Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury

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.”¹ Psychological pain, as psychologists have recognized as early as Freud, may have the same effects.² 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.”³ 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.”⁴ 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 Lauretis⁵ and Butler⁶ 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.⁷ 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?’⁸
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 action⁹, adding that there is “analytical payback in detaching the concept of agency from the trope of resistance.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹To 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.¹² 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.”¹³ 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.”¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵ 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.”¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.”¹⁹ 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.

1. E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 19. [↩]
2. C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). [↩]
3. Scarry, 56. [↩]
4. Scarry, 47. [↩]
5. deLauretis. [↩]
6. 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. [↩]
7. Alexander and Clare. [↩]
8. Alexander and Clare, 76. [↩]
9. S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 157. [↩]
10. Mahmood, 188. [↩]
11. 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. [↩]
12. 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. [↩]
13. Butler, 96. [↩]
14. Butler, 178. [↩]
15. Ibid. [↩]
16. Butler, 185. [↩]
17. Butler, 287. [↩]
18. Adler and Adler. [↩]
19. Adler and Adler, 554-5. [↩]