Morrow, MarinaRedikopp, Sarah Helena2024-07-182024-07-182024-04-112024-07-18https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42146This dissertation intervenes into dominant understandings of self-harm as a pathological problem behaviour in need of treatment and cure, opting, instead, to take as its point of departure an understanding of self-harm as a resourceful, multiplicitous, and socially embedded bodymind practice oriented towards attending to “what hurts”. Using a combination of critical qualitative methods (i.e., narrative inquiry and critical discourse analysis) this dissertation analyzes fourteen interviews with women, trans, and nonbinary adults living in Canada who identify with self-harm, placing interviewees' experience in conversation with the analysis of medical and cultural texts (i.e., psy- clinical literature, Canadian mental health policy documents, the DSM-5, and young adult novels pertaining to self-harm). Bringing together insights from mad studies, feminist disability studies, feminist theories of trauma, emotion, and embodiment, and social justice perspectives in mental health research, the dissertation pursues a deeply intersectional, situated, and reparative engagement with lived accounts of self-harm. This engagement critiques curative approaches to self-harm and works to position this practice beyond dualisms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, choosing, instead, to conceptualize self-harm as something that both hurts and heals. The dissertation contributes to mad and feminist literatures an understanding of self-harm as a relational, political, and multiplicitous bodymind practice which is shaped by, and which responds to, the social, structural, and political contexts of everyday life.Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.Gender studiesElectronic Thesis or Dissertation2024-07-18Self-harmMad studiesGender studies