Abstract

This dissertation argues that body piercing is a unique cultural and discursive practice that provides a means for acquiring authenticity of Self within American culture. Based on primary ethnographic research with body piercing participants in San Francisco and Kansas City, arguments are anchored in specific accounts and discussion of core elements of contemporary body piercing, including various soft-tissue piercings such as facial, nipple, genital and others, as well as ritual piercing. ;Urban ethnography serves to illuminate how subjects use, experience and interpret body piercing. The author traces body piercing from its roots in sexual sado-masochistic subcultures and performance art to its current presence in American popular culture. Piercing then is viewed within a broader sense as a material and discursive practice that enables subjects to experience, signify and revise the self through a specific kind of pain. Body piercing joins pain with choice, ritual, pleasure, and the celebration of 'holes,' or absences, within the context of a specific community. Body piercing represents a kind of language of spectacular bodily signifiers that communicates piercing participants' desire to belong to both community and to self. ;The author theorizes how the process of piercing enables participants to resolve tensions between intentionality and embodiment through the direct experience with and triumph over pain. One ritual piercing involved a transgendered person who marked a life transition by receiving more than 100 piercings. The dissertation situates body piercing cross-culturally and relates it to American culture and the subcultural rubric of neo-tribalism. Body piercing enables a kind of authenticity made real through elements of ritual, pain, and representation, which signifies radical and "hip" status and works to create an aesthetic discourse of conspicuous expenditure. Body piercing provides a way for some people to alter significant social categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity. It provides a way for individuals to reinvent identity within the context of embodied subjectivity. American consumer culture, the author argues, drives the desire for a proven Self made real through rituals of passage and discovery