Images of self-injury now surround us, along with voluminous narratives of mental ill-health 1 in popular media. Self-injury, intentional damaging of one's body without a clear suicidal intent, is an enigmatic behavior that breaches boundaries between sanity and madness, physical and mental health ( Chandler, 2014). Being attentive to cultural representations of self-injury thus can help clinicians move toward compassionate clinical practice beyond the medical paradigm. We argue that popular cultural narratives of self-injury like menhera may exert as powerful an influence as clinical discourses on the way we interpret, make sense of, and experience self-injury. The menhera narrative tropes mobilize cultural discourses about female madness and subsequently feed back into the social imaginaries, offering those who self-injure symbolic resources for self-interpretation. These menhera tropes, each with their unique interpretation of self-injury, have evolved symbiotically with traditional gender norms in Japan, while destabilizing long-standing undesirability of sick/detracted female bodies. Within these menhera narratives, self-injury functions as a self-sufficient signifier of female vulnerability, monstrosity, and desire for agency. Tracing the expansion of this popular cultural slang since 2000, this conceptual article explores three narrative tropes of menhera-the sad girl, the mad woman, and the cutie. Among the most conspicuous is the emergence of menhera (a portmanteau of “mental health-er”) girls, female characters who exhibit unstable emotionality, obsessive love, and stereotypical self-injurious behaviors such as wrist cutting. Over the last few decades, self-injury has gained wide visibility in Japanese popular culture from manga (graphic novel), anime (animation), to digital games and fashion. 2Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan.1School of Professional Communication, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |