Adolescent Daughters and Ritual Abjection: Narrative Analysis of Self-injury in Four US Films

Bareiss, Warren

doi:10.1007/s10912-015-9353-5

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Images of self-injury now surround us, along with voluminous narratives of mental ill-health 1 in popular media. Studies have documented the growing number of self-injury portrayals across popular media including films (Chouinard, 2009;Trewavas et al, 2010;Danylevich, 2016;Bareiss, 2017), TV shows (Whitlock et al, 2009), young adult fiction (Miskec and McGee, 2007) and comics (Seko and Kikuchi, 2020). Alongside mass media, interactive and visual-rich social media platforms have enabled instant sharing of user-generated self-injury content at an unprecedented speed and scale (Seko, 2013;Seko and Lewis, 2016;Alderton, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While self-injury, with its enhanced visibility, touches many people's lives, the perceived meanings ascribed to this practice vary widely. Research on media portrayals of self-injury has revealed a range of implicit and explicit meanings attached to this practice, including emotional regulation, self-punishment, coping mechanism, interpersonal manipulation, self-affirmation, or resistance to oppression (Danylevich, 2016;Bareiss, 2017;Seko and Kikuchi, 2020). Although what self-injury means to the person varies across media narratives, there is a recognizable pattern in who engages in this practice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mentally Ill and Cute as Hell: Menhera Girls and Portrayals of Self-Injury in Japanese Popular Culture

Seko

Kikuchi

2022

Front. Commun.

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Over the last few decades, self-injury has gained wide visibility in Japanese popular culture from manga (graphic novel), anime (animation), to digital games and fashion. Among the most conspicuous is the emergence of menhera (a portmanteau of “mental health-er”) girls, female characters who exhibit unstable emotionality, obsessive love, and stereotypical self-injurious behaviors such as wrist cutting. Tracing the expansion of this popular cultural slang since 2000, this conceptual article explores three narrative tropes of menhera—the sad girl, the mad woman, and the cutie. Within these menhera narratives, self-injury functions as a self-sufficient signifier of female vulnerability, monstrosity, and desire for agency. These menhera tropes, each with their unique interpretation of self-injury, have evolved symbiotically with traditional gender norms in Japan, while destabilizing long-standing undesirability of sick/detracted female bodies. The menhera narrative tropes mobilize cultural discourses about female madness and subsequently feed back into the social imaginaries, offering those who self-injure symbolic resources for self-interpretation. We argue that popular cultural narratives of self-injury like menhera may exert as powerful an influence as clinical discourses on the way we interpret, make sense of, and experience self-injury. Being attentive to cultural representations of self-injury thus can help clinicians move toward compassionate clinical practice beyond the medical paradigm.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentally Ill and Cute as Hell: Menhera Girls and Portrayals of Self-Injury in Japanese Popular Culture

Seko

Kikuchi

2022

Front. Commun.

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“…Patterns of self-harm are diverse, sensitive to context, definitions, and measures used. Despite this, in the public imaginary, and in media representations [ 9 ], self-harm is very frequently cast—as Anna notes—as “an adolescent thing for (white) girls.” We wonder why as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Violence of the Cut: Gendering Self-Harm

Chandler

Simopoulou

2021

IJERPH

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Taking as a starting point the frequent characterisation of self-harm as “an adolescent thing for girls,” this paper offers a sociologically informed, qualitative exploration of self-harm as a gendered practice. We move beyond statistical constructions of this “reality,” and critically examine how this characterisation comes to be, and some of its effects. Our data are drawn from a pilot study that developed a collaborative arts-based inquiry into meanings of self-harm. The authors worked with two groups: one of practitioners and another of people who had self-harmed, meeting over six sessions to discuss and make art in response to a range of themes relating to the interpretation and explanation of self-harm. Through data generation and analysis, we collaboratively seek to make sense of the gendering of self-harm, focusing on a series of dualistic Cartesian “cuts” between male and female, violence and vulnerability, and inside and outside. In conclusion, we call for more multi- and interdisciplinary explorations of self-harm, and greater use of diverse, arts-based, and qualitative methodologies, in order to further expand and nuance understandings and ethical engagements with self-harm, and those who are affected by it.

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“…Self-harm is represented across various media formats, including song (Baker & Brown, 2016; Whitlock et al, 2009), film (Bareiss, 2017), television (Whitlock et al, 2009), social media (Brown et al, 2018), and news media (Bareiss, 2014; Whitlock et al, 2009). Despite the important role news media play in public information, few investigations of news media portrayals of self-harm have been conducted, and those that have find that self-harm is portrayed negatively (Bareiss, 2014; Whitlock et al, 2009).…”

Section: Media Representations Of Self-harmmentioning

confidence: 99%

News media framing of self-harm in Australia.

Staniland¹,

Hasking²,

Lewis³

et al. 2022

Stigma and Health

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As a conduit of knowledge for the general public, news media inform the development and maintenance of attitudes and beliefs about a range of topics, including mental health and related behaviors. News media portrayals of such topics can, therefore, contribute to stigma-the culmination of harmful stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. A topic of increasing media and research interest is self-harm, a behavior that is still poorly understood and highly stigmatized. Despite the potential for news media to be a source of selfharm stigma, few investigations of such portrayals have been conducted. To understand how news media portrays self-harm, a qualitative media framing analysis was conducted on 545 news articles published in Australia during 2019. Six frames were identified: Inevitably Suicidal, A Tragic Outcome, Mentally Unwell, An Epidemic, Threatening and Dangerous, and A Manipulative Tactic, each drawing on a broader narrative of pathology, instability, and damage. Use of problematic language and a lack of definitional clarity reinforced these frames. While the analyzed articles are limited to an Australian context, findings demonstrate continued misrepresentations of self-harm, which arguably contribute to ongoing self-harm stigma. Greater education and support for journalists reporting about self-harm is needed.

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Adolescent Daughters and Ritual Abjection: Narrative Analysis of Self-injury in Four US Films

Cited by 8 publications

References 23 publications

Mentally Ill and Cute as Hell: Menhera Girls and Portrayals of Self-Injury in Japanese Popular Culture

Mentally Ill and Cute as Hell: Menhera Girls and Portrayals of Self-Injury in Japanese Popular Culture

The Violence of the Cut: Gendering Self-Harm

News media framing of self-harm in Australia.

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