Customer Reviews

Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (SUNY Series, the Body in Culture, History, and ... Series, Body in Culture, History, & Religion)

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The title of this book is incredibly misleading. IT has NOTHING to do with body adornment. It is about the changing sociological perspective of the human body and the gender issues involved. I bought this book with the intention of doing a research paper on body adornment, but all 175 pages of this book were unusable. It was a complete waste of my money. The editors should SERIOUSLY consider changing the title so as to not TRICK the reading public.

This title came up in a search on the keyword "tattoo". The cover illustration has some tattoos, and the introduction talks a bit about body modification, but the rest of the book has *nothing* to do with this subject. Still, they are marketing the book towards this audience. In addition, it is largely written in postmodern gobbledygook. I found it to be virtually unreadable.

I initially bought this book with the intention of using it for my research on tattooing and other forms of body modification. I was rather disappointed because this book only had one paragraph that actually addressed these issues. However I still found the book useful - the articles in it may not contain exactly what I expected but they were useful and inspiring nonetheless. Some of the ideas were a bit dated but that's just a sign of the book's age (it was published 19 years ago, in 1992). I quoted many of these ideas in my university essays - easy targets for some healthy criticism. In short: misleading title but definitely not a waste of money (in my case at least).

It was not at all, what I expected. It was not a book about tattoo at all, a wast of good money.