Sociology Plus
Body Modification Definition
Body modification refers to the deliberate altering of the human body through practices such as tattooing, scarification (cicatrisation), and piercing (infibulation). For sociologists it has proved a rich subject for studying deviance, social control, and the social construction of behaviour that societies treat as problematic. Most of this work sits within the symbolic interactionist tradition, examining how people negotiate whether body art counts as beautiful or frightening, alluring or dangerous, rebellious or inclusive.
A Universal Practice, Variably Judged
Humans have modified their bodies in some form in virtually every civilisation, which makes it striking that so many people find these practices disturbing. Tattooing in particular has long been associated with marginal groups — outlaw bikers, prisoners and gang members, soldiers and sailors on leave, sex workers, and others labelled deviant. Those associations persist, but their meaning has shifted as more affluent and less threatening people have become visibly tattooed, pierced, or branded.
The Tattoo Renaissance
From the late 1960s a twin-track “renaissance” transformed tattooing. On the cultural side, San Francisco tattooist Lyle Tuttle tattooed Janis Joplin and other music stars, making tattoos visible to their middle-class fans. On the artistic side, Don Ed Hardy in San Francisco and Cliff Raven in Chicago combined formal art training with Japanese full-body aesthetics and American popular imagery to establish “fine art tattooing.” As middle-class Americans recognised that tattoos could be aesthetically sophisticated, the practice spread across lines of class, gender, and race — to the point where, done with restraint, tattooing can no longer be regarded as straightforwardly deviant.
Taste Publics and Status
As tattooing has diversified, the decision to be tattooed has grown more complex: not merely whether to get one, but which design and whether it should be visible. Specialist magazines have divided the tattoo world into distinct “taste publics” that value different styles for different reasons. Gang members prize the autobiographical function of their imagery; bikers value a tattoo’s power to unsettle “citizens”; soldiers and sailors favour classic military designs linking them to tradition; artistic collectors seek unique custom work. Status within each group varies with the type of tattoo and the extent of coverage — a full “backpiece,” for instance, carries prestige among art collectors but little among bikers because it cannot easily be seen.
Placement and Stigma
Placement often matters more than artistry to a tattoo’s shock value. Designs on “public skin” — hands, neck, face, and head — provoke the strongest reactions almost regardless of content, which is why many artists are reluctant to tattoo those areas except on committed collectors. The aversion stems from the wearer’s evident refusal to conceal what is still widely read as a mark of stigma. This was not always so: tattooing reached the West through Captain Cook, who introduced it to the British aristocracy, and upper-class women — including Winston Churchill’s mother — later took to cosmetic tattoos in the form of permanent make-up.
Piercing and Other Forms
As tattoos became mainstream, punks and self-styled “modern primitives” turned to other permanent modifications to signal alienation from developed Western culture, most commonly piercing. Tongue and eyebrow piercings have lost much of their power to shock, but more radical forms — genital piercing, stretched earlobes, and multiple or unusual placements — still unsettle many. More than other modifications, piercing is linked to intense sensation and “body play,” making it common in bondage and sadomasochism (B&D/S&M) cultures and among others exploring the relationship between pain and pleasure.
Theoretical Approaches
Sociological study of body modification has been largely ethnographic and tied to symbolic interactionist accounts of how art, culture, deviance, and reality are socially constructed. A substantial literature has also grown up within postmodernist and poststructuralist analysis, which treats the body as a surface for the inscription of cultural meaning. In this view, those who modify their bodies “queer” both their appearance and their interactions, reclaiming control over the body in an age when body image is dominated by media constructions of beauty far removed from lived bodily experience.