Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

Nikki Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. She is the author of Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics and Pleasure (Praeger 2001) and A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (NYUP 2003) as well as numerous articles on body modification. 

The technologically modified human form has not only a future, but also a past. We understand transsexual surgery and self-demand amputation as two quite different practices that reveal, in complementary ways, the complex state regulatory regimes that historically have governed antinormative surgical body modifications, and which thus help us chart the trajectory of emerging developments in the field of somatomorphic enhancement technologies. We demonstrate how a discourse of bodily integrity has been deployed both for and against transsexual surgery and self-demand amputation at various historical moments and in differing social contexts. Drawing on Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty in Leviathan as well as Foucault’s critique of centralized state authority, we argue that “integrity” is not predicated on notions of natural, biologic, organic unity, but rather on the availability of the body for integration as a source of biopower into the State’s projects. We thus arrive at a radically antihumanist understanding of the political struggles that structure the occupation of one’s own embodied space, and which ultimately determine whether the body is available as a resource for subjective needs as well as state functions.