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Melissa Wilcox,
"Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury"
(page 3 of 6)
Technological Self-Injury
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. 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]
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. 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.
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