JAWORSKI, K., The Gender of Suicide, Ashgate, 2014 PDF

The Gender of Suicide
This book is dedicated to three people without whom I could never have written this book:
My mother, Anna Jaworski, who taught me to question certainties and hunger for
knowledge and scholarship.
My love, Graham Billing, who is like a lighthouse whose beam of bright light I always see
while I am out there struggling at sea.
My true teacher, Vicki Crowley, who challenged me to think like a philosopher and always
exercised faith in my ideas and scholarly passion for understanding suicide.
Knowledge Production, Theory and Suicidology
Katrina Jaworski
University of South Australia
© Katrina Jaworski 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Katrina Jaworski has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Jaworski, Katrina.
The gender of suicide : knowledge production, theory and suicidology / by Katrina Jaworski.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4141-0 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4094-4142-7 (ebook) –
ISBN 978-1-4724-0314-8 (epub) 1. Suicide. 2. Suicide–Sociological aspects. I. Title.
HV6545.J39 2014
362.28–dc23
2013032316
ISBN 9781409441410 (hbk)

ISBN 9781409441427 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781472403148 (ebk-ePUB)
V
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgementsix
understanding Suicide through Gender: an introduction 1
1 The construction of Knowledge of Suicide and

Gender in Suicidology 15
2 Performative Knowledge: re-reading Gender in Suicide 35
3 durkheim’s Social recognition of Gender in Suicide 47
4 ‘fact-finding exercises’: The coroner, Suicide and Gender 63
5 ‘what it Means to See’: reading Gender in Medical

examinations of Suicide 79
6 The Visibility of difference: Gender and Suicide

in Psy-Knowledge 95
7 intriguing events, Spectacular deaths 113
what now? concluding remarks 153
Bibliography159
Index193
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Figures
5.1 and 5.2 wound caused by a discharge of a 12-bore shotgun.

A fine spray of powder marks surrounds the hole.
The mark of the undischarged barrel can be seen
in the second figure (arrowed). 84
5.3 and 5.4 Abrasion of the thumb due to recoil of the

trigger of a 12-bore gun used to kill himself. This
indicates the victim pulled the trigger. 85
5.5 Showing the noose which has dropped away from

the brown ligature mark. It is important not to
disturb the knot. 86
5.6 Blood removed from the right iliac vein with a

wide-bore pipette (1 – iliac vein; 2 – right
common iliac artery). 86
Acknowledgements
every book needs friends and colleagues, and this one has many. i am fortunate
to share organic intellectual kinship with rob cover, Ludek Broz, daniel
G. Scott and anna Szorenyi. Thinking in their company is both stimulating
and challenging and, above all, intellectually nourishing. My appreciation
also goes to Lia Bryant, Saige walton, abebe Zegeye, dino Murtic, Mandy
Stanley, Ben Sellar, chloe Patton, Phil Bagust, Susan Luckman, Jodie George,
cassandra Loeser, Brad west, Kit Macfarlane, nigel Starck and amrita Malhi
whose collegiality and friendship sustain my everyday academic life. i want to
acknowledge the many students i teach at the university of South australia.
They teach me about ideas as much as i teach them about how ideas ‘work’.
This book was born out of my doctoral dissertation for which i won the
ian davey research Thesis Prize for the most outstanding thesis in 2007 at the
university of South australia. i began writing the actual book manuscript in
2011 as a research fellow at the hawke research institute, university of South
australia. i am grateful for the writing retreat the institute organized to support
writing projects of early career researchers. i am also grateful to the School
of history and Politics at the university of adelaide where i am currently a
Visiting fellow. one important faculty member – chris Beasley – was in fact
the first very senior academic to tell a freshly minted PhD holder that she could
and should write a book. her practical and down-to-earth advice has stayed
with me ever since.
ironically (for some), three male professors mentor me: ian davey, Pal
ahluwalia and drew dawson. all three are very different from me (that’s
probably a good thing). all three know all too well that i take no prisoners
when it comes to arguing about feminist philosophies. i want to thank ian
for being there for me, unconditionally, from the moment we met. i want
to thank Pal for nourishing my love for all things theory and theorizing. Pal
understands intuitively who and what i am. his friendship is a philosophical
lesson in understanding what sensate recognition means. i want to thank drew
for giving me the room to understand the emotional fabric of my thinking and
writing – and why the ‘lightness of being’ is philosophically important to my
own writing and existence.
And finally, I want to thank Kate Leeson for her invaluable editorial
assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. alongside Kate, i want to
acknowledge the efforts of Simone Marangon and Vic Beasley. in fact, it was
Vic Beasley who, many years ago, recognized the birth of the writing voice that
appears in these pages.
x
Understanding Suicide through
Gender: An Introduction
In the Beginning
I might as well say it at the beginning. It is difficult for me to think and write
about suicide. Half of the time I wish I never did. Personal experiences with
suicide influence my writing. Here is one example.
It is roughly three o’clock in the morning. The world is asleep. Suddenly,

my bedroom door bursts open and the flick of the light switch shatters the
fragility of the night’s darkness. My mother is crying as she climbs into my bed.
Surprised and confused at first, I quickly register what is going on. There is a
sense of familiarity about my mother’s actions and the pain written across her
face. There is also the familiar sound of smashing plates and the too familiar
angry, drunken voice of my father, who suddenly appears in the doorway to
my bedroom screaming what is unspeakable yet clearly understood even by me
as a young child. He is drunk and enraged. His eyes are bloodshot and sweat
pours from his face down to his stained white singlet. My mother continues to
cry, hugging me as if I represent safety. With slurred speech, my father begins
to threaten but these threats are different this time. They are accompanied with
hand actions, representing the words being spoken. He wants to commit suicide.
As he speaks, his hands move across the throat in a slash-like manner. His veins
seem to appear just beneath the surface of his skin; they stand out against the
redness of his neck. He repeats his intentions, emphasized through bodily
movements, as he proceeds to the next room of the apartment.
This is a confronting memory to recount, tell and write. It conveys a disturbing

picture, filled with dread, fear, violence and intense distress. I bore witness to
something very traumatic as a young child. I came face to face with something
incredibly painful, complex and existentially profound that night – and as a
writer, I cannot separate myself from it.
in Saint Foucault, David Halperin reflects on a similar problem. He writes:
It’s always interesting to find oneself in a situation that one can’t write one’s
way out of. The impasse may be a clue to something real, an indication that one
has stumbled upon something of potentially wider significance than one’s own
limitations, onto some major organizing structure of social meaning or some

irreducible law of cultural discourse. In this case, what I had stumbled upon
turned out to be at least one basis for my identification with Foucault: namely,
the permanent crisis of authority faced by any intellectual in our society who is
also gay. (Halperin 1995: 10)
I invite my readers to consider that my writing is bound to suicide. This creates

tensions and difficulties. On the one hand, personal and painful experiences
inform my writing. On the other hand, I am continually confronted by the
highly objective, neutralized academic prose required in academic writing about
suicide. Where the former offers an opportunity to be open and honest, the
latter demands I remain distanced from personal associations with suicide.
Writing becomes a strange case of wanting to conceal yet transcend one’s
biography in a time when the confessional culture dominates.
There are advantages to my position. My difficulty with writing on suicide
provides an opportunity to question how we understand suicide, and how this
understanding is constructed in the way that it is. Whenever I hear someone
speak of suicide, I wonder why they think the way they do. I wonder whether
what researchers write about suicide differs from the interpretations of those
who experience it. I wonder what those who died would say if they knew how
their deaths were interpreted by the living. Would they approve? Or would they
be surprised, dismayed, or even outraged? These questions always remind me
of how important it is to handle suicide in respectful ways. Finding respectful
and incisive tools to explore how we understand suicide is an ever-present
challenge to which I hope to do justice here.
The Problem and the Argument
Suicide is a constant presence in contemporary western societies. It sits painfully

