The Social Transformation of Self-Injury

Patricia A. Adler; Peter Adler

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.18.4.04

Authors

Patricia A. Adler University of Colorado Boulder, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2059-805X
Peter Adler University of Denver, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9991-0981

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.18.4.04

Keywords:

Deviance, Medical, Self-Injury, Ethnography, Cyber-Ethnography

Abstract

This research offers a description and analysis of the relatively hidden practice of self-injury: cutting, burning, branding, and bone breaking. Drawing on over 150 in-depth interviews and tens of thousands of website postings, e-mail communications, and Internet groups, we challenge the psycho-medical depiction of this phenomenon and discuss ways that the contemporary sociological practice of self-injury has evolved to challenge images of the population, etiology, practice, and social meanings associated with this behavior. We conclude by suggesting that self-injury, for some, is in the process of undergoing a moral passage from the realm of medicalized to voluntarily chosen deviant behavior in which participants’ actions may be understood with a greater understanding of the sociological factors that contribute to the prevalence of these actions.

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Author Biographies

Patricia A. Adler, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Patricia A. Adler (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1984) is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her myriad research interests span social psychology, deviant behavior, sociology of drugs, sociology of children, sociology of sports, and the sociology of work and leisure. Along with Peter Adler, her most recent work is The Tender Cut (New York University Press, 2011). Together, they were the co-recipients of the 2010 George Herbert Mead Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Their edited text-reader, Constructions of Deviance, is now in its eighth edition.

Peter Adler, University of Denver, USA

Peter Adler (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1980) is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. His work is informed by a symbolic interactionist perspective and ethnographic methods. Together with Patti, he edited the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography for eight years and wrote several books, including Membership Roles in Field Research (Sage, 1987), a treatise on ethnographic methods and how researchers locate themselves within their settings; Backboards & Blackboards (Columbia University Press, 1991), an insider’s account of the subculture of Division I intercollegiate athletes; Peer Power (Rutgers University Press, 1998), research on the culture of preadolescent children, and Paradise Laborers (Cornell University Press, 2004), a study of hotel workers in Hawaii.

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