Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury
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.
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