in our world. It is enumerated in death statistics, categorized by age, tabulated
by gender, concealed with hasty adaptations to religious ritual, quietly nested
against unspoken sexualities, or situated indeterminately in questions of race.
Suicide seems so familiar; yet it defies us. Its reach is catastrophic; its aftermath
tragic. Suicide comes to our notice in varied forms, each acting to reveal yet
also mask what we ‘know’ to be suicide: suicide as genuine attempt, suicide as
‘attention-seeking behaviour’, suicide publicly unspoken yet locally known. It
stems from private despair attached to celebrity deaths, or takes the form of
a political statement writ large through the spectre of ‘the suicide bomber’. It
appears, muted, in publicized accounts of Indigenous deaths. Like death, suicide
presents us with aspects of the unfathomable, but with something added: the
incongruity of a life that seeks its own end.
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Understanding Suicide through Gender: An Introduction
But there is a problem. Suicide is studied more than ever. We know why it
happens, what the signs are likely to be, and how we can respond so that we
can prevent it. Yet so little is written about how this knowledge is constructed
– how ideas, assumptions and practices of knowing determine what suicide
means. How we know what we know is either unnoticed or taken for granted,
treated as self-evident and in need of no explanation. But there is more. Gender
plays a central role not only in how knowledge of suicide is constructed but also
in how this knowledge is taken for granted. This is despite the fact that, as I will
show throughout this book, gender is central to understanding suicide. It plays
a covert, yet at the same time overt, role in understanding suicide. Nevertheless
many problematic assumptions about gender frame some experiences as
serious, valid and legitimate at the expense of others being less so.
I want to come back to my father for a moment. How do we understand
the meaning of his actions? Were they serious? Does his masculine body have
anything to do with how we interpret his intentions? What about the fact that
he was a man and not a woman? Does this matter? If I distil these questions
into broader ones, then they are as follows: Is suicide made intelligible through
gender? If so, how? How does the body come to matter in suicide? How does
gender figure in the production of knowledge of suicide? How does gender
affect the way we understand agency in suicide? What are the limits to what we
know of suicide? What do they offer, to whom, and to what ends?
With these questions in mind, The Gender of Suicide is a critical intervention
into suicide as an epistemological object and subject of study. It shows that it is
timely and critical that we, the living, review how society comes to know suicide.
We become so busy trying to pinpoint the confronting nature of suicide to the
point where we forget to question the role we play in this painful enterprise. This
is not about carrying personal epistemological wounds. This is about reviewing
how implicit meanings of gender sit uninterrogated in bodies and sites of
knowledge in charge of making sense of suicide. Drawing on theoretical tools
situated under the banners of post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism
and post-feminism, I contextualize and analyse how suicide is understood in
sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, to demonstrate
that gender is central to knowing suicide and, as such, there is nothing self-
evident about it. The central argument is that the gender of suicide is masculine
and masculinist. And as I will demonstrate, the character of the gender of
suicide is in fact performative.
Why is this important? Why should we care? We should care not only
because people either die or suffer as a result of suicide. We should care because
how we know what we know is at the heart of understanding suicide. Without
knowledge – without theoretical understandings – we would not know how to
act, to respond and prevent suicide. But there is more to this kind of knowledge.
As Judith Butler acknowledges, ‘something besides theory must take place, such
3
as interventions at social and political levels … which are not quite the same
as exercises of theory’ (2004a: 204). This could not be truer in the context of
suicide, where applied practice is central to preventing suicide. Yet as Butler
also reminds us, ‘in all of these practices, theory is presupposed’ (Butler 2004a:
205). If we do not know how ideas work, our efforts to understand and prevent
suicide will be undermined by the very assumptions operating in our efforts.
Knowing suicide is not just a matter of exposing what already exists, as if it
were self-evident, transparent and obvious. To borrow from Butler, knowledge
is ‘implicated in social processes, inscribed by cultural norms, and apprehended
in their social meanings’ (2004a: 20). Gender is part of the parcel through
which knowledge of suicide is produced. How gender ‘works’ is complicated.
It occurs in multiple, heterogeneous ways. Sometimes suicide seems gender-
neutral. Sometimes suicide is heavily imbued by gender. Sometimes gender
assumptions are visible and invisible. The masculine and masculinist side of
gender dominates. In so doing, it leads us to think that there is only a singular
or homogenous way of reading suicide.
In wanting to understand how knowledge of suicide is constructed through
gender, this book focuses on suicidology as a culturally and socially significant
knowledge base for understanding suicide. I have a love–hate relationship with
this knowledge base. It contributes so much to what we know of suicide. It has
done so much good towards suicide prevention. It has, I think, made suicide
intelligible in particular ways. Established in the United States in 1968 by Edwin
Shneidman, suicidology is a field committed to the study of suicide, aimed
at promoting greater public awareness and education to reduce death and
dying through suicide. Researchers and practitioners from various disciplinary
backgrounds generate its expertise. It produces different sites of ‘facts’ that
speak of, and for, those who are no longer alive, as well as those who continue
to live after suicide attempts. Yet as Brown (2001) explains, suicidology has
disciplined suicide to the point where certain ways of knowing are preferred
over others. Suicide becomes intelligible in particular ways – it is interpreted,
identified, recognized and verified as legitimate knowledge across various sites
of practising this knowledge. And this is where my love for suicidology weakens.
Key Themes and Issues
The fleshiness of the corporeal body plays a key role in the gender of suicide as
masculine and masculinist. The body is not a site for simply discovering signs,
marks and meanings concerning suicide. Suicide materializes, or takes shape,
through different bodily practices, each caught in the webs of power, exercised
in varying degrees in different sites of practice. These in turn are interlinked with
what is conceptualized as active and passive in suicide – binary differences that
4
frame our understandings of violence. I look at notions of agency, materialized

through notions of autonomy, mastery and instrumentality, and made visible
through actions considered violent.
The focus on the material body does not mean that suicide is individual
only. Individual actions are influenced by particular meanings and assumptions
and these also influence what is and is not said about suicide. As I will explain
in different chapters, material bodies – particularly those no longer displaying
vital signs – are spoken for, and can only ever be spoken for. Yet being spoken
for produces meanings for material bodies. As Davis points out, death is ‘an
interruption to the production of meaning; it curtails our dialogue with the
deceased as it removes their ability to speak to us’ (2004: 77). But as some
chapters also demonstrate, material bodies that continue to live past attempting
suicide are commonly framed as ‘failed’ and ‘unsuccessful’. They too are spoken
for, often in deterministic and agency-denying ways. Methods of suicide, such
as the use of firearms or poisons, frame the intelligibility of suicide, by which I
mean the discursive conditions which enable the gendering of suicide.
While the terms ‘gender’, ‘gendering’, ‘masculine’ and ‘masculinist’ are
continually elaborated in the book, I think it is useful at this point to foreshadow
their meaning. ‘Gender’ in suicide refers to one of the ways through which this
death is distinguished from others. While it plays a crucial role in interpreting
suicide, gender alone does not and cannot explain everything there is about
suicide. When it does explain suicide, gender refers to masculinities and
femininities and to their production and reproduction. In this sense, gender is a
discursive means through which corporeal bodies are falsely interpreted as only
naturally and neutrally ‘male’ and ‘female’ (Butler 1990, 1993a, 2004a). Gender
is made sense of in suicide through binary pairs: male–female and masculine–
feminine, but also completed–attempted and active–passive.
Where the concept of gender is used to signal what has come to be known,
‘gendering’ relates to how what is known becomes known in suicide. I want
to stress that gendering is not synonymous with gender. While one cannot
be thought of without the other, for heuristic purposes I want to distinguish
gendering as the process of invoking or hailing suicide. Gendering as
materialization is part of giving material form to suicide. I use gendering to
examine how assumptions about gender shape which experiences of suicide
do and do not count as legitimate and valid – intelligible – for the purpose
of maintaining others as abject. But there is something strange about all of
this. Dominant and universalized meanings and experiences of suicide need
the abject status of other meanings and experiences. The fleshiness of bodies
is crucial to this process, etched with meanings already interpreted as gendered
and still awaiting interpretation. In making the case for suicide as masculine and
masculinist, I show that sometimes gendering is concealed from view especially
in the interpretation of what is active and passive. By using gendering as an
5
analytical concept, my task is not about debating or determining the facticity,

