In between a life and the meanings that may be made in it, for and against that life is the wound. Meaning making begins in wounding, and the process of meaning making is wounding. —Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth

Trauma ... is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. —Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience

Introduction

Self-injury is a widely known human behavior that appears in the historical record of numerous cultures, especially in contexts such as mourning, repentance, adept religious practice, and sacrifice. Psychological literature also recognizes a range of self-injurious behaviors, which may fall on a continuum or may bifurcate more neatly into two categories: suicide (attempted or completed) and non-suicidal self-injury. Non-suicidal self-injury, which I will call self-injury from here forward for the sake of brevity, is defined fairly consistently in the psychological literature as the "self-inflicted, direct, socially unacceptable destruction or alteration of body tissue that occur[s] in the absence of conscious suicidal intent or pervasive developmental disorder."[1] Self-injury can take such forms as cutting, burning, or branding the skin, hair pulling, picking at skin or scabs, head banging, breaking bones, and hitting oneself. The psychological literature describes a number of functions for self-injury, including the suppression of overwhelming negative emotions or, conversely, the creation of feeling out of a state of numbness or dissociation; avoidance of unwanted social situations; and interpersonal rewards such as admiration or coolness[2] and attention to previously ignored underlying problems. Self-injury can also serve as a method for expressing inexpressible emotions.[3]

Within specific populations, such as among prison inmates and those with particular developmental disorders, self-injury has been studied for several decades. Research in the general population, however, is more recent and may parallel the growing awareness of self-injury.[4] A number of questions about self-injury remain unresolved. Until the past few years, for example, there was a general consensus that more women than men self-injured. More recent research, however, has offered mixed results,[5] and indicates that part of the gender difference may lie in the chosen form and style of self-injury.[6] Little work has been done on the role of ethnicity or class in self-injury prevalence, though recent studies of predominantly white, economically privileged adolescents (see Yates, Tracy, and Luthar, 2008) and of Hispanic and African American girls (see Adler and Adler, 2007) have yielded comparable results. It's estimated that between 1% and 4% of adults, between 17% and 38% of college students, between 12% and 21% of adolescents, and 7% of children self-injure.[7]

Clinical definitions and descriptions of self-injury are a clear example of the exercise of bio-power—the use of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, to create and control populations.[8] Here, self-injury is explicitly constructed as socially deviant, with all of the connotations of irrationality that accompany such a construction.[9] Of particular interest in the clinical definition of self-injury is the specification that self-injurious practices include only those that are "socially unacceptable." This is a deceptively simple boundary in the clinical literature, and isn't even included all that often in the definition. Yet, if one removes that caveat, one is left with a curious definition: "self-inflicted, direct destruction or alteration of body tissue that occur[s] in the absence of conscious suicidal intent or pervasive developmental disorder." How literally are we to take the term "self-inflicted"? At what point does pathology end and normativity enter? Why, for instance, is piercing one's own ears not self-injury? What about body piercing in general, if self-administered? How does scarification differ from self-injury.[10] What about extreme forms of food control, which fall under the related category of eating disorders in clinical literature? And this doesn't even begin to touch, yet, religious phenomena involving the "self-inflicted, direct destruction or alteration of body tissue": one thinks of ascetic practices in a number of world religions, ranging from severe food restriction among Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and Christian adepts, through the nail beds and hair shirts of the Christian ascetics, to practices such as the Sun Dance. These practices can't be reduced to self-injury, yet the apparently clear boundary imposed by the words "socially unacceptable" turns out to be strikingly elusive.

Turning from the psychological literature to the sociological sheds light on self-injury from a different angle. Patricia and Peter Adler, who conducted in-depth interviews with eighty non-institutionalized participants who self-injure, as well as studying Internet communities for people who self-injure, take issue with what they see as a denial of agency in the clinical literature. "The psychomedical disease model," they argue, "overlooks the way self-injurers use their customary and ordinary sociological decision-making processes." Stressing the importance of self-expression, they add that "self-injury represents, in part, a complex social process of symbolic interaction rather than purely a medical problem."[11] Self-injury creates, communicates, and absorbs meaning.

