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Walking Wounded: Mediating self-cutting through images and texts
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Music and Art. (LNUC Intermedial and multimodal studies, IMS)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2071-349X
2023 (English)In: HumaNetten, E-ISSN 1403-2279, no 51, p. 227-258Article in journal (Other academic) Published
Abstract [en]

This study analyzes the roles of different media for one person who cuts himself. The material consists of images, photographs, and texts that depict and describe this person’s experience with self-cutting and the physical and emotional outcomes of the act. A previous study by the author showed how self-cutting can be a medium that mediates inner chaotic feelings by giving them a physical and visual form. The question for this study is how media can be used by a self-cutter to explore and make sense of the mutilating act. Central to this study is the performative character of harming yourself: how it changes a person’s understanding of themselves and their social status. Previous studies on how self-harmers describe their experiences have often overlooked the formal values of the medium involved and its special qualities. In this analysis, media affordances, that is, what meaning it is possible to express through the medium involved, is an important perspective. This study has a qualitative design: it focuses on one person’s production of images and written texts. The results of the analysis, which involves formal and content analytic methods, reveal different themes that were important for the person involved in the study: cutting made him an outcast from so called normal life but also gave him a new identity in an internet community for self-harmers. Control is a strong theme in the material; self-cutting gave the person involved a sense of control, both physically and socially. The analysis of media affordances shows that the images could mediate the experience of self-cutting better than the texts did. However, written texts provided a greater opportunity to reflect on the act than the images did. This article shows that studies of how self-cutters and self-harmers mediate their experiences are important for nderstanding their behavior.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Växjö: Linnéuniversitetet, Fakulteten för konst och humaniora , 2023. no 51, p. 227-258
Keywords [en]
Self-cutting, media, mediation, performativity, affordance.
National Category
Visual Arts Art History
Research subject
Humanities, Visual Culture
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-126122DOI: 10.15626/hn.20235113OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-126122DiVA, id: diva2:1822370
Available from: 2023-12-22 Created: 2023-12-22 Last updated: 2024-03-25Bibliographically approved

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Sternudd, Hans T.

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