`Reclaiming' the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque

This article considers women's use of the body as a site of protest by taking up women's participation in non-mainstream body modification. The use of scarification, multiple genital piercing and other practices by women in the lesbian SM movement has been considered self-mutilative (Jeffries, 1994). This article takes a different, but not uncritical, approach by examining the `reclaiming' discourse surrounding these practices and considering how this discourse reflects the feminist poststructuralist project of identity subversion.