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156 12 “What I Had to Do to Survive” Self-Injurers’ Bodily Emotion Work Margaret Leaf and Douglas P. Schrock I can picture myself perfectly sitting at my desk in my bedroom with the glass in my hand. I didn’t even know it was called self-injuring. I just knew it made me feel better. It made me feel happy for some strange reason. The anticipation as I held the glass over my skin was so exciting that it was almost unbearable. Then before I knew it there was a fresh scratch. And I was delighted when I saw the blood appear. Our bodies may be the material that enables symbolic interaction (Mead 1934) and the experience of emotionality (Cooley 1902). But as Kate, a twenty-one-year-old self-injurer, suggests in the preceding quotation, we can also strategically employ them to suppress and evoke feelings.1 In this chapter, we examine how self-injurers suppress distress and evoke authenticity and self-efficacy. As one interviewee put it, “This is what I had to do to survive in my eyes.” We also show how self-injurers’ emotional troubles derived largely from the precariousness of their everyday lives and how selfinjury often unintentionally nourished the very emotional dilemmas they were trying to escape. In other words, rather than resisting or trying to change the social conditions causing them trouble, they blamed themselves and took it out on their bodies, which temporarily made them feel better. Adler and Adler (2005, 345–46) define self-injury as the “deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one’s own body tissue,” which can involve a range of behaviors including “self-cutting, burning, branding, scratching, biting, banging, hair-pulling, and bone-breaking.” Psychologists dominate the study of self-injury, and many argue with each other over what alleged mental illness causes people to self-injure (see, e.g., Andover et al. 2005; Lochner et al. 2005). Adler and Adler, however, move research on self-injury beyond the purview of abnormal psychology by examining how self-injurers rationalize and carry out their actions, contributing to sociological theory on, and social-psychological understandings of, deviance. In this chapter we build on their work by showing how self-injurers can deepen our understanding of emotion work. Hochschild (1979) defines emotion work as the “deliberate act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling” (561). She points out that people Self-Injurers’ Bodily Emotion Work 157 do emotion work both to suppress undesired emotions and to evoke desired emotions, and that emotion work may be expressive (controlling outward expression), cognitive (changing the way one thinks about a situation), or bodily (changing an embodied practice). Hochschild names two examples of bodily emotion work: trying to breathe slower or relaxing muscles when trying not to shake. Similarly, Thoits (1989) suggests that people can manipulate bodily experiences to do emotion work, giving the examples of drug and alcohol use, deep breathing, and exercising. While the study of emotion work has flourished over the past thirty years, most research has neglected bodily emotion work and instead focused on how people do expressive or cognitive emotion work.2 Methods We learned about self-injury by interviewing fifteen current or former self-injurers about their experiences. Interviewees approached us after hearing about the project from mutual friends, flyers posted around campus, announcements on online message boards, and canvassing in college classrooms. Thirteen of the interviewees were women and two were men, and they ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-three. All but two were white, and their educational attainment ranged from less than a high school diploma to a Ph.D. Interviews lasted between one and four hours. During that time, the interviewees talked about their feelings and experiences with family, school, and work, as well as with self-injury. We assume that interviewees’ descriptions and interpretations of their experiences are the closest we can come to accessing the “lived actualities” of their world (Smith 1987, 176). By coding interview transcripts for similarities and differences and brainstorming about the emerging analyses, we determined that framing self-injury as emotion work best encapsulated their experiences. Self-Injury as Bodily Emotion Work Although interviewees traveled different pathways to self-injury, most said they did not remember exactly why they first did it. For instance, when Kate was helping her mother pick up the pieces of a broken glass, she pocketed a shard “for no reason” and later used it to scratch her...

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