This paper asks questions about 'trauma' and its cultural representation specifically, trauma's representation in the cinema. In this respect, it compares and contrasts the work of Robert Bresson, in particular his 1967 masterpiece, Mouchette , with contemporary Hollywood film. James Mangold's 1999 'Oscar-winning' Girl, Interrupted offers an interesting example for cultural comparison. In both Mouchette and Girl, Interrupted the subject matter includes, amongst other traumatic experiences, rape, childhood abuse and suicide. The paper ponders the question of whether such aspects of (...) trauma can ever be authentically represented on film; or, whether, on the contrary, through the deployment of cultural stereotypes, cinematic representation tends rather to reproduce the very forms of structural power which are, in the first place, trauma's primary cause. Bresson emerges from this analysis in a favourable light for, whereas Mangold stereotypes victims of trauma and represents traumatic experience itself as inevitable and over-determined, Bresson always retains for the victim a sense of critical agency. By contrasting key scenes from both films, the paper suggests that contemporary popular cinema (the 'Hollywood-ized' form), working in tandem with institutions of social control, such as psychiatry, does not subvert but, in fact, reproduces patterns of structural power. This argument has particular significance for the cultural representation of women. The paper is theoretically framed by Simone Weil's reflections on both 'representation' and 'structural power'. (shrink)

Media representations of illnesses, particularly those associated with stigma such as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), not only define health conditions for mass audiences, but generally do so in ways that are consistent with dominant ideologies. This article examines the construction of non-suicidal self-injury as practiced by female adolescents and young adults in four US films: Girl, Interrupted, Painful Secrets, Prozac Nation, and Thirteen. The methodology used to examine the films’ narrative structure is Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, while Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection (...) informs the analysis. On one hand, a paradigmatic reading suggests that the films frame self-injury as resistance to repressive maternal domination of female adolescents. On the other hand, syntagmatic analysis reveals a privileged response to NSSI in the form of pacification administered by psychotherapists functioning as the return of the phallic-mother fantasy. (shrink)

This study explored representations of self-injury in Japanese manga. A content analysis of fifteen slice-of-life manga published between 2000-2017 was conducted, focusing on forty scenes that depict eighteen characters engaging in self-injury. Most depictions of self-injury reflect a stereotypical perception of “self-injurer,” a young girl cutting herself to cope with negative emotion. Characters receive informal support from friends and partners, while parents are portrayed as unsupportive and even triggering. An emergent trend was observed among manga targeting male readers to label (...) self-injuring women as “menhera” - mentally vulnerable damsels in distress - inviting a fetishistic gaze on the self-injuring female bodies. (shrink)

The film Female Perversions (1996) has received mixed reviews in newspapers and popular magazines. Critics have made appreciative comments on the powerful feminist message of the film, while many reviews registered frustration at the overuse of vulgarised Freudian psychoanalytic discourses in the film. Apart from those film reviews, however, many viewers have been somehow touched by the film and especially by the last scene, in which Eve physically ‘touches’ a girl’s face—though they do not know exactly why they felt the (...) film was so good. The difficulty of discussing the film Female Perversions lies in its contradictory appeal to the audience. While the film calls on the audience—most likely to be either ‘art-film’ fans or ‘professional’ viewers—to participate in the discussion about contemporary sexual politics, it eventually encourages them to suspend such a cerebral way of appreciating the film and to engage emotionally and physically in it as ‘lay’ cinema fans enjoy a nice entertainment movie. This apparently ‘highbrow’ film illuminates the very gap between the sophisticated analytic mode of film-watching and a more sensual and corporeal cinematic experience, and in a very subtle manner it invites us to move from the former mode of filmic experience to the latter. This paper aims to describe in words the film, the audience, and the intertwining of the two as a sensual, material, and corporeal being. For this purpose, this paper focuses on the moments of ‘touch’ in the film, the effect of which plays a crucial role in the subtle shift of the filmic mode mentioned above. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection on touch, this paper textualises what happens when touch happens in the film, how touch serves to produce the power of the film, and how it works on us when we are watching it. (shrink)

Self-harm, or self-mutilation, is generally viewed in academic literature as a pathological act, usually born out of trauma and/or a psychological and personality defect. Individuals who engage in self-harm are usually seen as damaged, destructive, and pathological. While self-harm is not a desirable act, this paper argues through the narratives of those who engage in such acts that self-harm may be better construed as a meaningful, embodied emotional practice, bound up in social understandings of psychological pain and how best to (...) attend to such pain. In particular, this paper suggests that those who engage in self-harm practices are performing embodied, socially situated acts of healing, survival, and self-creation in a physical attempt to retell complex, fragmented stories of abuse, existential angst, trauma, and loss of self. While these individuals may be more or less successful in such attempts, this paper suggests that understandings of self-harm would benefit from more nuanced approaches to individuals’ embodied expressions of pain that take into account the difficult nature of psychological suffering and the effects of trauma. (shrink)

‘Deliberate self-harm’, ‘self-mutilation’ and ‘self-injury’ are just some of the terms used to describe one of the most prominent issues in British mental health policy in recent years. This article demonstrates that contemporary literature on ‘self-harm’ produces this phenomenon (to varying extents) around two key characteristics. First, this behaviour is predominantly performed by those identified as female. Second, this behaviour primarily involves cutting the skin. These constitutive characteristics are traced back to a corpus of literature produced in the 1960s and (...) 1970s in North American psychiatric inpatient institutions; analysis shows how pre-1960 works were substantially different. Finally, these gendered and behavioural assertions are shown to be the result of historically specific processes of exclusion and emphasis. (shrink)