Body Modification: Pushing the boundaries of the human form

For those who choose to dedicate themselves to the purposeful alteration of their natural body, modification is no passing trend. It is, on the most part, a permanent commitment to the crafting of identity.

I talked to Charlamaine Temple, a transgender fetishist who has a devotion to altering her body. We got together in the tattoo studio she works at, a place that evoked a strange mix of the sterile and the antiquated. We sat amongst the needles and metal all neatly packaged and disinfected beneath deep red walls, and oak picture frames.

She sat before me, her ear lobes stretched to the size of soup cans by thick black plastic plates. Two horns protruded from her forehead and a little bit of metal poked out from her cheeks and lips in a neat symmetrical pattern. I stared into her eyes, the whites of which were a jet black. I asked if she wore contacts. She smiled. “I’ve had my eyeballs tattooed”. She could tell I was taken aback, unsure of where to look. She smiled again, and told me to take a closer look, pulling apart her eyelids to reveal the extent of her transformation; “nobody gets into body modification if they don’t like to be looked at”, she told me with a grin.

“I don’t have many tattoos, I prefer the immediacy of body modification. I like the pain as well I guess, but tattooing has a much more social aspect and often a deep seeded meaning. Having a piercing, implant, or even scarification is so much more intense.”

I asked her to detail what she has had changed about her appearance; “the first was the piercings of course, they’re pretty straight forward. I mean, pretty much every girl has got their ears pierced. Then I branched out to the facial piercing around my cheeks and lips”.

I asked about her ears; “Stretching my ears took a while, you have to be really patient with them. If you try to go up sizes too quickly then you can risk splitting the skin.”

The horns in her head are made of silicone, and placed under the skin; she explained that they are known as sub-dermal. She showed me through pictures of things she wanted to do next, having her tongue split was next on the list. I asked one of the tattooists if they had ever performed one of these procedures. “No, no, no” he said, “these sorts of things have to be done by a specialists, you need a really good understanding of the skin, the difference between all the epidermal and dermal layers. Its something that needs a serious amount of training.”

Is there something you’d never consider doing? I asked Charlamaine. “I don’t really like the thought of scarification.” She told me. “You can do it a number of ways, like branding, cutting into the skin or some form of abrasion. Scarification is something that originated in Africa and that has come along in a big way to the West. Most people get it done using laser branding, that way you can control the area of the skin you are cutting away in a much more precise manner. I would never get it done though, it seems a very extreme thing to do for a outcome that I don’t think is that rewarding.”

Sitting there listening to how these procedures are done, and faced with Miss Temple’s own appearance, it was hard for me to see past the pain involved with body modification. The cutting, burning, splicing was hard for me to digest, but more than that, it was the irreversible nature of it. I asked if she had seen an increasing number of people trying body modification in the past year, but she just shrugged and said that there was always just a steady stream of people that do it. Most of her friends had experience with all forms of procedures, and when you live in such a close-knit community you don’t really come into contact with anyone else.

“A lot of people are now choosing to get their ears sewn up actually. In the early 2000s, stretching ear lobes was really popular and it became a sort of arms race to see who could stretch them the biggest. Now though it’s sort of died out, I keep mine in because I still quite like them. Most people though have had their ears reconstructed, and have sort of grown out of it.”

I wondered how many people had undergone permanent procedures for the sake of a fashion that could pass as easily as ear stretching. The term modification implies correction, adjustment, and alteration, from all of which there is no going back. Sub-cultural fashions always grown, gravitate and evolve, but the fixed nature of body modification seems to be a reaction against the superficiality of changing trends. For Charlamaine, there seemed to be no regret in what she had done to herself, no notion of removing her implants or taking out her piercings. There was a sense of timelessness about her. Body modification fights against trends and fashion; it stands like a rock against the winds of change.