| This dissertation empirically examines photographs of Self-Injury (SI) uploaded onto the photo-sharing website, Flickr.com, questioning how Flickr images represent the act in relation to existing cultural assumptions of SI. Taking a departure from a pathologizing tendency among previous studies of SI on the Internet, I have approached this question from the perspective of media studies, exploring how Flickr's interface facilitates and aggregates underrepresented self-expression. The metaphor of skin is used to organize discussions around core components of the subject phenomenon: the corporeal skin of self-injurers, the aesthetic skin of photography, and the skin-interface of social media. This "three-layered skin" is seen to collaboratively produce visual representation of SI on Flickr, allowing participants to engage in a mode of performative self-expression and affective social interaction.;The findings reveal that photographic representations of self-injured bodies serve as a modality for a performative self-disclosure that facilitates affective social communication between photo-uploaders and viewers. As the location where SI as one's lived reality meets and collides with various sociocultural assumptions, Flickr photographs symbolize an inextricable relationship between dominant discourses, personal narratives and affective attachments between users and digital imagery. While dominant pathologizing discourses have a significant impact upon the uploaders' self-performance, the analysis illuminates that photographic mode of self-expression enables Flickrists to cultivate new multimodal vocabulary to describe their experience and devise innovative interpretation of the wounds inscribed onto their body. In particular, the aesthetic power of photography allows for interpreting the injured body as an authentic source of self-expression, which transforms painful experience into a powerful narrative of survival and resiliency.;In order to comprehend various channels of communication available on Flickr, this research deploys three lines of inquiry: combining network visualization method to illuminate semantic patterns of metadata, qualitative discourse analysis to explore social interaction among participants, and multimodal content analysis to examine content, component and context of photographic self-expressions. This three-fold mixed method aims to illuminate diverse modes of narrative strategies adopted by the content uploaders when shaping "the photographs of SI" and examines how they represent SI in alignment with, or in opposition to, dominant medical, cultural, and subcultural discourses. |
