The practice of body suspension piercing ones own flesh with metal hooks and hanging from them and its uniquely sprawling community challenge our cultural understanding of pain. The suspendees experience physical suffering to trigger altered states of consciousness that help them define and create an enhanced version of the self. Through experimental and practice-based methodology, Beyond Pain combines thirteen years of intermittent ethnographical fieldwork during suspension festivals and private events in Italy, Portugal, and Norway, along with online sites such as Facebook groups, to uncover the often silenced and misunderstood voices of the people who undertake this practice.
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Introducing suspension, this project and me
Chapter 1. A History of Body Suspension
Chapter 2. Other Stories about Suspensions
Chapter 3. The Body Suspension Community
Chapter 4. The Summer
Chapter 5. Suspensions and Suspendees Online
Chapter 6. There is So Much More Beyond Pain
Chapter 7. Coming Back Down on Earth
Conclusions
Bibliography
Federica Manfredi is a Fellow Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Torino (Italy), where she investigates the medicalization of womens' sexuality and illegitimate forms of genital pain through experimental qualitative methodologies. Working with artists, designers and sociologists, she curated the itinerant exhibition Vulvar Pain. Art. Science. Resistance as experiment of participative dissemination.
