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Resistant Rituals: Self-Mutilation and the Female Adolescent Body in Fairy Tales and Young Adult Fiction

In spite of its history as an unintelligible activity in Western society, self-mutilation entered the discourse of childhood as a significant motif of feminine experience the moment children appropriated the fairy tale. Since then, it has functioned as a complex motif in literature, offering scholars an opportunity to identify the different ways troubling or disturbing subjects are treated based on the target audiences of texts. Taking "Cinderella" and "The Little Mermaid" as representative, this paper argues that self-mutilation functions as an act of self-mutilation functions as an act of self-sacrifice to romantic hetero-normative narratives. Meanwhile, cutting in the Canadian young adult novels As She Grows by Lesley Ann Cowan () and Cheryl Rainfield's Scars () is represented ambivalently, exposing both the potential for violence and for agency in self-mutilative acts. In their refusal of pathologization, representations of self-mutilation in YA fiction offer readers a ritualistic occasion for their own empathic resistance to the hegemonic incorporation of symbolic demands, encouraging the development of creative strategies for self-expression within dysfunctional societies.