Dr Veronica Heney introduces her recent paper: Creating Care for People Who Self-Harm through Transformation of Aesthetic Objects.
When people write about the relationship between fictional depictions of self-harm and care, there are often two main trends. The first, is that work tends to focus on how self-harm is represented in fiction, in the content or ideas of that representation – lots of academic work is interested in thinking about how fiction might increase or decrease stigma, how fiction might encourage or discourage caring responses. And a lot of my own work falls into that category! The second trend is that there’s often an assumption that the most important care fiction can enact is that of avoiding, at all cost, the possibility that it might encourage a reader or viewer to begin self-harming – and that the best way to do this is by avoiding representing self-harm at all. This is a trend that my research shows is perhaps not very helpful.
But there are other ways that fiction and care might intertwine – and some of these came up in the interviews I conducted with people with experience of self-harm as part of my PhD research. And so when a call to contribute to a special issue that focused on “materialising care” came out, I jumped at the chance to contribute! I was delighted to have the opportunity to think about some of the relations of care that participants described that went being ideas and content.
The paper was recently published, and I am so pleased to see it out in the world. In it, I focus particularly on the experiences of three participants. One, Tracey, talked about how she used to make zines when she was a teenager, bringing together poetry and images that she had found and enjoyed, and sometimes sharing the zines or working on the zines together with a friend. She told me that the zines were a way of creating something beautiful, that could exist even while she was struggling, and she talked about one particular poem that she associated with self-harm and that it, too, expressed something important about that experience in a way that was ‘beautiful’.
Another participant, Hattie, also talked about poetry, specifically that of Andrea Gibson. She told me how much their poetry meant to her, and described attending a poetry reading with her sister and finding it incredibly meaningful to share an emotional experience with the rest of the audience. I was struck, in both accounts, by the way that poetry enabled Hattie and Tracey to transform their (at times difficult or emotionally painful) experience of self-harm into something that was beautiful, that felt significant, and that felt less lonely. And I was interested in the way that they achieved this by interacting materially with the poetry – through cutting it up and adding it to zines, or through travelling to sit in a room and hear it spoken aloud. These poems became objects, became embodied, became tangible in some interesting way.
Finally, I wrote about Francesca, who talked to me about watching a scene from The L Word over, and over again – often at a time when she felt upset, when she might otherwise self-harm. She talked about how meaningful it was to see a self-harming character be cared for, given that such a response couldn’t always be taken for granted either in fiction and in life. Again, I thought this was an interesting example of the way someone might actively engage with a text – the scene lost it’s context within the flow of a whole episode (or even season) of TV, and instead became almost an object in its own right.
These are just three examples, three case studies perhaps, that open up questions about care, and texts, and self-harm. What I think is particularly important, that for all three participants care didn’t mean avoiding thinking about self-harm. It meant the opposite. It meant finding ways to spend more time with texts that connected to their experiences of self-harm, finding ways to engage with them deeply. Rather than silence or distance from self-harm, they wanted closeness. I think this asks questions about what the very nature of care could or should be in the context of self-harm – perhaps we need to throw away old assumptions, and find new ways of imagining care?