or the material fact of suicide. Rather, I toil at working out what shapes the
interpretation of different suicidal outcomes. The implications this has for
calculating agency and intent are important since they do not operate in neutral
and self-evident ways.
Similarly to the difference between gender and gendering, what is ‘masculine’
does not stand for what is masculinist. What is masculine refers to normative
performances of male gender, marked by selective instrumentality, visible
forms of violence, aggressiveness and independence (Connell 2000, Petersen
1998). However, as both Judith Butler (1990, 2004a) and Judith Halberstam
(1998) insist, masculinity speaks to the male gender, but is not of it. Centred on
the Enlightenment postulation of the ‘Man of Reason’ in Western philosophy,
‘masculinist’ refers to an exclusively gendered subject ideal articulated as
male, rational, abstract, objective, neutral, white, heterosexual and universal,
transcending not only time but also nature, and the material body in particular
(Harding 1987, Hekman 1990, Lloyd 1984, Milligan 1992, Rooney 1991,
Ruddick 1987). These are the prime conditions under which a valid subjective
position is recognized. By arguing that suicide is masculine and masculinist, I
examine the effects of the masculinist subject ideal in the privileging of some
gendered truths over others.
Obviously, what counts as ‘truth’ in suicide is at the heart of this book. I
will come back to truth in a little while. For now I want to emphasize that it
is important to examine truth from multiple angles to see how it is contained
and normalized. This is because knowledge is often made possible through
a complex interrelation between powerful bodies of knowledge, such as law
and psychiatry, and ‘the institutional spaces in which they operate’ (Bunton and
Petersen 1997: 4). Although the argument of The Gender of Suicide does not show
precisely how each discursive site is interlinked with another, it still works towards
showing how institutionally significant bodies of knowledge such as sociology,
law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media illuminate the gendering
of suicide. For this reason, it is important to examine their specific discursive
mechanics, to understand how knowledge about suicide is constructed.
The key issue then is that suicide is not self-evident, neutral and free floating,
‘out there’ somewhere in society, to be caught by the nets of sites of practice
required to know about it and to respond. This demands us to consider the
manner through which we come to know suicide, and how this manner is shaped
by gender. My thinking is influenced by Foucault’s insistence that ‘It is therefore
not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how
one would repress the other … but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has
to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a
system’ (1997b: 52–3). Thus, my purpose is not only about working out how we
understand suicide, but also tracking how knowledge and understanding do not
6
work – how they fail in maintaining the very claims they seek to establish. This,
I think, is important to imagining possibilities for changing how we understand
the confronting nature of suicide.
Let me be clear about what I mean by change. I do not mean this book
to offer an alternative framework to replace older views with ones generated
here. While I do theorize the gender of suicide, I do not offer suggestions as
to how older views should change or how my theorization should be applied.
This, I believe, would require a different kind of work to what I offer here, with
different aims and tasks in mind. But I do envisage change at an epistemic level,
hypothesizing a stage where it will be possible to problematize the conceptual
parameters of suicide and create knowledge that is more gender-aware and
gender-compassionate. Once again I return to Foucault, and in particular a
passage of his that deeply moves and inspires me as an intellectual. He writes:
Never consent to be completely comfortable with your own certainties. Never

let them sleep, but never believe either that a new fact will be enough to reverse
them. Never imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms. Remember
that, in order to give them an indispensable mobility, one must see far, but
also close-up and right around oneself. One must clearly feel that everything
perceived is only evident when surrounded by a familiar and poorly known
horizon, that each certitude is only sure because of the support offered by
unexplored ground. The most fragile instant has roots. (Foucault 1997b: 144)
Foucault’s point shows just how crucial it is to work towards opening a

space in which it is possible to debate and contest gendered assumptions
about suicide. By contestation I do not mean we ought to get rid of gender
altogether. This is precisely what this book does not seek to achieve. Instead,
it seeks to generate space for further critique and a vision that recognizes the
impact of cultural assumptions on how we come to know suicide. It also seeks
to undermine a form of epistemic violence, by which I mean an interpretive
act that is itself deathlike, continually denying the autonomy and agency of
divergent voices and experiences that deserve to be heard and recognized in
our understandings of suicide.
My Hermeneutic Suitcase
As much as I love theory and anything theoretical (well almost), I always get
annoyed when authors do not reveal the very tools that enable their analyses.
I get annoyed even if I love the actual scholarly argument. After all, neither
thinking nor its labour happens by itself. I suppose it would be cumbersome
always to write about one’s tools. But it would be very helpful if authors did,
7
especially when their books become pedagogical sources for teaching others
how to think through ideas rather than about them. Following a Foucauldian
approach, I want to reveal the analytical tools in my hermeneutic suitcase so
that those who read my work can understand where I am coming from and
how I arrived at my conclusions. I do this because lack of attention to tools of
interpretation is at the heart of my quarrel with suicidology’s approach to suicide.
While suicidology explains its methods of research in concrete and factual ways,
it forgets that methods themselves might frame how we understand suicide.
My suitcase is framed by philosophies and theories loosely located under
the banner of the ‘posts’. Throughout the book, I mobilize valuable intellectual
resources offered by writers and scholars located in post-structuralism,
postmodernism, feminism, post-feminism and postcoloniality. There are of
course many crossovers among these. Each field is bound to its own history
of development. Without wanting to tame the ‘posts’, both post-structuralism
and postmodernism enable me to understand that human reality, including
suicide, is a product of complex and interrelated practices, bound to social,
cultural and historical contexts (Jameson 1991, 1998, Sarup 1993). What must
be questioned is how various social categories, discourses and institutions exist
in their contexts of production. This questioning enables us to see reality as real
precisely because it is interpreted through multiple and fragmented meanings
that do not always add up or make sense (Lovell 2000). Post-structuralism and
postmodernism are valuable because they help me to show how power is part
of key concepts and ideas of suicide.
Of equal importance are feminist and post-feminist philosophies. Both
have maintained an uneasy alliance with the ‘posts’, even though both have
sought to develop new ways of critiquing traditional philosophies (Fraser and
Nicholson 1990). Like post-structuralism and postmodernism, feminism has a
history of critiquing norms about gender and sexuality (Weedon 2000). Post-
structural and postmodern approaches in feminism deploy a critical lens to
examine the presumed stability of identity categories such as ‘woman’. And
then there is post-feminism, which, as I understand it, does not mean we
have moved beyond feminism. Instead, post-feminism is an intricate field that
deploys tools from psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, postmodernism and
postcolonialism to unpack constructs such as man–woman, male–female and
masculine–feminine because they elide complex workings of power, knowledge
and norms (Bell 1999; Brooks 1997). I find post-feminism valuable for it allows
me to see gender as one epistemological condition of understanding suicide,
and in so doing welcome race and sexuality as significant to working out the
gendering of suicide.
Whether I like it or not, I am an ‘organic intellectual’, a phrase that belongs
to Antonio Gramsci (1971) and Edward Said (1994). Borrowing from Gramsci
(1971), Said writes that this phrase describes someone who knows that being
8
an intellectual ‘involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability’

