Tattoo Torture Mutilation And Adornment

Contemporary theory across a wide range of disciplines denaturalizes the body and reveals it to be a social construction. Cultural practices which deform, adorn, mutilate, and obliterate the body illustrate that it is an important site for the inscription of culture. The authors draw on cross currents in feminist theory, literary criticism, anthropology, and history to analyze several such cultural practices as examples of the power of culture to encode its messages on the human form.

Practising Identities is a collection of papers about how identities - gender, bodily, racial, ethnic and national - are practised in the contemporary world. Identities are actively constructed, chosen, created and performed by people in their daily lives, and this book focuses on a variety of identity practices, in a range of different settings, from the gym and the piercing studio, to the further education college and the National Health Service. Drawing on detailed empirical studies and recent social and cultural theory about identity this book makes an important intervention in current debates about identity, reflexivity, and cultural difference.

Body Style reveals the subcultural body as a site for understanding subcultural identity, resistance, agency, and fashion. Analyzed, theorized, politicized, and sensationalized, the subcultural body functions as a framework where individuals build a sense of self and subcultural identity. Drawing on specific subcultural examples and interviews with members, Body Style explores the subcultural body and its style within global culture. Body Style is the result of over twelve years of research examining these intersections within specific urban subcultures, including Urban Tribals, Modern Primitives, Punks, Cybers, Industrials, Skaters, and others. Divided into three main sections on subcultural body history, subcultural body identity and subcultural body styles, this book will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.

Daniel Turner’s prolific writings provide valuable insight into the practice of a commonplace Enlightenment London surgeon. Turner’s career-long crusade against quackery and his voluminous writings on syphilis, a common ‘surgical disorder’, provide a refined view into distinction between orthodox and quack practices in eighteenth-century London.

Ranging across contemporary culture from the academy to shopping malls, this book offers engaged cultural criticism in a postfeminist context.

This title concerns the different ways in which people use their bodies for self-expression: tattooing, piercing, self-mutilation, which serve both individual and cultural needs.

Whether they graphically depict an individual’s or a community’s beliefs, express the defiance of authority, or brand marginalized groups, tattoos are a means of interpersonal communication that dates back thousands of years. Evidence of the tattoo’s place in today’s popular culture is all around—in advertisements, on the stereotypical outlaw character in films and television, in supermarket machines that dispense children’s wash-away tattoos, and even in the production of a tattooed Barbie doll. This book explores the tattoo’s role, primarily as an emblem of resistance and marginality, in recent literature, film, and television. The association of tattoos with victims of the Holocaust, slaves, and colonized peoples; with gangs, inmates, and other marginalized groups; and the connection of the tattoo narrative to desire and violence are discussed at length.

Making Worlds brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"—race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worlds both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worlds develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life—home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.