ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the body can be modified through practices such as tattooing, piercing and bodybuilding. It explores these acts in more detail and considers the act of transgression, particularly with regards to extreme bodybuilding. Extreme bodybuilding offers up some intriguing ways into rebelling against the perceived cultural pressures on the body via extensive body modification. The first part of this chapter discusses some areas of, what is frequently termed, ‘skin art’, which includes tattoos, piercings and other more extreme amendments to the flesh. The bodybuilder also positions him/herself within another culture in which the regulations of body image are even more restraining than hegemonic culture. In Victoria Pitts’s valuable study of radical body modifiers in North America, she demonstrates how such an activity provides a variety of functions, most notably community building, social bonding, self-healing and cultural resistance. Pitts explores the way radical body modification has sometimes been used as a way to challenge the ordeal of illness.
