‘I like to see blood’: visuality and self-cutting

Abstract

The sight of blood and wounds is described as crucial by individuals who self-injure, especially those who practise self-cutting. An understanding of the visual mode is therefore important to get a deeper understanding of why people choose to cut themselves. In this article, visual aspects of first-hand experiences of self-cutting are investigated. Cutting is understood as having a purpose and a function for people who injure themselves; it releases overwhelming feelings or communicates inner states to the individuals themselves and to others. Material was taken from autobiographical accounts describing cutting episodes and from photographs documenting the act. The analysis was carried out using content and discourse analytic methods. The results were interpreted using a discourse theoretical perspective. A semiotic model is proposed to understand the communicative meaning of the acts. An important finding is the role of conceptual metaphors such as ‘the-body-is-a-container’ and ‘feelings are fluid’, which make self-cutting a logical coping strategy. The role of blood as a central sign in the act was manifest in the written and visual accounts of the self-cutting experience. Blood was related to a wide range of meanings, such as realness and true self, and to feelings such as anger and sadness. Through the drawing of blood, feelings were expressed and understood. Blood was also often aestheticised and rearticulated by self-cutters who acknowledged their deviancy as a group in relation to a hegemonic culture. Concurrent themes were the verbal and visual articulations of cutting in a control discourse as a means to regain control or, sometimes, to give oneself up to an experience of chaos.

Notes

1 The statement comes from a study on self-injurers’ relation to photographs of self-injury (Sternudd 2012).

2 For overviews of literature and research see for instance Mayrhofer (2011, 25–56), for explanatory models see Bandalli (2011, chapters 1 and 2) and for the connection to youth cultures see Young, Sweeting and West (2006) and Johansson (2011).

3 The writing on this subject has produced numerous terms for this behaviour: self-mutilation (Menninger 1938; Favazza 1996), self-injury and self-harm, or deliberate self-harm (differences discussed in Mayrhofer 2011, 27–29). Non-suicidal self-injury is more and more frequently used (American Psychiatric Association 2012), while self-inflicted violence (Alderman 1997) is seldom used. As self-injury is the most frequent term in the material and the differences in definitions are of minor importance here, self-injury will be used throughout this article (except in quotes), regardless of the author’s preferences.

4 This review of previous research only mentions studies of self-injury experiences; for introductions to research on self-injury and to different models for explaining the activity see Shaw (2002) and Mayrhofer (2011, 25–56). Sociocultural studies of self-injurers’ experiences have addressed questions about identity and meaning making to self-injurers individually and in relation to their interpersonal communication (Murray and Fox 2006; Adler and Adler 2007, 2008, 2011; Baker and Fortune 2008; Johansson 2010).

5 Bandalli means that his concept is a development of previous explanatory models that state that the functions of self-injury are ‘affect-regulation, anti-dissociation, anti-suicide, establishing interpersonal-boundaries, interpersonal influence, self-punishment [or] sensation seeking’ (Bandalli 2011, 26).

6 Bandalli defines expressive as ‘manifestation’ intended for the person themselves that ‘serves the function of personal release’, as opposed to communication that is ‘the interpersonal exchange of information’ (2011, 80).

7 Verbal is understood here as spoken and written language.

8 Even if the visuality is important for many self-injurers, the notion that self-injury by definition is executed without any experience of nociceptive pain (presented in Bandalli 2011, 27) is contradicted by many studies (Babiker and Arnold 1997, 72; Conterio and Lader 1998, 55; Bandalli 2011, 184). The informant who is quoted in the title of this article explained that which mode was desirable depended on the situation: ‘If I’m really angry or sad, I want to feel pain. If I’m feeling numb or “unreal” I like to see blood to remind myself that I’m alive’ (17, experienced). Bandalli’s results support the informant’s suggestion that different media of self-injury have different functional (and symbolic and expressive) qualities (2011, 246–249).

9 Brief accounts of the results from my own studies on partially the same material are presented in Sternudd (2008, 36; 2010, 241; 2011a, 86–88).

10 Thanks to Anna Johansson for mentioning this metaphor (see also her dissertation 2010, 93–95).

11 Lakoff and Johnson, and Kövecses developed their theories about conceptual metaphors inside a cognitive linguistic framework. Using their concepts in studies with a constructivist approach, such as discourse theory, might seem inconsistent. But as they argue that as ‘every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions […] our culture is already present in every experience itself’ (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 57), it seems possible to leave the cognitive aspect aside.

12 When only numbers are written inside brackets they refer to page numbers in PS.

13 Previously unpublished results from my study (Sternudd 2012) showed that over 9 out of 10 of the informants that had published SI-photographs on the internet had seen others.

14 See Sternudd (2012, 424) for a discussion on methodological and ethical issues connected to that study.

15 Following Kress and van Leeuwen, medium is the materialisation of the expression (2001, 6), for instance the hard copy of a photograph.

16 This is a special kind of metaphor that involves an animation or personification of non-human entities.

17 Here I only mention the reasons for taking SI-photographs that are relevant for this article. See Sternudd (2012) for a more elaborate discussion.

18 The results presented here are previously not released findings from a follow-up questionnaire conducted in 2008 as part of the study presented in Sternudd (2012).

19 In this study the most common SI-photograph ‘is taken by a female, it shows an arm with scars and it’s lacking contextualized features’ (Sternudd 2010, 238); see also Sternudd (2008, 32–33).

20 The quote is taken from the same source as referred to in note 18.

21 As the photographer is identifiable in the photograph that is mentioned, it is not published here.

22 The search was carried out on 24 June 2013 using Google.com. Blood-is-tears also appears in Babiker and Arnold (1997, 72) and Moe and Ribe (2007, 74).

23 Kristeva’s term abject opens itself up for psychoanalytical interpretations in which the let-out blood could be a way of dismissing objects connected to the Real, which is a demand for entering into the realm of the Law of the Father, according to Lacan. As psychoanalytical articulations are not explicit in the material, I leave this interpretation aside.

24 Mode signifies the particular character of the expression, for example, visual or verbal (Kress 2004).

25 Several writers have discussed the relation between tribal and religious rituals and self-injury (Menninger 1938; Favazza 1996; Hewitt 1997). This connection is sometimes based on an analogy in its expression and an ignorance of semiotic and functional differences. To inscribe self-injury into a ritual discourse can be problematic as it can relate self-injury to ‘primitivism’ and something illogical. Here ritual is used in the meaning of a performative act, a notion following Austin (1975) and Butler (1990).

26 If feelings were understood instead as a relational interpersonal activity that emanates from contact between individuals, it would make self-cutting an insignificant act. For a critical approach to feelings see Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hans T. Sternudd

Hans T. Sternudd is a senior lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Linnaeus University and has a PhD in Art History. Since 2008, he has worked on a project concerning photographs of self-injury, financed partly by the Swedish Research Council and Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden.