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Shifting Conversations on Girls' and Women's Self-Injury: An Analysis of the Clinical Literature in Historical Context

Harvard University Graduate School of Education, sarah_shaw{at}gse.harvard.edu

Through a historical review of girls' and women's episodic and repetitive self-injury -scholarship focusing primarily on white, middle-class women in North America and Britain - in the clinical literature from 1913 to the present, the author identifies four shifts over time. These are: 1) varying degrees of clinical interest in and numbers of publications on self-injury, 2) changing conceptualizations of self-injury, 3) changing treatment approaches for self-injury, and 4) changing characterizations of women who self-injure. Moving from research studies which indicate that self-injury typically presents in females during adolescence, this article elucidates how self-injury may reflect girls' developmental struggles within a patriarchal culture and embody a narrative of women's experiences of violation. Bringing together the history of self-injury and a feminist, relational analysis, it is argued that the historical discourse on self-injury mimics women's experiences of objectification and violence by silencing and distorting their self-injury.

Key Words: adolescence • female development • relational psychology • self-injury • self-mutilation

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