Ana Belén Rojo Ojados

For her PhD thesis, Ana Belén Rojo Ojados, graduate in the History of Art and PhD in Sociology from the Public University of Navarre (UPNA), analysed the phenomenon of extreme body modification, which includes tattooing, piercing and other corporal modification techniques arising from these practices. As she explained, her research aimed “to study in depth the reasons or motives that makes thousands of persons to have this kind of intervention carried out on them, marking the body with often irreversible consequences and constituting a phenomenon which has opened a debate about how this affects them as individuals and in their social relations”.

The research — in which other forms of extreme body modification, such as cosmetic surgery or sex change are not included — outlines the social and historic background of such corporal practices, reviewing the bibliography generated in this regard and analysing the resulting body narratives and the impact that they have had amongst contemporary social movements.

The thesis “Extreme body modifications” was led by Professor of Sociology Bernabé Sarabia Heydrich, from the UPNA, and Juan Zarco Colón, lecturer in sociology at Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma.
As its author points out, the forms of decorating and altering the body are evermore visible and common amongst thousands of young – and not so young - persons. “These newly-found indigenous and primitive corporal rites have been reappropriated by Western social groups since the 1970s, constructing symbols of identity and group membership and giving rise to debate, admiration, rejection and provocation”.

The modern fashion for ornamenting the body with tattoos and piercings became more obvious towards the end of the 1990s, the urban landscape becoming populated with adolescents, young people and younger adults who showed their bodies tattooed, perforated, scarified and decorated with all kinds of modifications. “Such ornamentation being used to construct their personality, to make their rebellion visible to the canons of Western beauty and, in consequence, to create new trends that would be disseminated through the Internet”.

Eliminating stigmatisation

Internet has become the grand platform of dissemination, with virtual communities, blogs and websites where participants show their tattoos, mutually support each other, comment and give their opinions, and are encouraged to continue with these practices. “At the same time, this dissemination consolidates these persons as a community and contributes to the disappearance of the stigmatisation that these body practices have borne and to their absorption, little by little, into the Western urban imagery”.

In this context, Ms. Ana Belén Rojo pointed out that the spectacularity of many of these body modifications is giving rise to a rapid evolution in the techniques used. “The phenomena of “everything goes” or of going beyond the limits of the body are revolutionising the professionals carrying out these body interventions, in such a way that technology and new synthetic materials (not forgetting biomedicine and surgery) serve to undertake almost unbelievable modifications – those of science fiction”.

As a conclusion, the author explained that “in this current society, where philosophy and beauty of extremes are references that have to be taken very much into account, the body also is taken to the limit; the identity becomes liquid and the skin malleable, without limits; even pain does not matter so as not to halt experimenting with one’s own body”.

* Elhuyar translation, published in www.basqueresearch.com