(1994: 13). This means that, as Said also explains, ‘there is always the personal
inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being
said or written’ (1994: 12). I, of course, have already made this patently clear
at the very beginning. I do not want to repeat what I have already said earlier
other than to add that the postcolonial stance of writers such as Said enable
me to argue that knowledge can never be universalized. If it is, this knowledge
is a symptom of Western epistemology’s insistence that it knows the other
and can speak of, and for, the other (Gandhi 1998, Loomba 1998, Said 2000).
Postcolonial feminist writers in particular have been especially dissatisfied with
the ways in which Third World women have been treated as passive objects of
knowledge rather than active participants who know what they want (Mohanty
1991, Spivak 1990).
How does postcolonialism fit in my hermeneutic suitcase? First, it reminds
me that my experiences with suicide do not give me the right to assume that
I understand everything there is about suicide. As Probyn argues, evoking
experience is confused with ‘an inherent “right” to speak’ (1993: 16). This is
because ‘what counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward;
it is always contested, always therefore political’ (Scott 1992: 37). What then are
my options? I can speak as long as I do not presume or demand that my way is
the way of understanding how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. I
can speak as long as – to borrow from what Spivak (1990: 62) said a long time
ago – I ‘develop a certain degree of rage’ against that which threatens to silence
me, so that I am reminded that I too do not stand outside workings of power.
As a researcher, this keeps me grounded.
Concepts such as discourse, knowledge, truth and power are the content of
my suitcase.1 For Foucault, discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the
objects of which they speak’ (1997a: 49). Language is crucial but, as Foucault
argues, what it does ‘is more than use … signs to designate things’ (1997a: 49).
In this sense, discourses are produced through an inseparable relation between
power and knowledge. The relationship is reciprocal. Power incites knowledge
and knowledge constantly induces power (Foucault 1980, 1991, 1997b). What
is important about Foucault’s view, as Grosz aptly describes, is that ‘knowledge
is an activity’. Through the agency of bodies, knowledge becomes ‘a practice
and not a contemplative reflection. It does things’ (1995: 37, original emphasis).
If knowledge is a practice, then power is a process rather than an outcome
only. It circulates in a net-like fashion akin to an electric grid. Its capacity to
1 I am not novel in my use of discourse, knowledge, truth and power to analyse

suicide. Ian Marsh’s (2010) book entitled Suicide: Foucault, History, Truth is an excellent
and more thorough example of how to use the concepts in a historically informed
manner.
9
incite is what makes it, and the knowledge it produces, acceptable. While it is
visible, it is often ‘exercised through its invisibility’ (Foucault 1991: 187). This
is because ‘individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application’
(Foucault 1980: 98). Thus, power is a mechanism, which becomes part of ‘a
grid of intelligibility of the social order’ (Foucault 1978: 93). I want to suggest
that this is precisely why it is important to question and challenge suicidology’s
gendering of suicide. What constitutes knowledge in suicidology is not a
matter of knowing something as if it were an obvious fact. Instead, as an
effect of power, knowledge becomes part of individual experiences, with some
experiences given greater validity and legitimacy than others.
What counts as ‘truth’ then is not a matter of what is intrinsically true and
false, real and unreal. Rather, as Foucault argues, truth is about ‘the links, what
are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and
elements of knowledge … such that a given element of knowledge takes on
the effects of power in a given system where it is allocated to a true, probable,
uncertain or false element’ (1997b: 50). What comes across as the truth shows
‘itself as a repetitive form’ (Foucault 1994: 110). We recognize something as
true because it is repeated often enough. This is bound to power, precisely
because through knowledge it too incites truth (Foucault 1980).
Foucault’s approach to truth is a valuable analytical tool for several reasons.
First, it allows me to consider suicidology as a discursive field that has formed
the rational grounds for understanding the intelligibility of suicide. Secondly,
Foucault’s stance allows me to view suicidology as a discursive field whose
rationality depends on practices of ‘truth’ through which knowledge about
suicide emerges. In this sense, suicidology does not exist in a vacuum or a
void, removed from the contexts and sites of practice to which it speaks. Nor
is suicide shaped by some pre-given criteria to which suicidology responds.
Rather, suicidology and suicide are dependent on one another, shaped by
truth-inducing processes that regulate what counts as valid and legitimate. The
production of truth in suicidology can be seen as an exercise of power that
encourages the growth of knowledge, and simultaneously produces deeply
problematic interpretations of gender that turn suicide into a masculinist and
masculine discourse.
Some Risky Business
As strange as it might first sound, what I offer here is ethical. In an essay

entitled ‘What is critique?’ Foucault says critique is ‘akin to virtue’ (1997b:
25). Namely, critique is ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the
critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the
limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going
10
beyond them’ (1997b: 132). In this way, critique is not a ‘fault-finding exercise’,
devoted to evaluating what is good or bad (Williams 1976: 76). Rather, critique
is always a ‘critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution’
(Butler 2004b: 304, original emphasis). Critique is a risky business because it
requires one to interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions. Critique is also
risky because the critic is likely to be criticized, particularly if other parties have
vested interests in what is criticized (Foucault 1997b, Butler 2004b). I expect
this to happen to me. However, it is not my ego that is at stake here but rather
the importance of showing how this ethos occurs in practice.
So what does this practice involve? Foucault says that a critic must do
two things: ‘bring out the conditions of acceptability of a system and follow
the breaking points which indicate its emergence’ (1997b: 54). To clarify, this
means the critic has to identify what conditions and claims make something
the way it is and what are the cracks and limits in those conditions and claims.
It is important for things not to work, to fail, because this failure offers the
possibilities for change I described earlier. In this sense, critique is not about
a search for origins even though a fair amount of detective work is involved
in trying to make sense of why something is interpreted. Instead, as Foucault
(1997b, 1984) states, critique is genealogical, methodologically deployed to analyse
the epistemological grounds upon which knowledge is produced.
And so The Gender of Suicide is an ethical project because I trace different
epistemological conditions, namely what knowledge is, to see how gender in
suicide is made sense of – intelligible – so that suicide is framed as masculine
and masculinist. I also track down the rifts and cracks to see what they can
offer towards questioning the security of particular gendered truths. I am not
critical for the sake of it. Rather, I want to show how knowledge of suicide is
discursive instead of neutral, self-evident and transparent. The discursivity of
suicide is worthy of attention because, I think, it will help us find better ways
of understanding suicide.
Scope and organization
Located in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, gender studies and

philosophy, The Gender of Suicide is an effort to read suicide across several key
expert bodies of knowledge. Whether I focus on sociology’s founding ‘father’,
Durkheim, coronial inquest findings, medical autopsy practices, depression
and suicide prevention, or newsprint media representation, I treat them all as
analytical ‘case studies’. While gender remains the focus throughout all of these
case studies, I examine race and sexuality towards the end to show how potent
the construction and production of knowledge in suicide really is.
11
If knowledge is constructed, and if construction as such is not neutral and

