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(2015) Making sense of self-harm, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
I met Sally today outside a cafe in Brighton. It was a warm and sunny evening, lots of people sitting around chatting, making white noise, which drowned out individual voices and provided us with a bit of privacy. She was friendly and talkative, in her mid-20s, and smartly dressed in a dark trouser suit as she had just finished work for the day. We made our introductions, which were easy and relaxed, and I went inside to get us some coffee. We sat outside for the interview, which lasted about an hour. I didn’t have to do much prompting as she was happy to talk about her experiences I noticed Sally using an expressive gesture; a sort of open-handed parenthesis with her palms facing inward so as to indicate herself, or to enclose herself, and alternately bracketing her head and chest. She leaned into this gesture, looking down into it slightly so as to create a space just big enough for herself; physically indicating her personal space and the only thing that occupied it—her. This gesture dominated her body language throughout the interview and now I think about it it’s a gesture that has dominated the body language of everyone else that I’ve met and interviewed so far (early October, 2010).
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Full citation:
Steggals, P. (2015). The ontological axis, in Making sense of self-harm, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 85-121.
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