Another phenomenon that involves sometimes socially unacceptable, intentional alteration of one's body tissue for purposes of self-expression, and that thus engages in a process of symbolic interaction, is tattooing. Not classed as self-injury and in some ways distinct from it, tattooing nonetheless offers an interesting parallel and perhaps a key to understanding self-injury as part of a broader spectrum of expressive bodily interventions. Michael Atkinson notes that while anthropological studies in non-Western cultures have portrayed tattooing in a positive light, when tattooing comes home to Western cultures it's portrayed as unremittingly deviant and anti-social in academic literature. Based on his own ethnographic research among tattoo artists and their clients, Atkinson argues instead that "tattooing is routinely undertaken as: i) a rational form of identity expression; and ii) a conservative gesture of conformity to dominant norms of self-restraint."[12] Sounding surprisingly similar to a definition of self-injury, Atkinson explains that "enthusiasts refer to tattooing as a way of etching controlled representations of emotional experience onto the body, or managing "problematic" emotions stirred through social interaction."[13] Although some tattoos are meant to be seen and there is much less social stigma involved in the display of tattoos than in the display of self-injury scars, here again the boundaries blur to the point where social disapproval remains as the only clear dividing line between self-injury and tattooing.[14] Furthermore, social display of both tattooing and cutting are gendered, with men more likely to have large, visible tattoos[15] and more likely to engage in more extreme (and therefore more visible) forms of self-injury such as bone breaking.[16] In keeping with this apparent gender divergence, Atkinson interprets tattooing as an aspect of Foucauldian technologies of the self.[17] Self-injury seems to work the same way, and we might make a similar claim for religious body modification.

The literature on self-injury stresses that the practice is overdetermined; that is, it contains multiple, often intertwined meanings for practitioners.[18] One of the potential meanings of self-injury is of particular interest for my analysis: bodily violation. The connection between self-injury and sexual abuse is clear in much of the literature (though a recent meta-analysis has challenged this understanding; see Klonsky and Moyer[19]). In cases where there's a strong relationship between self-injury and sexual abuse, the connection seems to go through post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. As Weierich and Nock point out, a number of PTSD symptoms, such as intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation, and numbness, have also been identified as motivating factors for self-injury—and their study found a significant relationship between childhood sexual abuse and self-injury among adolescents.[20] Furthermore, as Wiederman, Sansone, and Sansone note,"the childhood experience of the violation of body boundaries, either directly or indirectly, is a predisposing factor to bodily self-injury in adulthood among some individuals, perhaps through subsequent devaluing or dehumanization of one's own body."[21]

I'm not convinced that devaluation and dehumanization of one's own body is the right explanation, and I think feminist theory can be helpful here. Teresa de Lauretis' classic formulation of technologies of gender, expanding on Foucault's concepts of technologies of sex and technologies of the self, posits that such technologies, "have the power to control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, and 'implant' representations of gender." They can also take more resistant forms "in subjectivity and self-representation."[22] The words of Regina, a participant in Atkinson's study of tattooing, demonstrate that this art form can serve as a technology of the self:

It's totally understandable to me why tattooing is so popular now, when there are a million ways your body can be invaded .... After a while you pay attention to how your body works and looks. A weak-looking body is a target .... With all the risks I can't control, I put on this armor [tattoos] and show how I won't lie down and be a victim.[23]

Wary of the violation of bodily boundaries, Regina practices what we might see as another form of bodily violation—inscription on the skin with needles—in order to transform her body from "weak-looking" to armored. The armor of her tattoos becomes for her a show of force, refusing a passive body that would "lie down and be a victim" and claiming, by implication, an active, resistant one. Although Regina does not mention gender explicitly, this shift from a passive to an active body suggests that for her, tattooing is also a subversive technology of gender.

If tattooing is a technology of gender, and if, as I've argued, the boundary between tattooing and self-injury is murkier than it is often made out to be, might self-injury also be a technology of gender? Does that make it, as some have argued, a tool of the patriarchy, or can we also see it as a form of subversion?[24] In answering these questions, I will consider four aspects of self-injury: voice, symbol, agency, and ritual.

Technological Self-Injury

1. Voice:

   In patriarchal societies, silence is often the response to women's pain: silence from without, refusing to acknowledge the pain, to take it seriously, or even to believe the speaker; and silence from within, as those who are not heard learn that there is no point in speaking. Furthermore, lasting trauma is generally held to be caused by an experience that, incompletely processed by the psyche, remains unvoiced. This is particularly true when interpreting trauma as caused by pain; as Elaine Scarry has famously observed, "physical pain ... is language-destroying."[25] Psychological pain, as psychologists have recognized as early as Freud, may have the same effects.[26] While men more than women are discouraged from expressing their emotions, and thus men are likely to be drawn to the self-expressive aspects of self-injury, there may be a slightly different dynamic at work for women, especially in cases of sexual trauma—an important factor that's at least indirectly associated with self-injury among women. Childhood sexual abuse has been implicated repeatedly in self-injury, especially among adolescents. Often silenced by perpetrators, other family members, or themselves, as well as by the trauma itself, many who have experienced sexual abuse as children have no outlet for the tumult of emotions caused by such trauma. I would argue that self-injury represents a way of giving voice to an otherwise mute experience.

   Pain, Scarry notes, "though indisputably real to the sufferer ... is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others."[27] Thus, the wounds of self-injury, in addition to giving voice to injury, also enable the psychological pain of trauma to be heard. Although rape hasn't received the same attention in the self-injury literature as childhood sexual abuse, in part because adult self-injury in non-clinical settings is not as extensively studied, theoretically rape could also be part of the background for self-injury in some cases—especially those in which the survivor has no opportunity to tell her story.

2. Symbol:

   Consider the body of one who self-injures: is it victim, as generally understood, or canvas, as with the tattooed body? In many cases it's both. As the recipient of self-punishment (especially common among women, who are also the ones more likely to have a connection between self-injury and sexual trauma), it's victim. But it may also serve here as canvas, displaying at least to the mind of she who self-injures the guilt and shame that many feel before, and sometimes after, self-harm. Does the violation of the skin barrier represent in some more literal way the unspeakable violation of the body?

   Consider a sexual trauma survivor who cuts. With some implement—a razor blade, perhaps, which makes the cleanest, deepest cut with the least effort—she draws a line across some part of her body—her upper arm, her inner thigh, her stomach, her breast, her labia—and watches as tiny dots or a thin red line of bright blood springs up. She experiences a sense of relief, a release of tension—perhaps from the endorphins released as a result of the injury. She may feel satisfaction at having inflicted punishment upon herself, knowing that proof of that punishment—an expiation or expression of guilt?—will remain on her body for days, weeks, or even years, depending on the depth of the cut. As Scarry says of physical pain, one could also say of the psychological pain of trauma: "The person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony."[28] Thus, the woman who cuts may be punishing her body for its initial involvement in the trauma or for its ongoing culpability in her embodied memories. Or the cut may instead be proof of her pain, a visible cry—even if hidden by clothing—from a harm gone unspoken, unspeakable.

   Some might argue that, in not voicing her experience explicitly, the woman I've described is only reinforcing the patriarchal order, her wounds literally etching silence onto her already violated body. This would be a one-sided reading of self-injury as a technology of the self, a literal internalization of the law of the father just as much as sexual violation represents such a literal internalization. Yet later readers of Foucault,—de Lauretis[29] and Butler[30] among them—have shown us that technologies of the self and their relative, technologies of gender, can be subversive just like other conduits of power. There is a key difference here between self-injury and sexual violation that is not taken into account by those who read self-injury as simply the re-inscription of structures of dominance: in self-injury the violation is self-inflicted, and the scars are visible and undeniable, if one chooses to show them. Self-injury can be read, then, as a way of reasserting power and agency in the aftermath of their theft. In situations where one's trauma is silenced or ignored, self-injury might be one of the only ways of claiming voice and reasserting power.

   Lest this interpretation seem wholly conjectural, Alexander and Clare's study of self-injury among lesbian and bisexual women found self-expression in the face of silencing to be an important part of their interviewees' experiences.[31] They write: "Sometimes the responses of others were felt to be so invalidating that self-injury seemed the only means of communicating one's distress, as in the case of this woman who felt invisible as a lesbian in a refuge for women who had been physically abused by their partners.":

   Sometimes you were really invisible, especially if you were a dyke, it's like 'it's only women that slapped you for god's sake, it's not a man,' but at the end of the day, a slap is a slap, a kick is a kick. I just wanted someone to say, 'oh god are you ok?'[32]