self-evident, then where can one begin understanding this, and the effects arising
from it? Specifically, what do we know about the effects of gender in suicide? In
Chapter 1 I begin the task of analysing the construction of knowledge of suicide
and gender by surveying suicidology. I focus on contemporary definitions of
suicide, and assess empirical understandings of suicide according to gender.
In so doing, I show that understandings of suicide are gendered not because
statistically more men than women suicide. Rather, it is the way in which suicide
is interpreted as neutral and self-evident. I scrutinize prevalent binaries such as
completed–attempted, male–female, masculine–feminine and active–passive. I
establish that gender cannot be viewed as a self-evident structural addition to
understanding suicide per se, but rather ought to be considered as an important
ingredient in interpreting suicide itself.
But how does construction of knowledge ‘work’? Surely we need to
understand how construction works before we understand its outcomes? What
tools can we use to understand construction, and what does their use tell us
about suicide? As a segue from Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I focus on the task of
re-reading suicide by drawing on selected elements of Judith Butler’s work on
performativity. The purpose of using Butler’s work is to recast methodologically
the way gender has been framed in suicide to show that understanding suicide
is dependent on more than suicide itself. The purpose is also to interrogate
analytically aspects of suicidology’s construction of suicide and gender to
contest and subvert them, and to offer tools for further analysis.
The sociological work of Emile Durkheim is the first analytical ‘case study’.
Well over a century after his contribution, Emile Durkheim continues to be
regarded as the founder of the scientific study of suicide. Regardless of the
focus or disciplinary backdrop, most studies of suicide begin with, or at the
very least acknowledge, Durkheim’s work. Chapter 3 follows this trend. I begin
by situating Durkheim’s work in its historical context, and closely examine the
construction of his theoretical concepts. I then interrogate how Durkheim
draws on gendered assumptions to construct suicide as an empirically based,
self-evident social phenomenon. In contrast to the view that Durkheim
ignores gender, I show that Durkheim’s theoretical framework is paradoxically
dependent on masculinist assumptions, based on his preconceived ideas about
society at large. Therefore Durkheim’s work on suicide can never be read
outside of gender. To do so is to miss an important point about the social
construction of suicide.
Much of what can be understood of suicide is dependent on particular areas of
expertise that verify suicide as a cause of death. The legal process of investigating
suicide is a crucial area of expertise, which is generally regarded as neutral and
transparent, divorced from social contexts at large. In Chapter 4 I analyse the
legal processes of investigating suicide to determine whether the outcome of
12
such processes can ever be regarded as entirely neutral. The analysis starts with
a brief examination of past representations of suicide in legal history to see the
extent to which they can be viewed as free of assumptions. The analysis then
shifts to interrogating some inquest findings with a focus on medico-legal and
psychiatric expert opinions, deployed by law to determine the cause of death.
Finally, I consider whether the ‘factual’ neutrality of language is entirely neutral.
It turns out that suicide in coronial forensics is simultaneously understood as
gender-neutral and gendered, via the mind–body dichotomy.
Drawing more attention to the physical body on which legal interpretations
depend, in Chapter 5 I focus on selected photographic autopsy images of
deceased bodies. The task here is especially difficult since it involves examining
what is deeply confronting, and should only come to the attention of very
few. Yet, as I demonstrate, it is important to consider the physical body since
what actually happens to the body holds the key to understanding suicide in
social terms. I consider what it means to see this body, before examining several
images portraying the medical examination of suicide. I then consider ideas
around lethality through the lens of the abject, to draw attention to the processes
inherent in interpreting suicidal intent. My purpose is not to sensationalize a
deeply sensitive issue in suicide. Rather, my purpose is to show that, via the
medical gaze, this body can never be read outside of gender, which is why
assumptions about gender can be made in the first place – especially those that
privilege male and masculine over female and feminine.
It becomes clear in the course of the book that differences in experiences
of suicide are important to constructing knowledge. It also becomes clear that
psychiatry and psychology contribute significantly to understanding suicide,
working in tandem with expert knowledges such as law and medicine. Unpacking
what difference means, in Chapter 6 I examine the prevalent assumption that
the mind is the sole basis for understanding suicide. I pay attention to the clinical
criteria for depression – the cornerstone of suicidology’s understanding of
suicide. I consider how the interpretation of the desire to die figures in suicide,
and critically evaluate elements of suicide prevention and the inroads made by
feminist critics of psy-knowledge. I establish that the gendered body cannot be
dismissed from what the state of mind conveys, or the different experiences of
suicide. In fact, the interpretation of difference, based on what is determined as
visibly different, is already gendered, where what is male, masculine and active
is often positioned against what is read as female, feminine and passive.
In Chapter 7 I focus on newsprint media as a cultural site of understanding
suicide. While this media is not an expert discourse per se, it nevertheless
contributes to constructing knowledge of suicide in very significant ways by
conveying to the public what experts think. The Australian press forms the
context of my analysis. I analyse four vignettes of suicide-related deaths: the
celebrity deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates; Palestinian female
13
suicide bombers; Indigenous suicides; and queer youth suicides. Unlike previous
chapters, this chapter shows that knowledge of suicide is constructed explicitly
as a universal masculine activity. Furthermore, I show that understanding gender
in suicide is not based on gender alone. Assumptions about race and sexuality
also influence gendered media representations of suicide.
In the End
My sincere desire is to show that suicide, as a form of death and dying, cannot
be understood outside of life and living. Our knowledge of suicide materializes
or is produced in relation to meanings of life, constructed by and for those who
are living. I do not think this is exactly straightforward. As Davis describes the
work of philosophers such as Levinas:
The dead may not speak in any literal sense, but they do signify, since the
survivor continues to be the uncomprehending addressee of signs which cannot
be attributed to any living subject … This is not exactly a dialogue; it does
however maintain the possibility of some kind of signifying relationship with
the dead, even if that relationship is understood as a breach within meaning
rather than the availability of determinate, conscious messages. (2004: 82)
If we think through the ideas offered above, suicide can be understood as

being caught within a life–death nexus – a nexus that is contextual, relational
and sometimes ambiguous. Death and life cannot be easily compartmentalized
and clinicized. One speaks to the other, each depending on the other for its
meaningfulness in complicated and confronting ways – ways that may not
always provide determinate ‘truths’ and answers. Insistence on only particular
truths may not only ignore the significance of the relationship between life
and death, but also exclude important gendered meanings that are crucial for
understanding how we come to know suicide.
14
Chapter 1
The Construction of Knowledge of
Suicide and Gender in Suicidology
Introduction
The central concern in this book is how knowledge about suicide is constructed
through gender. i want to situate this concern in this chapter by offering a
metaphor. imagine that what you, my reader, are about to read is like a chopping
board. To this chopping board, i bring different ingredients. But i have to sort
the ingredients so that i can use them properly in my cooking. This might come
across as a boring task. i would like to think otherwise. in the process of sorting
my ingredients, it is obvious that something is not right. it turns out they are
not of the best quality. i realize that something could have been done about
this much earlier but for now i will have to make do with what i have. i notice a
pattern in the ingredients’ quality and wonder what kinds of antecedents made
them as such.
The chopping board metaphor represents the approach i take to the task
of surveying the gender of suicide in suicidology. To say that suicidology – as
a socially and culturally significant pool of knowledge and expertise – pays no
attention to gender is a serious overstatement. interpretations of gender are
present and, when present, they are complicated, contradictory and uneven.
At times gender is insignificant to how we understand suicide. At other times,
it is abundant and apparent, suggesting that suicide, as a term, is not neutral.
Suicide is burdened by history and religion, and influenced by law, medicine, the
social sciences and cultural commonsense assumptions. Gender is present in
all of them. Yet despite this, there is no concise and well-developed theoretical
framework that interprets gender in suicide.
i am not content with working out the degree to which gender is recognized
and interpreted in suicidology. indeed, this would be boring. instead, i want
to make several claims that will be present throughout the book. even though
there is no coherent theory of gender in suicide, suicidology constructs suicide
as an empirically determined, male phenomenon. This is because, statistically,
more men than women kill themselves. what matters in this ‘fact of suicide’ is
that suicidology frames suicide as self-evident and neutral. numbers tell it like
it is. i disagree and argue that this framing privileges and sustains contradictory
‘truths’ about gender in suicide. on the one hand, suicide is understood as
something about masculinities and femininities – an understanding influenced by

