Abstract
This is more than just another book about self-injury. With The Tender Cut, Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler take the phenomenon out of its psychomedical ghetto and examine it in a broader sociological framework. Their work deserves an audience of feminist social workers, therapists, researchers, and teachers who want to understand self-injury and to think more deeply, broadly, and differently about its scope and implications.
The book initially covers familiar ground, introducing self-injury and summarizing the previous literature. However, qualitative interviews with more than 135 noninstitutionalized practitioners of self-injury, as well as thousands of Internet messages and e-mail messages form the basis of the study. In this unique approach to the subject, the authors allow practitioners of self-injury to speak in their own words, ostensibly without judgment, and then offer new categories and frameworks to understand and locate the behaviors. On the basis of the literature and their interviews, the authors divide the practice into three periods: (1) ancient and ritualistic or hidden (including the mid-20th century’s psychomedical approach), when people “self-invented” the practice; (2) the 1990s, when people began to hear about the practice from others; and (3) about 2001–2002, when the practice entered the mainstream.
The authors’ previous scholarship has focused on something they call “attitudinal deviance” or “people who do not think along normative lines” (p. 39), and Adler and Adler bring this interpretive lens to bear on the subject. They analyze the participation of practitioners of self-injury in cyber communities, examining the “social organization of deviance,” and conclude that access to cyber communities fundamentally alters an expected “loner deviance” (p. 127) by providing outlets for connection and support. Adler and Adler describe the importance of cyber communities in helping practitioners to define the act for themselves, which they categorize into the “three S’s of deviance” (sin, sickness, and selected; p. 133), underscoring the progression from the perception of self-injury as hidden and shameful to a chosen and more widely accepted coping strategy.
Their data confirm previous statistics that self-injury occurs more frequently among women, and they offer various gendered analyses. Although the authors emphasize their intention to focus on the practice among previously hidden groups (e.g., nonwhite, boys and men, lower socioeconomic class, prisoners, homeless), they disappoint by promising more than they deliver, especially about implications that are related to race and power/powerlessness. They rely on other research for statistics about self-injury and race and state that they “‘heard’ about a lot of this behavior occurring among other populations” (p. 36), but in their own sample, “nearly all” were Caucasian (p. 43). Some readers may object that the “deviant” lens potentially undermines the authors’ attempt to counter judgmental perspectives, particularly when they link self-injurers to “other deviants,” such as embezzlers, rapists, drug addicts, and paranoids (p. 94). However, Adler and Adler provide a valuable contribution to the study of self-injury, which, as they conclude, “certainly has evolved from being a symptom of mental illness practiced by suicidal individuals to becoming a visible, albeit not accepted, mode of expression for disaffected or disempowered youth and a coping mechanism for adults” (p. 213).