3. Agency:

   To read self-injury as a form of self-expression is to make claims about agency in the face of trauma. Whereas a liberal reading of cutting would see it as symptomatic of women's lack of freedom under patriarchy, poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists have questioned the definition of agency implicit in such claims. Saba Mahmood, for example, defines "agency" not simply as a synonym for resistance to social norms but as a modality of action[33], adding that there is "analytical payback in detaching the concept of agency from the trope of resistance."[34] In another work, she suggests: "If the ability to effect change in the world and in oneself is historically and culturally specific (both in terms of what constitutes "change" and the means by which it is effected), then the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity."[35]

   To analyze cutting through Mahmood's lens is not simply to jettison the concept of resistance, but to rethink it through the locatedness of the cutter. Cutting is not resistance, strictly defined—it does not fight back directly against patriarchal structures of sexual dominance and abuse. Indeed, from one perspective it further wounds an already wounded body&mash;thus the common use of the term "self-mutilation" in clinical settings. Yet it is undeniable that taking a weapon in one's hands and using it to wound oneself is, in fact, a form of agency, if agency is understood, in Mahmood's words, as "a modality of action." The self-injurer reclaims control over her body by reclaiming the ability to cause pain and to wound. Even in the cases where self-injury is a form of self-punishment, it is still agency: through the use of her weapon, the self-injurer reasserts control over her own body, perhaps even "armoring" it as Regina did through her tattoos.

4. Ritual:

   While voice, the symbolic, and agency are important components of the workings of power, they (like power itself) also play a central role in ritual. And, though it has rarely been noticed, ritual receives a passing mention in one of the classic texts on gender and power: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.[36] In discussing Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis, Butler describes the process in which "desire is manufactured and forbidden as a ritual symbolic gesture whereby the juridical model exercises and consolidates its own power."[37] What exactly she means by ritual here remains unclear, as it does toward the end of the book when she describes gender as a "ritual social drama."[38] However, an important aspect of such ritual is clearly repetition: "The action of gender," she explains, "requires a performance that is repeated." Furthermore, such repetition, "is at once a reenactment and a reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation."[39] Thus ritual, for Butler, reinforces and recreates structures of power. Because such ritual practices are central to the maintenance of power relations, Butler argues that agency "is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition."[40] Elsewhere, Butler expands on her prior use of the term "ritual": "The response to ... social meanings involves a reiteration of their force .... If this reiteration can be called a 'ritual,' then this is the case only because rituals are, by definition, shared and social."[41]

   Like other workings of power, self-injury is sometimes ritualized. Though this receives little mention in the psychological literature, it appears in one of the few sociological studies of self-injury, in which the authors spend significant space discussing the different ways in which participants in their study practiced self-injury.[42] Though self-injury can be impulsive, a number of Adler and Adler's study participants went about the process in a very deliberate way. The authors describe one participant engaging in self-injury as part of her evening ritual (here meaning simply something she did routinely). Another explained, "I've often done it sort of in rituals, too."[43]

   As a technology of the self and of gender, self-injury partakes in the repetitive, ritual nature that Butler describes. But is it "shared and social"? Most self-injurers, and especially women, self-injure in private and keep their wounds to themselves. Yet, at the same time, if self-injury is a form of communication, of giving voice, then there is an imagined audience, even if that audience is not real. If the wounds of the self-injurer are in some way armor against further harm, then there is an implied audience that will see or encounter this armor and be turned back. Self-injury, then, is private ritual that becomes public at the level of the imaginary. And if self-injury is both a technology of gender and a form of ritual, this raises the question of whether ritual theory has anything to contribute to understanding self-injury and technologies of gender, and whether self-injury and technologies of gender can shed any new light on ritual.

Self-Injury and Ritual Theory

In her classic text on ritual, Catherine Bell defines ritualization as "a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities."[44] Though self-injury is sometimes impulsive, undertaken at the peak of an emotional crisis, its repetitive nature means that it's frequently a carefully designed practice. Self-injurers need to have tools at hand and have a space in which they can self-injure uninterrupted. Many plan where and how to self-injure, selecting a preferred method and choosing where on their bodies to inflict pain. Is self-injury "distinguish[ed] and privilege[d] ... in comparison to other ... activities?" Yes, in that it's a regular practice that takes place in a time and a space set aside from other activities. Can it be counted as ritual?

It may be helpful here to turn to Bell's formulation of ritual practice as "(1) situational; (2) strategic; (3) embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world"—what she terms "redemptive hegemony."[45] Self-injury, when engaged in repeatedly as a planned response to environmental or internal stimuli, fits these criteria. It's clearly situational, responding to particular events or internal states. It's strategic: those who use self-injury do so to induce or eradicate a particular emotional state or to give voice to otherwise unspeakable pain. Is it embedded in a misrecognition of what it's doing? Yes, if we consider the question of power raised in Bell's concept of redemptive hegemony. Bell argues that ritual is an important method of creating and reordering reality: "ritualization as a strategic mode of practice produces nuanced relationships of power, relationships characterized by acceptance and resistance, negotiated appropriation, and redemptive reinterpretation of the hegemonic order."[46] I would argue that some forms of self-injury, especially cutting and burning, express and renegotiate relationships of power through the refiguring of bodily violation, while at the same time remaining unaware of that refiguring and also of the ways in which self-injury re-implicates the injurer in systems of domination.

Reading some forms of self-injury as ritualization affords us a nuanced perspective on the roles of power in these practices. Bell notes that, "ritual practices are produced with an intent to order, rectify, or transform a particular situation"—in this case, a sense of violation or lack of control—and that the "end" of ritualization is the "production of a 'ritualized body'" and "sociocultural situations that the ritualized body can dominate in some way."[47] Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon agree, echoing Scarry's theory of pain: "Getting it right [in ritual] is ... an act of world construction."[48] The ritualization involved in some forms of self-injury has as its end the rectification of a situation out of control: emotions out of control, bodily integrity out of control, voice and silence controlled by others. Through the ritual of self-injury, the participant produces a situation in which she or he is in control, giving voice against silence, controlling the violation of bodily boundaries. Through the ritual of self-injury, the participant creates a world in which she has control over her body, in which she has a voice. Ritualization, Bell notes, is "the avoidance of explicit speech and narrative"—the avoidance of prohibited speech about violation and pain—and also "the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other way."[49] Ritual also creates a sense of the sacred by differentiating it from the profane—this is part of its set-apart nature. The experience of uncontrollable violation is an experience of profanity; in self-injuring, controlled violation, the self-injurer may even re-sacralize a violated body.

Indeed, Bell argues that ritual "acts to restructure bodies in the very doing of the acts themselves."[50] The self-injurer reconstructs her body as one which can give voice to violation—a body that speaks through its visible scars the pain of the invisible ones—and one which controls its own violation. Self-injury turns a silenced, uncontrolled, vulnerable, and violated body into a speaking, controlled, armored, and self-violated one.

And yet, this control is ambivalent, for the body and the self that are created through the ritual of self-injury may not entirely be those intended by the participant. Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon offer a model of "ritual as a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case," stressing "the incongruity between the world of enacted ritual and the participants' experience of lived reality."[51] Those who self-injure may feel a sense of control and voice during the self-injury, and may use their scars as reminders of that control, but clearly the feeling fades over time in the face of everyday experiences—if it didn't, self-injury wouldn't be a repeated and often addictive action. Bell again offers a key when she argues that "ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, force, event, and tradition, how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding."[52] The message of self-injury is fully coherent only in a community of others who self-injure; beyond this community, the self-injured body is seen simply as violated, the self-injurer as disordered. Furthermore, while the externalized force of self-injury may be to give voice, what is internalized is the wounding. As Amy Hollywood notes, "ritual is productive of the subject."[53] How might one describe the subject produced by the ritual of self-injury? It is a subject whose primary aspect is woundedness. In the end, the self-injurer gives voice but is not heard; she subverts and at the same time reproduces the violation, recreating her socialized body and literally reinscribing the structures of power upon her body. She reclaims agency only to lose it to a medical system that regards her as abnormal and mutilated. The ritual of self-injury reconfigures but also reproduces "a vision of the order of power in the world"; it is "embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing."[54]

This ambivalence, this production of paradox, is an important part of the nature of ritual. As Bell notes, ritualization "create[s] social bodies in the image of relationships of power," and "also empower[s] those who may at first appear to be controlled."[55] "By focusing on the making and remaking of the body," she adds, ritual "reproduces the sociopolitical context in which it takes place while also attempting to transform it."[56] In self-injury, this happens in several ways. On the one hand, self-injury is empowering. It provides emotional regulation and offers a vivid symbolic representation of suffering, especially in cases where the suffering is the result of violation by another. It replaces uncontrollable, external violation with controlled, ritualized self-violation, returning a sense of order and volition to the world.