the masculinist subject ideal in western culture. On the other hand, suicidology
invokes gender as a self-evident structural addition to understanding suicide per
se. The nature of this structural add-on is contradictory. What is male in suicide
is never about gender and what is female is always about gender. This ‘twin
gender movement’ of neutrality and repleteness is at the heart of making sense
of what it means to suicide.
I will begin by briefly discussing historical traces of suicide. The historians
of suicide will be unhappy with me for I will not follow a straightforward
trajectory. Yet any kind of theoretical work must, in some form, be informed by
history. And so I will turn to history because it offers curious traces of gender
in suicide that should not be forgotten or taken for granted in contemporary
perspectives on suicide. Following this, I will focus on contemporary definitions
of suicide and assess empirical understandings of suicide according to gender.
I will then focus on prevalent binaries such as completed–attempted, male–
female, masculine–feminine and active–passive. By focusing on these binaries,
I will pay attention to how the material, physical body is understood in relation
to two key things – intent and outcome – without which suicide would not
exist. I will finish this chapter by examining race and sexuality in the context
of Australian Indigenous suicide and queer youth suicide respectively. While
focusing on gender in suicide more broadly, my work is located in Australia
– a country in which suicide is a constant presence especially for those who
remain at the margins despite Australia aspiring to be an egalitarian society. By
examining race and sexuality, I do not think they stand for or represent gender.
But I do think that examining them will help us understand how intent and
outcome are interpreted through gender.
Traces of the Past
In his entry in the Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying, Brown notes that through
history ‘suicide has been an expedient outlet for intellectual debate, philosophy,
aesthetics and moral opinion’ (2001: 441). I want to dip into suicide’s history by
focusing on early sanctions against acts deemed as suicide because sanctions
of any kind aim at regulating whatever is taking place. Christianity is often
credited with playing an instrumental role in developing sanctions against
suicide, especially if we consider its impact on moral and legal understandings
(Cahn 1998). Yet as Fedden shows, sanctions against suicide go back to what
he terms ‘primitive taboo and fear of the ghost’ (1972: 38). Curiously, sanctions
against suicide focused on the body, which was considered to be unclean once
the cause of death was established. It was assumed that those who suicided
were wronged by someone in their communities, causing them to commit
16
The Construction of Knowledge of Suicide and Gender
impulsive violent acts resulting in death (Choron 1972, Marks 2003). While the
deceased was deemed responsible for the act, the cause itself did not always
belong to the individual alone. For this reason, the ghost of the deceased was
considered dangerous. Many taboos and rituals were developed to prevent
revenge from taking place.
Degrading the suicided body was the most common way of preventing the
ghost from haunting the living. In surveying pre-modern European practices of
corpse degradation, Marks paints the picture as follows:
Sometimes the remains of suicide committers were disbursed in order to make

it difficult for their ghosts to reconstitute themselves, thereby preventing them
from exacting vengeance on the community. Occasionally, suicide victims’
bodies would be removed from close proximity to the community to prevent
the ghosts from finding their way back to do harm. (2003: 310)
Over time, such responses developed into organized public rituals of punishing
suicide. These rituals included hanging the corpse by the feet, dragging it
through the streets, burning, quartering, burying at a crossroads, driving a stake
through the body or placing a stone over the face (Marks 2003, Murray 2000).
These were performed well into the late eighteenth century in England, France
and Germany (Murray 2000). With religion influencing the practice of law,
rituals of degrading the deceased body instituted suicide as a felony (Murray
2000, Schrage 2000, Summerson 2000, Williams 1966). Like murder, suicide
became an immoral and impulsive act (Choron 1963, Lieberman 2003, Marks
2003, Williams 1966). Nevertheless, rituals alone did not establish suicide as a
felony. For instance, in seventeenth-century England, following a very intense
period of people killing themselves, the term ‘suicide’ was reinvented based on
earlier Latin expressions ‘suicida’ and ‘suicidum’ to mean ‘a mode of killing rather
than a way of dying’ (Brown 2001: 438). Understanding suicide was centred
on the act and the individual as the origin of the intention to carry out the act.
Rituals of degradation punished the body not because it was already dead, but
because it represented the intention to destroy one’s own life – an excessive
and unacceptable flaunting of the individual spirit that had to be punished
(Lieberman 2003, Marsh 2010).
There are several points to make here. First, suicide became immoral and
eventually illegal, initially out of the fear of the ghost of the body. The ghost,
and later the agent of the act and the body, was gender-neutral and self-evident
– as were notions of danger, vengeance and violence. Secondly, suicide was
painted as an impulsive mistake made by the individual. Thirdly, the individual
was the author of the act of suicide because of the body and what that body
represented. It was almost as if the ghost/individual in its separation from the
body was replaced by the body. The body became a site of inscription, bearing
17
the mark of suicide. Yet the body also became a site of further inscriptions to
invoke the power of the living over the dead, and the dead over the living. In
this sense, the deceased body bore the mark of power. Its exercise did not stop
with death, because the living spoke of, and for, the dead through rituals. As
responses to suicide, such rituals offered interpretations of suicide.
As important as they were, practices of degrading and punishing the deceased
body were not the only sources of constructing knowledge about suicide. For
instance, in ancient Greek and Roman societies a suicide was unacceptable if
carried out by hanging, which was ‘viewed as a cowardly or effeminate death’,
or jumping, which ‘desecrated the body and was undignified’ (Brown 2001:
438). Yet when done by using a knife, suicide was seen as heroic, marked by
dignity and integrity (Brown 2001, Marks 2003, Lieberman 2001, 2003). Van
Hooff (1990) notes that men rather than women were likely to use knives and
daggers to kill themselves. Methods such as jumping and hanging were viewed
fit for women, slaves and members of lower social classes only (Marks 2003,
Holmes and Holmes 2005, Van Hooff 1990). At some level, gender and class
did matter in how suicide was interpreted. This was bound to the material body
through which suicide was interpreted as heroic or cowardly – more masculine
or more feminine.
Any discussion of the history of suicidology, no matter how brief, cannot
avoid the philosophical influence of Plato. Plato objected to suicide on the basis
that ‘human beings are the gods’ possessions and risk punishment for daring
to decide when to die’ (Lieberman 2001: 661). The mind–body dualism framed
Plato’s objection. In Plato’s view, with death the soul was released and became
immortal (Choron 1963, Lloyd 1984). To achieve immortality, one had to subject
oneself to discipline and purification of the body, which Plato saw as a prison
of the soul and mind (Cahn 1998, Marsh 2010). Suicide put the immortality of
the soul in grave danger because the person gave in to the appetites of the body.
Because of these appetites, suicide was not only immoral but also irrational.
Plato thought that the state should be responsible for punishing suicides by
burying the deceased in solitary and nameless places (Choron 1972). Plato
changed his mind a little later on by suggesting that suicide did not deserve
punishment if it was based on a rational motive (Novak 1975).
While Plato was not the only thinker in his time to consider suicide, he
was nonetheless influential. He not only influenced Aristotle’s views on suicide
but also the writings of Saint Augustine, who developed the official Christian
case against suicide (Cahn 1998, Lieberman 2003). Although early Christian
philosophers disagreed with Greek approaches, the basis for condemning
suicide was influenced by Plato’s body–soul dualism, the immortality of the
soul and the Hebraic belief in the sacredness of life (Cahn 1998, Marsh 2010).
Augustine formalized the stance against suicide when he argued that it ‘violated
the sixth commandment: Thou shall not murder’ (Lieberman 2003: 10). This
18
creative reinterpretation was in fact a social policy response driven by the ‘suicide
mania’ that took place during the fourth century because ironically the Christian
teaching of eternal life became a powerful incentive to die (Alvarez 1974, Cahn
1998, Lieberman 2003). Augustine proposed that condemnation of the act was
the responsibility of the church and state because ‘the suicide who takes his
own life has killed a man and is thus a murderer, for “he who kills himself still
kills nothing else than man”’ (City of God, Bk I, 16–27, cited in Cahn 1998: 24).
Giving in to the whims of the body instead of enduring adversity made suicide
the worst sin of all (Lieberman 2003). Suicide rendered reason incapable of
governing the intentions of both body and soul.
Where are the traces of gender in Plato’s and Augustine’s approaches to
suicide? In Plato’s thought, it is clear that the mind represents rationality and
that the body, ‘with its overtones of femaleness, is seen as something to be
transcended in the search for rational knowledge’ (Lloyd 1984: 5). Framed by
the master–slave metaphor of dominance, the rational soul is the bearer of
immortality and the sign of freedom as long as it is not jeopardized by the whims
of the body (Lloyd 1984). There is, however, an exception to the rule. Cahn
explains that Plato recognized suicide as rational if it is requested by the state (as
in the case of Socrates), or if it occurs as a result of unbearable circumstances,
including ‘sorrow, bad fortune, shame, or extreme poverty’ (1998: 15). Strangely,
none of these are trapped by the material femaleness of the body.
Augustine’s position reinforced similar conceptual traces about gender and
knowledge. Lloyd’s (1984) reading of Augustine shows that he made symbolic
comparisons between maleness and superiority and femaleness and inferiority,
making femininity at odds with rationality because of its link to the body instead
of the intellect. While suicide does not automatically become a feminine act,
giving in to the whims of the body points to gendered presuppositions. Suicide
represents a certain level of weak-mindedness: the maleness of the will giving
into the femaleness of the body.
Contemporary Conceptualizations of Suicide in Suicidology
Based on methods and mortality outcomes, suicide is defined today as an

