Flesh Hook Pulling: Motivations and Meaning-Making From the “Body Side” of Life
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article offers an ethnographic account of a radical body modification ritual called “flesh hook pulling.” The article describes the motivations and rationales for flesh hook pulling as well as the spiritual, personal, and social benefits that flesh hook pullers derive from the practice. Data were collected via participant observation fieldwork and in-depth interviews. As an “extreme,” clandestine practice, flesh hook pulling elicits negative reactions from outsiders. Results are interpreted as part of a discursive competition for definitional control of radical body modification practice. The article speaks to competing constructions of body deviance and highlights the way in which the body continues to be a contested terrain. Acknowledgments I extend my sincere thanks to the participants in this study. I also thank Vincent Sacco, Shanlea Gordon, and the anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and very helpful and insightful suggestions. Notes 1 www.bme.com; www.bodyplay.com; www.modcon.org 2For example, ModCon a semi-annual “heavy body modification” event featuring speakers and demonstrations. 3See Fakir Musafar's Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly and Piercing Fans International Quarterly. 4See Modify (2005) and Dances Sacred and Profane (1987). 5An article currently in progress details the extent to which I was able to penetrate this group as well as the methodological, epistemological, and ethical dilemmas that arose across the various stages of this research event. 6One participant described his experience as “very personal” although he did not ascribe a spiritual meaning to the event: “certainly people mean a great deal … just breathing together is much more meaningful to me than the goddesses of the earth, or Ganesha or whatever else was up on the altar.” Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlicia D. Horton ALICIA D. HORTON is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include deviance and social control, social constructionism, ethnography, popular culture, victimization and incarceration.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it