Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

187 Epilogue 2008
become more committed collectors and the tattoo will continue to
have the identity-display functions discussed in Chapter 2, tattooing
certainly will not die out altogether. It seems reasonable to
predict that most likely to survive will be those street shops that
put out the cheapest and most conventional tattoos for casual recipients
and custom shops where the most talented artists provide
work for the most committed collectors.
However, the spread of tattooing has sapped, and will continue
to diminish, the power of the tattoo to frighten or annoy members
of mainstream society (see DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2001). This
means that tattooing no longer is effective as a mechanism of conspicuous
outrage and, in order to symbolically divide “us” from
“them,” marginal, alienated, or unconventional members of the
society must continue to find innovative ways to induce outrage.
This process of the escalation of outrage is ongoing and is seen in
the spread of the alternative forms of body alteration discussed
above and in the continuing search for new and different ways of
modifying the body. As is frequently emphasized by sociologists
interested in social change, one of the factors most responsible
for this process is technological innovation. As advances in medical,
artistic, computer, and other technologies change and diffuse,
the available means of modifying the body—and outraging
ordinary folks—will expand in turn. Bladders that are surgically
implanted and can be expanded or deflated at will to alter one’s
physiognomy, tattoo inks that glow in the dark, computerdirected
instruments that inscribe burned or cut designs, tattoo
images that move on the wearer’s body because of some form of
animation process, decorative piercings of the torso or large muscles
in the arms and legs, and automated vending machines in
public settings that dispense permanent or semi-permanent body
markings and piercings are but a few of the conceivable possibilities.
Since deviant activities and styles typically act as the sources
of innovation in popular culture (see Sanders, 1990), it is reasonable
to anticipate that the process of spread, commercialization,
and eventual decline of these new forms of outrage will unfold in
much the way it did in tattooing.
It is far easier to predict that social, medical, and behavioral
analysts will continue to focus attention on body modification
than it is to predict the direction of or changes in purposive body
alteration itself. As seen above, these discussions tend to be lim-