by Jon Lackman | 4 January 2008 | Theory
The September 2007 issue of Social Semiotics is devoted to “Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification.” The editors, Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray, write in their introduction:
… the term “body modification” has a ring of deviance about it. The heterogeneous practices this rubric encompasses — from piercing, tattooing, suspensions, scarification, [and] branding, to corseting, the splitting of tongues and penises, and the removal of digits or limbs — are implicitly unified in their improperness, and marked for the challenge they pose to the “proper” mainstream body … These practices demonstrate that embodied subjectivity can, and is always already, lived differently — a politically significant move in the face of the discursive construction of bodies as fundamentally and “naturally” the same.
Yet all too often, the term “body modification” is used in a way that perpetuates the designation of these “non-mainstream” practices as entirely separate to the extraordinary array of often invisibilised techniques for altering bodies … from dental hygiene, showering, [and] eating, to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and reliance upon medicine … these all shape the ways that we are embodied.