explicitly individual choice and act (Holmes and Holmes 2005). Joan Huebl
succinctly defines suicide as ‘the act of taking one’s own life. Suicides are
voluntary, intended, and self-inflicted acts’ (2000: 1899). In this sense, the
deliberateness of the act suggests the individual is responsible for carrying
out the act purely as a result of their intention to carry out the act (O’Connor
and Sheehy 2000, Silverman 2006, Silverman, Berman, Sanddal, O’Carroll and
Joiner 2007a, 2007b). This is precisely what distinguishes suicide from other
forms of death and dying.
19
Explanations of what motivates someone to suicide frame it as truly

individual. For Edwin Shneidman, a widely recognized thanatologist and founder
of suicidology, profound isolation, caused by psychological pain, is the key to
understanding suicide as an individual act. According to Shneidman, suicide is a
drama that unfolds itself in the individual mind regardless of the multi-faceted
nature of suicide (1996: 5). The intention to suicide must always be understood
in the context of human emotions since suicidal people often desire to escape
the unbearable emotional anguish they experience (Shneidman 1996: 6–7). In
a different vein, for the sociologist Riaz Hassan (1995b: 1), suicide represents
‘deadly violence directed against the self ’, which is ‘a form of deviant behaviour’
embedded in wider social structures and functions. These include family life,
employment and experiences associated with migration and education. Hassan’s
approach, unlike that of Shneidman, leans towards understanding suicide from
a macro and collective perspective instead of the individual even though he
does not dispute the individuality of the act of suicide.
Before going any further, it is worth saying something about intent in suicide
because it is consistently identified as a key element of the suicide nomenclature
(Hansley et al. 2008: 576). But there are three problems. First, intent is
understood as self-evident. It is obvious to the point where there is no need to
name it (Kral 1998). Secondly, intent is equated with lethality: the more lethal
the act, the more intentioned the act – a point I return to later. Thirdly, intent
and motive are confused. Whereas motive means ‘the cause or reason that …
induces action’, intent refers to the ‘purpose of a person in using particular
means’ (Andriessen 2006: 535). As Hjelmeland and Knizek (1999) explain,
intent is what a person wants, and motive is the reason for what the person
wants. The act of suicide is expressed by intent, which means that intent rather
than motive explain the act. For, Hjelmeland and Knizek (1999) argue, intent
and motives are confused because there are two levels of explanation: a) the
phenomenological level from an individual perspective, to which intent belongs,
and b) the scientific/interpretive level from an observer perspective, to which
motive belongs. This confusion happens because suicide is interpreted mostly
from an observer’s perspective. No matter how diligent at being objective, no
observer perspective is ever free of values and assumptions.
Any discussion about the conceptualization of suicide cannot ignore the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – IV (American Psychiatric
Association 1994). The manual, however, does not define suicide in specific
terms. Instead, suicide is identified as the most serious symptom and consequence
of depression (American Psychiatric Association 1994). Yet suicide is also
identified on the basis of its instrumentalization: someone having recurring
suicidal thoughts, specific plans to suicide, access to a means of committing
suicide such as a firearm, rope, and prescribed or non-prescribed medication,
and establishing the time and place (American Psychiatric Association 1994:
20
322). It is clear that methods of suicide, in the context of depression, are

implicated in suicidology’s understanding of what suicide means.
Suicide methods are not the only key ingredient in defining suicide in
contemporary times. Suicide is almost always understood through a range
of instrumental actions or, in suicidology’s specific terms, self-destructive
behaviours. Canetto and Lester sum up the predominant nomenclature by
writing that ‘suicidologists typically call those suicidal actions in which the person
survives attempted suicides, and those in which the person dies, completed
suicides’ (1995c: 4). In this sense, it is clear that outcomes such as ‘attempted’
versus ‘completed’ are indicators of intent (Hjelmeland and Knizek 1999).
Established suicidologists such as Canetto and Lester (1995c), Canetto (1997b)
and Moscicki (1998) point out that most definitions of suicide are based on
mortality rates. Conclusions are then drawn about attempts, defined as female,
nonfatal ‘failures’, unlike the ‘success’ of male deaths (Canetto and Lester
1995c). The successful male deaths count as intended and serious suicides. And
in so doing, they become conceptually privileged – a norm directing how we
understand suicide. This norm influences anything that is different. So how
does this norm come to be? How is it materialized in the way knowledge of
suicide is constructed?
Framing Suicide as a Male Phenomenon
Much of what is said of gender in suicidology belongs to disciplines such as

