On Skin as Borderlands Using Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza to Understand Self-Injury Among Latinas
2006; The MIT Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1540-5699
Autores Tópico(s)Suicide and Self-Harm Studies
Resumo1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture, running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh, splits me splits me me raja me raja This is my home this thin edge of barbwire. --Gloria Anzaldua (1999:24-25) During the 2000-2001 academic year, I worked at an ivy league university as the director of a residence hall that housed 57 students, the vast majority of whom were students of color. During that time, I became aware of several students who self-injured. I had never been directly exposed to self-injury before, but I knew that the stereotypical self-injurer was white, middleclass, and female. Besides being female, however, these students did not fit the accepted labels: they were all Latinas, from immigrant families. Their parents had worked their way out of the working class and tentatively into the ranks of a tenuous entrepreneurial class or into the middle class. They were also the first generation of college students in their families. In this article, I develop a sociological perspective of self-injury. I use Gloria Anzaldua's concepts of Coatlicue States and the New Mestiza Consciousness to expand our understanding of self-injury among Latina youth. Self-Injury Defined The mental health literature contains numerous instances of complicated and overlapping definitions for self-injury. For the purpose of this article, self-injury is defined as any incident where an individual has attempted to deliberately alter or destroy body tissue without suicidal intent in an effort to gain relief from overwhelming affect. This includes, but is not limited to cutting, burning, scratching, hitting, biting, and pinching (Favazza 1989; Pattison and Kahan, 1983; Bennun, 1984). There are multiple types and manifestations of self-injurious behavior. This article specifically explores episodic, superficial/moderate, self-injurious behavior. This form of self-injury is usually ritualistic, it occurs multiple times over a period of time, and it is premeditated. It is also different from other types of self-injury. The two other major types include major self injury and stereotypic self-injury. Major self-injury includes eye enucleation, castration, and limb amputation and is often accompanied by a psychotic break (Favazza 1998). Stereotypic self-injury consists primarily of head banging, hitting, orifice digging, self-biting and is usually monotonously repetitive and sometimes rhythmic (Favazza 1998). Finally, given the stigma attached to self-injurious behavior, I want to make explicit the assumption that cutting and other forms of self-injury are valid psychological coping strategies and must be understood as such. When first confronted with the need to inform myself about self-injury, I turned to the internet. I found an abundance of information about the topic, everything from how to best be supportive of someone who self-injures to information for people who self-injure looking for strategies to resist being helped. Much of the popular, and thereby most accessible, literature on cutting and other forms of self-injury states emphatically that self-injury affects populations regardless of class, gender, and race. However, most of what is known about self-injury documented in mental health literature is based on data from small samples that are overwhelmingly female, middle-and upper-middle class, well-educated, young and white (Shaw 2002; Zila and Kiselica 2001; Suyemoto and MacDonald 1995; Pipher 1994; Strong 1998). In part, it was this significant discrepancy between the popular and academic literature that led me to this project. The vast majority of the scholarly literature addressing self-injury can be found in psychiatric, psychology, counseling journals, and journals of adolescence (cf. Zila and Kiselica 2001; Gratz 2001; Favazza 1998). …
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