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Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. The Tender Cut: Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011.
Patricia and Peter Adler may be the most visible contemporary scholars within the sociology of deviance, having published a number of high profile studies and reached thousands of students through their widely read Constructions of Deviance textbook (Adler and Adler, 2009). In their Acknowledgments for The Tender Cut they share that this is the most intense and intimate study they have done to date. They go on to note that a decade of work went into completing this project, and they warn that its subject matter is more heavy hearted when compared to the topics examined in their other works. These kinds of sentiments expressed by these particular authors invite high expectations and will no doubt enliven those who are familiar with the Adlers' previous work. Fortunately, and not unexpectedly, the Adlers deliver a masterful book worthy of the intrigue that emanates from the Acknowledgments section and the reviewer excerpts on the back cover.
Simply put, this book provides an in-depth look at self-injury and those who practice it, with self-injury defined as being "the deliberate, nonsuicidal destruction of one's own body tissue." The Adlers emphasis is on the use of self-injurious acts by individuals to cope with stress and trauma, and toward this end their analyses exclude self-injury performed in male bonding rituals and similar group contexts. Self-cutting is the most common type of self-injury examined. However, a number of other forms are also addressed including but not limited to burning oneself, breaking one's own teeth or bones, biting oneself, excessively picking at one's own skin or wounds, and pulling out one's own hair. All of these acts are similar in that they make the self-injury practitioners who employ them feel better than they did before carrying them out.
This project is akin to other studies by the Adlers in that it was born out of fortuitous circumstances. A student who self-injured began confiding in Peter Adler in 1 982, and a subsequent increase in these kinds of disclosures in the years that followed eventually provided the impetus for this book. The primary objective of this research was to give voice...