ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the permanence of tattooing and the pain associated with both forms of body modification, before considering whether such practices might instead be characterized as a form of anti-fashion. Following Susan Foster, however, E. Tseelon distinguishes J. Baudrillard’s ‘postmodernism of resistance’ from the ‘postmodernism of reaction’ associated with commentators such as Fredric Jameson. Truly ‘postmodern’ or not, contemporary fashion thus problematizes the notion of sartorial strategies of resistance, as detailed, for instance, in the work of writers associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s and beyond. Postmodern practices in that tattooed person involve the ‘refashioning of personal identities out of cultural materials’, tattooing and certain forms of piercing differ from other forms of ‘identity project’ in representing an attempt to fix, or anchor one’s sense of self through the permanence of the modification thus acquired.