Self-Harm as a Gendered Social Practice: Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodied Experience

Abstract

This study aims to critically examine how self-harm is socially and culturally constructed as a gendered practice. Moving beyond prevalence-based explanations, the article explores how dominant gender binaries shape meanings, interpretations, and responses to self-harm. The study employs a qualitative and interpretive approach, drawing on feminist sociological theory and a critical synthesis of existing literature, with particular reference to arts-based qualitative research on self-harm. Analytical attention is given to how narratives, metaphors, and embodied experiences of self-harm are produced and negotiated within gendered social contexts. Findings indicate that self-harm is frequently understood through binary oppositions such as male/female, aggression/vulnerability, and inside/outside. These binaries contribute to moral judgments, clinical assumptions, and the marginalization of experiences that do not conform to dominant gender norms. The analysis highlights how such constructions obscure relational, embodied, and contextual dimensions of self-harm. The study concludes that understanding self-harm as a gendered social practice is essential for developing more ethical, inclusive, and nuanced responses. It calls for greater use of qualitative, interdisciplinary, and reflexive methodologies that challenge reductive gender narratives and foreground lived experience.