The beauty of blood? Self-injury and ambivalence in an Internet community

Abstract

The present article analyzes how young self-injuring women and men construct themselves as ‘cutters.’ The study draws on observations of a Swedish Internet community connected to self-injurious behavior and departs from a poststructuralist framework in order to analyze how members position themselves and others in relation to cultural discourses on self-injury. Two main discourses are identified in the Web community: the ‘normalizing’ and the ‘pathologizing’ discourses, which give contrasting versions of self-injury, self-cutters, and their scarred bodies. Within the normalizing discourse, self-injurious behavior is regarded as a legitimate practice for dealing with mental health problems, ‘cutters’ are resilient, and their blood and scars are beautiful. In contrast, within the pathologizing discourse self-injurious behavior is understood as morally reprehensible, self-cutters are pathological, and their bodies are repulsive. In the Web community, members invoke both discourses, which leads to ambivalent subject positions. This study shows that the seemingly contradictory subject positions of the two discourses in fact are interdependent on each other as members draw on both the normalizing and the pathologizing discourses in order to become ‘authentic cutters.’

Keywords:

• identity
• media
• youth culture
• self-injury

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Karin Aronsson, Rolf Holmqvist, Calvin Keyser-Allen and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The prevalence of self-injury among adolescents in other Nordic countries is relatively high. In Norway, 10.6% of the girls and 2.9% of the boys report they have self-injured the last year (Madge et al. 2008). In a study on Finnish adolescents (Laukkanen et al. 2009), the lifetime prevalence of self-cutting was 11.4%, while 1.8% reported that they were currently cutting themselves on a regular basis.

2. Some researchers, such as Riley (2002) combine poststructuralist and feminist perspectives. In contrast to radical feminists (e.g. Jeffreys 2000) – who see self-injury as an expression of patriarchal relations, and women's accounts of self-cutting as voluntary as a form of false consciousness – Riley (2002) argues that bodies are given different meanings depending on social contexts and power relations (cf. Pitts 2003).