Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
commercial reasons is the recent promotion campaign "Body
Craze" organized by the London department store Selfridges.
Whether Stelarc's Suspension Performances were an inspiration
to the artistes engaged for a show of brutal and perverse self-
chastisement, which also involved the use of meat hooks
(Knöfel 142), was not verifiable. Apart from the popular
genres of horror and splatter movies, an interesting, concrete
example of pain and disgust utilized in the media for
sensational effects is the American TV show "Jackass" on MTV.
Protagonist Johnny Knoxville and his team try out painful
weapons for self-defence on themselves and invent absurd tasks
such as crashing into heaps of garbage bins. Although the
format has been severely criticized in the past for playing
down the risks of self-harm and attracting imitators and is
only allowed to be broadcast after 10 pm in Germany, it enjoys
a dangerously growing popularity among youngsters (Kölner
Stadtanzeiger, March 3rd, 2003).
42 More generally speaking, exposing one's own body to
painful, sometimes even torturous procedures such as
tattooing, cosmetic surgery, piercing or extreme forms of
fitness training has become an integral part of Western
leisure culture. A current tendency is the greed for the
sensational and unheard-of, for adventure and limit
experiences, which alone seem to be able to stimulate the
senses in a satisfactory way and typically involve the body (e.
g. in extreme kinds of sport), reckoning with pain or even
death. To some extent, pain has thus become popularized.
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (49 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57