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.”1 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.
- 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. [↩]