At the same time, the communication embedded in self-injury is only legible to a small number of people: oneself, others who self-injure, and some particularly empathetic outsiders who have secondary experience, either professional or personal, with self-injury. Thus, although self-injury gives voice to a silenced experience, it runs the risk of doing so in a vacuum. The experience of giving voice may be healing regardless, but how powerful is it to give voice when no one is there to hear? Furthermore, while self-injury is controlled violation, it remains violation; it continues to do harm to the body that has already been harmed. Unlike the tattoo clients discussed earlier, those who self-injure do not do so for bodily adornment. Some may wear their scars as a part of their life story, but the primary purpose of self-injury is to cause injury to the body in order to feel better. In the process, a body that has already suffered violence suffers more. Simultaneously with empowering the participant, giving voice to a silenced experience, and placing control back in her or his hands, self-injury literally reinscribes on the body a social power structure of violence and domination. What we learn about self-injury through ritual theory, then, is that it holds deep power to create meaning—indeed, to create worlds—but that power is ambivalent and paradoxical, and the world that's constructed in the practice of self-injury may not be the world that was intended by the practitioner.

What self-injury offers to the study of ritual is the question of external misrecognition, which fundamentally influences the meaning and concrete social effects of a ritual. The potential for misreading of self-injury leads to a potential for re-victimization of those who self-injure by people whose interpretations of the practice diverge from those of the self-injurer herself. The flip side, though, of the ambivalence of self-injury is that it is in fact empowering—and for very good reasons—despite how self-destructive and maladaptive it may seem from an outsider's perspective. Other rituals may share this fundamental ambivalence. This should alert scholars to be sensitive, in the analysis of ritual, to practitioners' claims of empowerment, even in cases where the ritual appears from our own perspective to be disempowering, and it should also alert us to the risks inherent in the misrecognition of ritual.

Self-Injury and the Religious Body in Pain

As well as adding to our perspectives on ritual, the study of self-injury relates directly to the study of religious ritual in the context of the religious infliction of pain. Glucklich points out that self-injury "is extremely pervasive in rites of mourning across the world."[57] It also appears in penance and purification, in offering and sacrifice, in initiation, and in the asceticism of some religious adepts. Religious self-injury differs from non-religious self-injury in some important ways, including the greater likelihood of community approval and comprehension. I don't intend to argue that religious and secular self-injury have the same psychological origins; however, I do think that the phenomenological similarities bear further exploration.

Glucklich argues that "in its relation to pain, the goal of religious life is not to bring anesthesia, but to transform the pain that causes suffering into a pain that leads to insight, meaning, and even salvation."[58] "The self," he adds, "emerges out of the violence and out of the hurtful feedback it generates."[59] Scarry offers a slightly different perspective, arguing that religious self-injury remakes the world: "The self-flagellation of the religious ascetic ... is not ... an act of denying the body ... but a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force."[60] Religious self-injury seems to operate within the same ambivalence as its secular relative; in both cases the practitioner is seeking meaning—even if insight and salvation are less common goals among those who self-injure outside of a religious context—and in both, violence and pain in some way create or open a path to reality. Indeed, Glucklich comments that secular self-injurers "often ... sound like religious [self-injurers] without the theology," and goes on to say that "if anything, in its complexity and ambiguity, the inner world of [secular] self-hurters more closely resembles that of mystics and other technicians of the sacred who acquire, or claim to acquire, 'spiritual' power by austerities and discipline."[61]

Furthermore, religious self-injury has a complicated relationship to gender. As Bynum points out, in medieval Christian mysticism, "illness or recurrent pain was ... more apt to be given religious significance in women's lives than in men's."[62] This was true for a number of reasons, including that women had little to give up as ascetics aside from food and bodily integrity[63], and that the culture of the time associated women with body, and through body with the incarnation of Christ.[64] Yet in other contexts, especially when religious pain is considered a mark of advanced religious abilities, it is the sole province of men. Associated with the gendered body, reinforcing the body's gender, ritual pain can be read as a technology of gender.

