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Published in:
2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Body Modification: Beauty and the Pleasures of the Modifiable Flesh
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Body modification, the permanent and semi-permanent intervention on the body’s surface such as tattooing, piercing, branding and cicatrization (scarification), would come quite low down on a list of recurrent cinematic themes. However, like BDSM imagery, body modification often slips through unnoticed, providing convenient but typically pejorative connotations of danger, perversion and threatening ‘other’ through characters such as ‘villains’, ‘sexual deviants’, and ‘foreign’ natives. More recently, it has appeared as subcultural background atmosphere in the guise of pierced punks and tattooed skinheads. A few films, however, utilize body modification as a structuring feature of the narrative, and explore the beliefs associated with these practices.