Body Art

To conform to norms of femininity, the female body has been adored, beautified, and customized to the ideal shape and look. Reclaiming the body from these oppressive regulatory methods was one of the most important agendas of feminism in the 1960s and the 1970s. Women started to use certain types of body art as a form of self-expression through which they could reclaim their bodies. Other body arts, however, are ways of adorning the body to conform to Western beauty ideas.

Body art incorporates a versatile field of personal adornment procedures and modifications such as body painting, makeup, tattooing, scarification, branding, piercing, body sculpting, and gender transformation. These forms of body art can be divided into two groups: normative beauty expectations that eroticize the female body ...