pathologization in heteronormative society. As Steven Epstein puts it, queer activism since the 1980s has engaged in a “politics of provocation” in which social tolerance for anomalously gendered and pleasured bodies is constantly pushed. See Epstein, “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality,” Soci- ological Theory vol. 12, no. 2 (1994), 195. 7. Katherine Dunne, “Introduction,” in Jim Rose, Freak Like Me (London: Indigo, 1996), 10. 8. Fakir Musafar in “Body Play: State of Grace or Sickness?,” epilogue in Ar- mando Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 326. 200 IN THE FLESH 9. Another magazine, Piercings Fans International Quarterly, is less fascinated with tribal practices, but equally interested in the modified body’s sexual potential outside the heteronormative mainstream. 10. Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1994). 11. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1989), 105. 12. Musafar in Favazza, 1996: 326. Favazza describes writing Bodies Under Siege as a trying experience because of the repulsion of editors and colleagues— psychiatrists!—to the very topic of self-mutilation. The publication of the book, however, in 1987 (in paperback in 1992), was highly successful, es- pecially as body modification became a hot topic for study. What is fascinating is how this book, which pathologizes body modification practices even as it gives a somewhat sympathetic account of the link between body modification and religious and cultural rituals, became marketable via the body modification generation. The 1996 reprint of this book (substantially the same book, with a new preface and an epilogue written by Fakir Musa- far) was marketed in places like Tower Records as well as university bookstores, with a new cover—a provocative, sexy picture of a woman’s branding—and a new subtitle: Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (emphasis mine). 13. Paul Sweetman, “Only Skin Deep? Tattooing, Piercing, and the Transgres- sive Body,” in The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contem- porary Culture, ed. M. Aaron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 14. Anthony Shelton, “Fetishism’s Culture,” in The Chameleon Body, ed. Nicholas Sinclair (London: Lund Humphries, 1996). 15. James Gardner, The Age of Extremism: Enemies of Compromise in American Politics, Culture and Race (Toronto: Carol Publishing, 1997), 186. 16. See Daniel Rosenblatt, “The Antisocial Skin: Structure, Resistance, and Modern Primitive Adornment in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology vol. 12, no. 3 (1997), 287–334; Valerie Eubanks, “Zones of Dither: Writ- ing the Postmodern Body,” Body and Society vol. 2 no. 3 (1996), 73–88; Vale and Juno, 1989. 17. Rosenblatt, 1997: 298. 18. See Abby Wilkerson, Diagnosis: Difference: The Moral Authority of Medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 19. Maria Lowe writes in her book on female bodybuilding that ethnographic approaches allow researchers to “document the lived experiences of the actors being studied and ascertain their definitions of situation” (Women of Steel: Female Body Builders and the Struggle for Self-Definition, New York: New York University Press, 1998, 168). I would add that what we docu- NOTES 201 ment are the performances of actors and bodies, their representations and creations of meaning, and our interpretive gaze upon these. Throughout, I have been aware of the Othering possibilities of my researcher’s gaze, and so I have tried to avoid exposing research subjects in ways that exploit the “differences” of their marked bodies. Readers may notice, then, that my presentation of individual subjects often privileges interview material over my descriptions of their visibly marked selves. 20. Between 1996 and 2001, I toured over two dozen body modification studios, mostly in four cities in the United States (greater Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia), but also elsewhere, including a few Eu- ropean cities (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin). I also attended body art demonstrations and performances at venues such as women’s pro-sex bookstores, fetish clubs, and art installations. 21. Five of them were also professional body modification artists who operated out of either body piercing studios or tattoo parlors and have collectively pierced, branded, and scarred many hundreds of body modifiers. The interviews were taped, transcribed, semi-structured, and open-ended. I began by asking about the affective dimensions of the practices, the structure of body modification rituals, the specific body modifications under- taken by a subject, the decision processes in acquiring them, and the perceived responses of others to a subject’s modified body. However, the interviews went far beyond these general topics. I content-analyzed interview transcripts and focused on the repetition of themes and lexicon across interviews, as well as on the individual self-representation of body marks. 22. I found my first interviewees during an observation of a public scarring, a demonstration at a women’s pro-sex bookstore in Boston. Demonstrations are educational sessions led by experienced body modification artists, which attract enthusiasts who are there to watch, enjoy, lend support to the person undergoing modification, and to display their own modifications. There and at later events, I observed multiple scarrings, brandings, tattoo- ings, and piercings. 23. Earl Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, sixth edition (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992). 24. Lowe, 1998: 169. 25. Kim Hewitt, Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1997); C. Moser, J. Lee, and P. Christensen, “Nipple Piercing: An Exploratory-Descriptive Study,” Journal of the Psy- chology of Human Sexuality vol. 62 (1993), 51–61. 26. Eubanks, 1996; Aidan Campbell, Western Primitivism: African Ethnicity (London: Cassell, 1998). 27. There are other limitations. Since I began my study, it has become appar- ent that male fraternities have been using brandings as hazing practices. 202 IN THE FLESH My study does not address fraternity hazing (except through the views of my non-fraternity participants), although I think this is a fascinating topic, an important one for masculinity studies. 28. Other participants, including urban and suburban youth who have been enthusiastic supporters of some forms of body modification, are neglected, although as Fred Davis points out, subcultural youth are often attracted to marginal practices that they perceive as having a charge of authenticity that originates elsewhere. See Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 29. Gardner, 1997: 186; see DeMello, 2000; Campbell, 1998; Rosenblatt, 1997; Eubanks, 1996; Vale and Juno, 1989. 30. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage, 1996). 31. I relied most heavily on the magazines Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly (which has a subscription rate of 4,000) and In the Flesh, which are self-defined body modification magazines, but I also read many others. Other magazines, which cater to specialty groups such as tattooees, fetishists, piercing enthusiasts, and leatherdykes, include Skin and Ink, Skin Deep: The European Tattoo Magazine, Piercing Fans International Quarterly, Bad Attitude!, and Taste of Latex. 32. One notable exception is that few of the magazines articulated women’s gender interests as strongly as women themselves did, with the exception of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude!. 33. These include Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image, ed. Susie Bright and Jill Posener; Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex, ed. David Wood; The Chameleon Body, Nicholas Sinclair; The Return of the Tribal, Rufus C. Camphausen; and Modern Primitives, Vale and Juno. These texts not only represent body modifiers, but they are read by them. 34. Gardner, 1997; Musafar in Favazza, 1996. 35. These include

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