You Bleed Just to Know You're Alive: Self-Harm and Subjectivity in Teenage Girls

This post may seem a bit wordy, but it's basically the beginning of a discussion around teenage girls cutting themselves, and how this act can perhaps be viewed as a reclamation of subjectivity. Kinda.

Self-harm, in particular ‘cutting’, is considerably more prevalent amongst adolescent girls than boys and has become increasingly common in the last two decades.* Considering accepted gendered power dynamics, and the pressures of love and romance foisted on teenage girls in countless fictions and glossy teen magazines, it is hardly surprising that the onset of womanhood leads to a distrust of the self. The passivity required within sexual relations in the pervasive andocentric model presumes “a kind of masochism inherent in [women’s] nature” (Bourdieu 2000: 40). This masochism, fostered by pressures of becoming ‘woman’ (as she is defined through patriarchy), is manifested literally in the teenage girl’s desire to self-harm. Masochism, however, traditionally requires an other, a sadist to dominate and negate the masochist’s subjectivity. Self-mutilation, however, is a closed circuit of submission and domination – where the perpetrator simultaneously asserts and negates her own subjectivity, assuming agency while still attacking the self.

razorbladebloodstainedmirror
enchanted mirror -
you show me what i want to see
what i need to be
- i find you in razorblades and kitchen knives
i don’t know why i bleed for you
why i bleed for me
why i bleed to see
some faint and fadin’ signs of life
[…]
but then again-
you’re my own reflection
my very own spiritual infection
and as i stain you with my blood you know.
[…] (Ashleigh: Online)

In razorbladebloodstainedmirror, one of countless adolescent poems about cutting, the author explicitly links the notion of the mirror and self-mutilation, stating that it is her reflection (separated from her self) that she is both attacking and wielding as her weapon.

Throughout Speculum of the Other Woman (1985) Luce Irigaray suggests that when looking in the mirror, women merely replicate the male gaze as it is imposed onto their own bodies because they are denied selfhood within the patriarchal definition of woman. Berger too discusses the role of the mirror in reflecting the male gaze, which separates women from their subjectivity: “the real function of the mirror was […] to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (Berger 1972: 51).

When Ashleigh looks in the flat shiny surfaces she is seeing herself separated from her own body, and outside of her own control. Unable to attack the phallogocentric powers that project this reflection, she lashes out at what appears to be their subject – herself. As Greer asserts, “the woman who cuts her body asserts undeniably and emphatically that there is a self that has power over that body” (2000:104). While there are certainly more constructive means of expressing subjectivity (claiming agency without the sacrifice of pain), self-harm amongst adolescent girls is often a quest for empowerment while simultaneously attacking the body’s exterior – the surface on which codes of gender, status and culture are inscribed. Self-mutilation should then be viewed in part as a reclamation of subjectivity that challenges women’s roles as disempowered victims, even as they bleed.

* See: Pipher, M. 1994. reviving ophelia: Saving the Selves of adolescent girls. new York: Ballantine Books. Cerdorian, k. 2005. The needs of girls who Self-harm. Journal of psychosocial nursing and mental health Services. 2005. vol. 43 no. 8. (40 – 46).
Suyemoto, L. & macDonald, 1995. Self-cutting in female adolescents. psychotherapy, vol 32. 1. (162-171).
Zila, L. & kiselica, S. 2001. understanding and counseling Self-mutilation in ado¬lescents and Young adults. Journal of & Development. 79. (46-50).

NOTE: This is an excerpt from my thesis I Love You to Death: the Voice of the Woman Artist: Sex Violence Sentimentality. The full text (with full references) can be downloaded here