Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury

Self-Injury and Ritual Theory

In her classic text on ritual, Catherine Bell defines ritualization as “a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities.”¹ Though self-injury is sometimes impulsive, undertaken at the peak of an emotional crisis, its repetitive nature means that it’s frequently a carefully designed practice. Self-injurers need to have tools at hand and have a space in which they can self-injure uninterrupted. Many plan where and how to self-injure, selecting a preferred method and choosing where on their bodies to inflict pain. Is self-injury “distinguish[ed] and privilege[d] … in comparison to other … activities?” Yes, in that it’s a regular practice that takes place in a time and a space set aside from other activities. Can it be counted as ritual?

It may be helpful here to turn to Bell’s formulation of ritual practice as “(1) situational; (2) strategic; (3) embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world”—what she terms “redemptive hegemony.”² Self-injury, when engaged in repeatedly as a planned response to environmental or internal stimuli, fits these criteria. It’s clearly situational, responding to particular events or internal states. It’s strategic: those who use self-injury do so to induce or eradicate a particular emotional state or to give voice to otherwise unspeakable pain. Is it embedded in a misrecognition of what it’s doing? Yes, if we consider the question of power raised in Bell’s concept of redemptive hegemony. Bell argues that ritual is an important method of creating and reordering reality: “ritualization as a strategic mode of practice produces nuanced relationships of power, relationships characterized by acceptance and resistance, negotiated appropriation, and redemptive reinterpretation of the hegemonic order.”³ I would argue that some forms of self-injury, especially cutting and burning, express and renegotiate relationships of power through the refiguring of bodily violation, while at the same time remaining unaware of that refiguring and also of the ways in which self-injury re-implicates the injurer in systems of domination.

Reading some forms of self-injury as ritualization affords us a nuanced perspective on the roles of power in these practices. Bell notes that, “ritual practices are produced with an intent to order, rectify, or transform a particular situation”—in this case, a sense of violation or lack of control—and that the “end” of ritualization is the “production of a ‘ritualized body'” and “sociocultural situations that the ritualized body can dominate in some way.”⁴ Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon agree, echoing Scarry’s theory of pain: “Getting it right [in ritual] is … an act of world construction.”⁵ The ritualization involved in some forms of self-injury has as its end the rectification of a situation out of control: emotions out of control, bodily integrity out of control, voice and silence controlled by others. Through the ritual of self-injury, the participant produces a situation in which she or he is in control, giving voice against silence, controlling the violation of bodily boundaries. Through the ritual of self-injury, the participant creates a world in which she has control over her body, in which she has a voice. Ritualization, Bell notes, is “the avoidance of explicit speech and narrative”—the avoidance of prohibited speech about violation and pain—and also “the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other way.”⁶ Ritual also creates a sense of the sacred by differentiating it from the profane—this is part of its set-apart nature. The experience of uncontrollable violation is an experience of profanity; in self-injuring, controlled violation, the self-injurer may even re-sacralize a violated body.

Indeed, Bell argues that ritual “acts to restructure bodies in the very doing of the acts themselves.”⁷ The self-injurer reconstructs her body as one which can give voice to violation—a body that speaks through its visible scars the pain of the invisible ones—and one which controls its own violation. Self-injury turns a silenced, uncontrolled, vulnerable, and violated body into a speaking, controlled, armored, and self-violated one.

And yet, this control is ambivalent, for the body and the self that are created through the ritual of self-injury may not entirely be those intended by the participant. Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon offer a model of “ritual as a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case,” stressing “the incongruity between the world of enacted ritual and the participants’ experience of lived reality.”⁸ Those who self-injure may feel a sense of control and voice during the self-injury, and may use their scars as reminders of that control, but clearly the feeling fades over time in the face of everyday experiences—if it didn’t, self-injury wouldn’t be a repeated and often addictive action. Bell again offers a key when she argues that “ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, force, event, and tradition, how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding.”⁹ The message of self-injury is fully coherent only in a community of others who self-injure; beyond this community, the self-injured body is seen simply as violated, the self-injurer as disordered. Furthermore, while the externalized force of self-injury may be to give voice, what is internalized is the wounding. As Amy Hollywood notes, “ritual is productive of the subject.”¹⁰ How might one describe the subject produced by the ritual of self-injury? It is a subject whose primary aspect is woundedness. In the end, the self-injurer gives voice but is not heard; she subverts and at the same time reproduces the violation, recreating her socialized body and literally reinscribing the structures of power upon her body. She reclaims agency only to lose it to a medical system that regards her as abnormal and mutilated. The ritual of self-injury reconfigures but also reproduces “a vision of the order of power in the world”; it is “embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing.”²

This ambivalence, this production of paradox, is an important part of the nature of ritual. As Bell notes, ritualization “create[s] social bodies in the image of relationships of power,” and “also empower[s] those who may at first appear to be controlled.”¹¹ “By focusing on the making and remaking of the body,” she adds, ritual “reproduces the sociopolitical context in which it takes place while also attempting to transform it.”¹² In self-injury, this happens in several ways. On the one hand, self-injury is empowering. It provides emotional regulation and offers a vivid symbolic representation of suffering, especially in cases where the suffering is the result of violation by another. It replaces uncontrollable, external violation with controlled, ritualized self-violation, returning a sense of order and volition to the world.

At the same time, the communication embedded in self-injury is only legible to a small number of people: oneself, others who self-injure, and some particularly empathetic outsiders who have secondary experience, either professional or personal, with self-injury. Thus, although self-injury gives voice to a silenced experience, it runs the risk of doing so in a vacuum. The experience of giving voice may be healing regardless, but how powerful is it to give voice when no one is there to hear? Furthermore, while self-injury is controlled violation, it remains violation; it continues to do harm to the body that has already been harmed. Unlike the tattoo clients discussed earlier, those who self-injure do not do so for bodily adornment. Some may wear their scars as a part of their life story, but the primary purpose of self-injury is to cause injury to the body in order to feel better. In the process, a body that has already suffered violence suffers more. Simultaneously with empowering the participant, giving voice to a silenced experience, and placing control back in her or his hands, self-injury literally reinscribes on the body a social power structure of violence and domination. What we learn about self-injury through ritual theory, then, is that it holds deep power to create meaning—indeed, to create worlds—but that power is ambivalent and paradoxical, and the world that’s constructed in the practice of self-injury may not be the world that was intended by the practitioner.

What self-injury offers to the study of ritual is the question of external misrecognition, which fundamentally influences the meaning and concrete social effects of a ritual. The potential for misreading of self-injury leads to a potential for re-victimization of those who self-injure by people whose interpretations of the practice diverge from those of the self-injurer herself. The flip side, though, of the ambivalence of self-injury is that it is in fact empowering—and for very good reasons—despite how self-destructive and maladaptive it may seem from an outsider’s perspective. Other rituals may share this fundamental ambivalence. This should alert scholars to be sensitive, in the analysis of ritual, to practitioners’ claims of empowerment, even in cases where the ritual appears from our own perspective to be disempowering, and it should also alert us to the risks inherent in the misrecognition of ritual.

1. Bell, 74. [↩]
2. Bell, 81. [↩] [↩]
3. Bell, 196. [↩]
4. Bell, 108. [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. Bell, 111. [↩]
7. Bell, 100. [↩]
8. Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon, 20. [↩]
9. Bell, 109, (italics not in original). [↩]
10. Hollywood, 269. [↩]
11. Bell, 207. [↩]
12. Bell, 209. [↩]