Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal
Abstract
Skin picking, otherwise known as dermatillomania, is considered to be a medical disorder by the DSM-5. However, the embodied experiences of skin picking in myself and my mother do not align with the neat definitions offered by psychiatry. Through autoethnographic material and an ethnographic interview with my mother, I argue that skin picking is a bodily technique that is pathologized through stigma. In particular, I suggest that skin picking reveals the body as a polyvalent entity, in which the same features and practices take on different meanings in different bodies. This frames the discrepancies between mine, and my mother's, experiences. This ethnography seeks to disrupt the dichotomy between body and mind perpetuated in psychiatry and in medicine as a whole, and attempts to make sense of the embodied experience of mental illness. Further, it seeks to challenge concepts of health and illness as states of being which afflict the bounded individual: rather they are mediated through socialities and ideologies, of which the body is at the center.
Recommended Citation
Jacinto, Katrina (2023) "Skin Stories and Family Feelings: The Contradictions of Skin Picking in Mother and Daughter," Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal: 1 (1), 115-126. https://works.swarthmore.edu/crossings/vol1/iss1/9
Included in
Behavioral Medicine Commons, Disability Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Medicine and Health Commons, Psychiatric and Mental Health Commons, Psychiatry Commons, Psychiatry and Psychology Commons, Psychology Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons