Bodily Transgressions: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury

Self-Injury and the Religious Body in Pain

As well as adding to our perspectives on ritual, the study of self-injury relates directly to the study of religious ritual in the context of the religious infliction of pain. Glucklich points out that self-injury “is extremely pervasive in rites of mourning across the world.” ¹ It also appears in penance and purification, in offering and sacrifice, in initiation, and in the asceticism of some religious adepts. Religious self-injury differs from non-religious self-injury in some important ways, including the greater likelihood of community approval and comprehension. I don’t intend to argue that religious and secular self-injury have the same psychological origins; however, I do think that the phenomenological similarities bear further exploration.

Glucklich argues that “in its relation to pain, the goal of religious life is not to bring anesthesia, but to transform the pain that causes suffering into a pain that leads to insight, meaning, and even salvation.” ² “The self,” he adds, “emerges out of the violence and out of the hurtful feedback it generates.” ³ Scarry offers a slightly different perspective, arguing that religious self-injury remakes the world: “The self-flagellation of the religious ascetic … is not … an act of denying the body … but a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force.” ⁴ Religious self-injury seems to operate within the same ambivalence as its secular relative; in both cases the practitioner is seeking meaning—even if insight and salvation are less common goals among those who self-injure outside of a religious context—and in both, violence and pain in some way create or open a path to reality. Indeed, Glucklich comments that secular self-injurers “often … sound like religious [self-injurers] without the theology,” and goes on to say that “if anything, in its complexity and ambiguity, the inner world of [secular] self-hurters more closely resembles that of mystics and other technicians of the sacred who acquire, or claim to acquire, ‘spiritual’ power by austerities and discipline.” ⁵

Furthermore, religious self-injury has a complicated relationship to gender. As Bynum points out, in medieval Christian mysticism, “illness or recurrent pain was … more apt to be given religious significance in women’s lives than in men’s.” ⁶ This was true for a number of reasons, including that women had little to give up as ascetics aside from food and bodily integrity ⁷, and that the culture of the time associated women with body, and through body with the incarnation of Christ. ⁸ Yet in other contexts, especially when religious pain is considered a mark of advanced religious abilities, it is the sole province of men. Associated with the gendered body, reinforcing the body’s gender, ritual pain can be read as a technology of gender.

Technologies of the Sacred

Might religious self-injury be more, though, than simply a technology of gender or, more broadly, a technology of the body? Does its association with the sacred complicate the relationships of power found in ritual? I would propose that it does, and furthermore that religious ritual comprises what one might call a “technology of the sacred.”

Technologies of the self are practical ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained. They’re the means through which power comes to expression in the everyday bodily practices and existence of the subject, and they’re also the means through which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of gender are technologies of the self that relate specifically to gender, that create the structures of gender and that through gender bring the self into being. Technologies of the sacred, then, might be defined as those practical, religious ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained, by or in the face of structures of power. They would include the ways in which social power comes to expression in the everyday sacred practices and experiences of the subject, and also—showing the ambiguity in self-injury as a technology of the self and a technology of the sacred—the religious ways in which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of the sacred can also be understood as those practices that bring a sense of the sacred into being, that construct the sacred, and that shape the self in response to such experiences of the sacred. In this way, self-injury as a technology of the sacred evokes an experience of the sacred, marks that experience clearly on the body, and at the same time reinforces—or, in some cases, subverts, or both—structures of power and domination.

The concept of technologies of the sacred can contribute to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between religion and power—a relationship currently undertheorized. I would suggest, for instance, that technologies of the sacred can also serve as effective technologies of gender, structuring the self into socially appropriate gender hierarchies but also providing the space for resistance to those hierarchies. Many theorists of ritual have already noted the ways in which it reinforces social hierarchies, even when, as in the case of traditional Mardi Gras celebrations, it purports to overturn them. Less work has been done on the connections between the sacred and subversion. ⁹ However, if we view the sacred as a conduit of social power and resistance through bodily techniques, we have new tools with which to understand the relationship between ritual, the sacred, the self, and society.

1. A. Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 35.[↑]
2. Gluckich, 40.[↑]
3. Gluckich, 101.[↑]
4.  Scarry, 34.[↑]
5. Gluckich, 80-1.[↑]
6. C.W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992): 188. [↑]
7. C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).[↑]
8.  Bynum (1992), 204.[↑]
9. Though see Mahmood’s work (2005, 2006) on religion, gender, and agency.[↑]