Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury

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.” ¹ 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.” ² 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. ³ Furthermore, social display of both tattooing and cutting are gendered, with men more likely to have large, visible tattoos ⁴ and more likely to engage in more extreme (and therefore more visible) forms of self-injury such as bone breaking. ⁵ In keeping with this apparent gender divergence, Atkinson interprets tattooing as an aspect of Foucauldian technologies of the self. ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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 ⁸ ). 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. ⁹ 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.” ¹⁰

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.” ¹¹ 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. ¹²

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? ¹³ In answering these questions, I will consider four aspects of self-injury: voice, symbol, agency, and ritual.

1. M. Atkinson, “Tattooing and Civilizing Processes: Body Modification as Self-Control,” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41:3 (2004): 130.[↑]
2. Atkinson, 136.[↑]
3. 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.[↑]
4.  Atkinson.[↑]
5. L. Claes, W. Vandereycken, and H. Vertommen.[↑]
6. Atkinson, 134.[↑]
7. Prinstein.[↑]
8. 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.[↑]
9. 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.[↑]
10. 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.[↑]
11. T. deLauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): 18.[↑]
12. Atkinson, 138.[↑]
13. Adler and Adler.[↑]