Technologies of the Sacred

Might religious self-injury be more, though, than simply a technology of gender or, more broadly, a technology of the body? Does its association with the sacred complicate the relationships of power found in ritual? I would propose that it does, and furthermore that religious ritual comprises what one might call a "technology of the sacred."

Technologies of the self are practical ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained. They're the means through which power comes to expression in the everyday bodily practices and existence of the subject, and they're also the means through which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of gender are technologies of the self that relate specifically to gender, that create the structures of gender and that through gender bring the self into being. Technologies of the sacred, then, might be defined as those practical, religious ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained, by or in the face of structures of power. They would include the ways in which social power comes to expression in the everyday sacred practices and experiences of the subject, and also—showing the ambiguity in self-injury as a technology of the self and a technology of the sacred—the religious ways in which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of the sacred can also be understood as those practices that bring a sense of the sacred into being, that construct the sacred, and that shape the self in response to such experiences of the sacred. In this way, self-injury as a technology of the sacred evokes an experience of the sacred, marks that experience clearly on the body, and at the same time reinforces—or, in some cases, subverts, or both—structures of power and domination.

The concept of technologies of the sacred can contribute to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between religion and power—a relationship currently undertheorized. I would suggest, for instance, that technologies of the sacred can also serve as effective technologies of gender, structuring the self into socially appropriate gender hierarchies but also providing the space for resistance to those hierarchies. Many theorists of ritual have already noted the ways in which it reinforces social hierarchies, even when, as in the case of traditional Mardi Gras celebrations, it purports to overturn them. Less work has been done on the connections between the sacred and subversion.[65] However, if we view the sacred as a conduit of social power and resistance through bodily techniques, we have new tools with which to understand the relationship between ritual, the sacred, the self, and society.

To return to self injury and to conclude, I want to turn to the epigraph of this paper, from Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth. Writing about the life of his grandmother and her devotion to Saint Gemma Galgani, Orsi reflects: "In between a life and the meanings that may be made in it, for and against that life is the wound. Meaning making begins in wounding, and the process of meaning making is wounding."[66] For those who self-injure, religiously or otherwise, Orsi's comment has literal as well as figurative resonance. Meaning-making is an important part of the ritualized practice of wounding, whether that meaning is secular (emotional control, bodily control, voice) or religious (penance, offering, sacred power). And in self-injury, the wound is both "for and against that life"—it's ambivalent. It gives voice yet can increase the silencing. It offers control over one's bodily violation, yet continues to inscribe violence on the body. It empowers yet expresses disempowerment. It focuses attention relentlessly on the body yet attempts to transcend the body. Pain is thus a powerful technology—of the self, of gender, and of the sacred.

Endnotes

1. T.M. Yates, A.J. Tracy, and S.S. Luthar, "Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Among 'Privileged' Youths: Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Approaches to Developmental Process," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 76:1 (2008): 52-62. [Return to text]

2. P.A. Adler and P. Adler, "The Demedicalization of Self-Injury: From Psychopathology to Sociological Deviance," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36 (2007): 537-570. [Return to text]

3. N. Alexander and L. Clare, "You Still Feel Different: The Experience and Meaning of Women's Self-Injury in the Context of a Lesbian or Bisexual Identity," Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 14 (2004): 70-84; K.L. Gratz and A.L. Chapman, "The Role of Emotional Responding and Childhood Maltreatment in the Development and Maintenance of Deliberate Self-Harm Among Male Undergraduates," Psychology of Men and Masculinity 8:1 (2007): 1-14. [Return to text]

4. Adler and Adler, 537-570. [Return to text]

5. T.M. Yates, A.J. Tracy, and S.S. Luthar. [Return to text]

6. L. Claes, W. Vandereycken, and H. Vertommen, "Self-Injury in Female Versus Male Psychiatric Patients: A Comparison of Characteristics, Psychopathology and Aggression Regulation," Personality and Individual Differences 42:4 (2007): 611-621. [Return to text]

7. M.J. Prinstein, "Introduction to the Special Section on Suicide and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury: A Review of Unique Challenges and Important Directions for Self-Injury Science," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 76:1 (2008): 1-8. [Return to text]

8. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). [Return to text]

9. In this regard, it is interesting to consider religious practices of self-injury around the world, and their fairly consistent representation in Western scientific discourse as the product of irrational and feminized cultures. [Return to text]

10. V. Pitts, "Visibly queer: Body technologies and sexual politics," The Sociological Quarterly, 41 (2000). [Return to text]

11. Adler and Adler, 559. [Return to text]

12. M. Atkinson, "Tattooing and Civilizing Processes: Body Modification as Self-Control," The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41:3 (2004): 130. [Return to text]

13. Atkinson, 136. [Return to text]

14. Aizenman and Jensen found different, though overlapping, motivations for tattooing and piercing, on the one hand, and self-injuring on the other, among a population of 1,330 college students. However, they also note that in all three forms of body modification participants reported "an expressed sense of relief and a significant decrease in the percentage of anxiety and tension reported after engaging in the act of body alteration." Though it is important to keep the differences in mind, these forms of body modification again seem to slide into each other. See: M. Aizenman and M.A.C. Jensen, "Speaking Through the Body: The Incidence of Self-Injury, Piercing, and Tattooing Among College Students," Journal of College Counseling10 (2007): 27-43. [Return to text]

15. Atkinson. [Return to text]

16. L. Claes, W. Vandereycken, and H. Vertommen. [Return to text]

17. Atkinson, 134. [Return to text]

18. Prinstein. [Return to text]

19. E.D. Klonsky and A. Moyer, "Childhood Sexual Abuse and Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: Meta-Analysis," The British Journal of Psychiatry 192 (2008): 166-170. [Return to text]

20. M.R. Weierich and M.K. Nock, "Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Mediate the Relation Between Childhood Sexual Abuse and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 76:1 (2008): 39-44. [Return to text]

21. M.W. Wiederman, R.A. Sansone, and L.A. Sansone, "Bodily Self-Harm and its Relationship to Childhood Abuse Among Women in a Primary Care Setting," Violence Against Women 5 (1999): 161. [Return to text]

22. T. deLauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): 18. [Return to text]

23. Atkinson, 138. [Return to text]

24. Adler and Adler. [Return to text]

25. E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 19. [Return to text]

26. C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

27. Scarry, 56. [Return to text]

28. Scarry, 47. [Return to text]

29. deLauretis. [Return to text]

30. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999); J. Butler, "Afterword," in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, E.T. Armour and S.M. St. Ville, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 276-91. [Return to text]

31. Alexander and Clare. [Return to text]

32. Alexander and Clare, 76. [Return to text]

33. S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 157. [Return to text]

34. Mahmood, 188. [Return to text]

35. S. Mahmood, "Agency, Performativity, and the Feminist Subject," in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, E.T. Armour and S.M. St. Ville, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 186. [Return to text]

36. A. Hollywood, "Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization," in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, E.T. Armour and S.M. St. Ville, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 252-275. [Return to text]

37. Butler, 96. [Return to text]

38. Butler, 178. [Return to text]

39. Ibid. [Return to text]

40. Butler, 185. [Return to text]

41. Butler, 287. [Return to text]

42. Adler and Adler. [Return to text]

43. Adler and Adler, 554-5. [Return to text]

44. Bell, 74. [Return to text]

45. Bell, 81. [Return to text]

46. Bell, 196. [Return to text]

47. Bell, 108. [Return to text]

48. A.B. Seligman, R.P. Weller, M.J. Puett, and B. Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 24. [Return to text]

49. Bell, 111. [Return to text]

50. Bell, 100. [Return to text]

51. Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon, 20. [Return to text]

52. Bell, 109, (italics not in original). [Return to text]

53. Hollywood, 269. [Return to text]

54. Bell, 81. [Return to text]

55. Bell, 207. [Return to text]

56. Bell, 209. [Return to text]

57. A. Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 35. [Return to text]

58. Gluckich, 40. [Return to text]

59. Gluckich, 101. [Return to text]

60. Scarry, 34. [Return to text]

61. Gluckich, 80-1. [Return to text]

62. C.W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992): 188. [Return to text]

63. C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). [Return to text]

64. Bynum (1992), 204. [Return to text]

65. Though see Mahmood's work (2005, 2006) on religion, gender, and agency. [Return to text]

66. R.A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 145. [Return to text]