Body Modification of the Past

[shanmonster]

Out by request is this minigallery of body modifications of the past. Some of these are reposts.

"Polaire (1879-1939) was born in Algiers Emilie-Marie Bouchaud. As a girl she was naturally slender, endowed with the ''sinewy, muscular body of a little Arab'' and (as she expressed it herself) a ''rib-cage like a Spanish bolero.'' Starting in music-hall, she was launched into fame as a straight actress by her friends Willy and Colette in their play Claudine à Paris (1902). It was they who promoted her as a young girl's ethereal sexual ideal, encouraged her to tight-lace and publicised her waist as ''the envy of a fashionably corseted bee,'' etc." (from Texts About the Corset: Polaire).

Scarred women of Mozambique, ca. 1920.

"Bobby Kork was a gay man and cross-dresser who performed as a hermaphrodite (which he probably was not) in the circuses of the 1940s and 1950s" (from Guide to the Bobby Kork Photographs).

Tattooed Salome from Dresden, Germany. I don't know the year.

The results of Chinese footbinding. The ideal was a foot three inches in length. Here's another photo.