Modifying the Modifier
Body Modification as Social Incarnation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8975501 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Will Johncock (0000-0003-1807-465X, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 241-259 |
| Publication date | 2012-03-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2012.00488.x |
| OpenAlex | W1888602342 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 14 |
The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self‐constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co‐constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post‐structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re‐conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre‐existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies‐as‐modifications‐which‐modify. This re‐defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects‐as‐bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Constitution · Constructive · Deconstruction (building · Epistemology · Incarnation · Interrogation · Political science · Politics · Process (computing · Social science · Sociology · Sovereignty · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Law · Philosophy · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Tattoo and Body Piercing Complications
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2023 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |