My Scars Tell a Story: Self-Mutilation in Young Adult Literature

This article examines several young adult novels that feature adolescents who participate in self-injurious behavior by cutting themselves. These novels emerged in the early 1990s in step with medical beliefs that there was a link between the behavior and suicidal tendencies, or that it originated from particular traumas in cutters' lives. However, representations of cutters have changed in recent years, particularly within the science fiction and fantasy genres, where cutting is employed as a comment on the society surrounding the teen. Such novels avoid the problem novel format, where the purpose is to fix the teen at its center.