Los discursos del cuerpo y la experiencia del padecimiento. Acciones autolesivas corporales en jóvenes

Identificador:  TDX:965

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX965

Autores:  Casado Marin, Lina Cristina

Resumen:
The act of bodily self-harm–defined as the way in which some people deliberately cut, burn or scratch their bodies with non fatal desires –have had a profound impact on public opinion in last five years. Even the act of self-harm without the intention of dying is not a new phenomenon in Spain, the incomprehension of a self-made action and its consideration as an underground epidemic affecting mainly young women (Truth Hurts, 2006 and CASE report –comparative Findings From the Child and Adolescent Self-Harm in Europe-, 2008), have promoted an upsurge of studies –mainly quantitative- which are essentially interested in concretising in numbers the magnitude of the phenomenon as well as trying to identify co morbidities and enabling conditions of self-harm. In this framework this work approaches bodily self-harm from a hermeneutic perspective and trough a multi-sited ethnography in order to analyse the relation between identity construction, emotional experience and bodily representations of affliction and malaise in young people. The point of departure is the concept of the individual body as a field with expressive possibilities that may either reproduce or subvert the normative body through strategies that may be interpreted on various levels as subaltern body images, forms of agency that defy hegemonic models of the body and canons of beauty, or responses to embodied feelings of alienation. The analysis of virtual communities that promote self-harm allows me to address the question of social support networks that exist only in an online space where the body and its representations, contrary to expectations, are still playing a crucial role that exceeds the cyborg category and forces us to redefine and reevaluate the meanings of injured virtual bodies.