![]() ![]() Studies indicate that self-injuring characters in popular media are predominantly female adolescents who self-cut ( Whitlock et al., 2009 Trewavas et al., 2010 Radovic and Hasking, 2013). Although what self-injury means to the person varies across media narratives, there is a recognizable pattern in who engages in this practice. Research on media portrayals of self-injury has revealed a range of implicit and explicit meanings attached to this practice, including emotional regulation, self-punishment, coping mechanism, interpersonal manipulation, self-affirmation, or resistance to oppression ( Danylevich, 2016 Bareiss, 2017 Seko and Kikuchi, 2020). While self-injury, with its enhanced visibility, touches many people's lives, the perceived meanings ascribed to this practice vary widely. Alongside mass media, interactive and visual-rich social media platforms have enabled instant sharing of user-generated self-injury content at an unprecedented speed and scale ( Seko, 2013 Seko and Lewis, 2016 Alderton, 2018). Studies have documented the growing number of self-injury portrayals across popular media including films ( Chouinard, 2009 Trewavas et al., 2010 Danylevich, 2016 Bareiss, 2017), TV shows ( Whitlock et al., 2009), young adult fiction ( Miskec and McGee, 2007) and comics ( Seko and Kikuchi, 2020). 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. ![]()
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