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

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]

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