psychiatry, psychology, sociology, social work as well as medicine. Gender,
however, has not been the sole factor in explaining suicide. Race, ethnicity,
class, age, sexuality, occupation, labour force participation and marital status
have also been taken into account to varying degrees (Cato and Canetto 2003b,
Hassan 1995b, Holmes and Holmes 2005, Humphrey and Palmer 1990–91,
Qin, Agebro, Westergard-Nielsen, Eriksson and Mortensen 2000, Stack 1996).
Nevertheless, the analysis of gender is one of the earlier areas of interest in
the study of suicide in medicine and psychiatry, influenced by the pioneering
sociological study of Emile Durkheim, which focused primarily on statistical
differences between male and female rates of suicide (Kushner 1985, 1993,
Motto and Bostrom 1997, Qin et al. 2000).
Although not free of methodological errors, statistical representations as
early as the eighteenth century portrayed male rates as significantly higher than
female deaths by suicide (Kushner 1985, 1993, 1995, Shneidman and Farberow
1965, Wilson 1981). More often than not, the generation of statistics focused
on mortality rates. Attempted suicide, largely identified as female, was entirely
eliminated from the generation of empirical facts (Kushner and Sterk 2005).
This led to two things. First, only specific sorts of empirical data determined the
21
interpretation of suicide – and these were based on the actions taken by men.
Secondly, without being excluded entirely from the picture, women remained
more or less invisible. The problem, however, was not only about who was part
of the picture. Instead, statistics, I think, presumed that what was male about
suicide was self-evident and neutral. Put simply, numbers told it like it was.
I want to debate the assumptions about statistics but, before I do, it is
important to acknowledge that empirical data, however generated, might have
been the best option for determining the rates of suicide. Hospitalization data
for attempts were rarely available (Kushner 1995, Kushner and Sterk 2005). Yet
as Kushner’s (1985, 1993, 1995, 2009) extensive historical research demonstrates,
the use of suicide statistics during the eighteenth century and beyond coincided
with something other than statistics.
Whether completed or attempted, women’s suicide was viewed as a sign
of a ‘fallen angel’: a religious perception grounded in gendered notions of
purity, virtue and submissiveness (Kushner 1985, 1995, Lewis and Shepeard
1992). For example Esquirol, a famous French psychiatrist, concluded that on
the basis of lower rates women were almost incapable of suicide as a result
of the ‘overexcitement of their sensibilities, their flights of imagination, their
exaggerated tenderness, their religious attachments’ (1838: 584–5, cited in
Kushner 1995: 13). Suicide was not something women could do because it was
seen as something only men were capable of doing. What is significant is the
explicit attention given to explaining why women could not suicide because
of their femininities. Men suicided simply because they could and regardless
of their masculinities.
In stark contrast to women’s overexcited sensibilities, male deaths were
associated with heroism, bravery and courage (Braswell and Kushner 2012,
Canetto 1992–93, Kushner 1985, 1995, Lewis and Shepeard 1992). As Canetto,
a longstanding critic of suicidology’s interpretation of gender, argues, men’s
suicides were historically conceptualized ‘as understandable responses to
powerful social or physical calamities’ (1994: 518). For Kushner, this shows
that assumptions about gender ‘predated the collection of official statistics
which “found” sex differences in suicide mortality’ (Kushner 1995: 13, original
emphasis). Statistics merely qualified gendered presuppositions already in
existence, enabling them to be part of the interpretation of suicide per se. This
was the case with Durkheim (1951) who used statistics to theorize suicide as a
sociological fact. As a fact, suicide was a male phenomenon because men and
not women were truly social.
At this juncture I want to make two points about the early story about the
gender of suicide. First, the interpretation of suicide as a male phenomenon
was not necessarily a neutral and self-evident exercise. Secondly, at least in
some instances, male deaths were associated with the culture of manhood and
masculinity. This association furthered the view that suicide was something men
22
could do – without having to explain why this was the case. The link between male
deaths and masculinities was not eagerly acknowledged, as it was with female
attempts and femininity. Where gender was very relevant to the interpretation
of female attempts, it was irrelevant in the interpretation of male deaths. Or,
perhaps it was an unspoken epistemological condition in understanding suicide.
No one needed to name it directly because it was obvious. And so my questions
are simply this: Why is this the case? What frames the interpretations themselves?
Although I am yet to establish this fully, my suggestion is that masculinist ways
of knowing dictated the contradictory interpretation of suicide as neutral and
gendered. By attributing gender to women only, gender is a structural addition
to understanding suicide as a male phenomenon, making the interpretation of
suicide a contradictory state of affairs.
Differences between men’s and women’s suicidal outcomes continue to exist.
Statistical data in recent decades confirm that more women than men attempt
suicide, whereas more men than women complete suicide (Bourque, Kraus and
Cosand 1983, Fincham, Langer, Scourfield and Shiner 2011, Fernquist 1999,
Hassan 1995b, Leenaars 1988, Lester 1996, McIntosh and Jewell 1986, Qin
et al. 2000, Skegg 1998, Steenkamp and Harrison 2000). As the latest report
produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004: 3) shows, male rates of
suicide were approximately four times higher than the female rates between
1993 and 2003. Once again men are viewed as completers and women as attempters
(Canetto 1992–93, 1995a, Canetto and Lester 1998, Neuringer and Lettieri
1982, Wilson 1981). Based on outcome, determined by mortality rates, suicide
is male and masculine (Canetto 1995a, Dahlen and Canetto 2002, Garrison
and McAndrew 2007, Linehan 1973, Range and Leach 1998, Rutz and Rihmer
2007). To kill oneself is not only a male phenomenon but also a ‘masculine
type of behavior’ (Dublin 1963: 23). For Street and Kromrey ‘being male is
… clearly related to completed suicides’ (1995: 42). This is in stark contrast to
what is said of women. Attempts or nonfatal acts are largely viewed as female
and, as Range and Leach critically assess, a ‘feminine phenomenon’ (1998: 25).
Surviving suicide, as Cleary (2005, 2012), Canetto (1992–93, 1995a) and White
and Stillion (1988) conclude, is viewed as ‘unmasculine’: a sign of a ‘failed’ act
and of ‘failed’ masculinity.
Suicide methods are especially imbued with meanings of gender. McIntosh
and Santos note: ‘Traditionally, suicide methods have differed greatly between
the sexes with males most often employing firearms but rarely using solid or
liquid forms of poisons, while females were using solid or liquid poisons most
frequently and firearms much less often’ (1982: 221). McIntosh and Santos’s
early 80s view has purchase since other researchers specify firearms are not only
more readily available and familiar, but also a culturally acceptable method of
suicide for men (Adamek and Kaplan 1996, Andriolo 1998, Canetto and Lester
1995b, Callahan and Davis 2012, Cantor and Lewin 1990, Langhinrichsen-
23
Rohling, Friend and Powell 2009, Martin and Goldney 1997, Snowdon and
Harris 1992). The same is recognized in women’s suicides, as drug overdoses
are seen as a female method of suicide (Brockington 2001). Thus, ‘females use
different (and less lethal) methods for suicide than males; men choose active
methods (e.g., shooting, hanging), whereas women choose passive methods
(e.g., drugs)’ (Leenaars 1988: 18). This binary difference between what is male
and active, and female and passive translates completed suicides as masculine
and attempted suicide as feminine (Callahan and Davis 2012, Canetto 1992–93,
Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998, Galligan et al. 2010). This is despite the fact that
some women choose hanging, and others do not survive drug overdoses.
Canetto (1997b) argues that suicide attempts in particular are often interpreted
as feminine rites of passage, or as cries for help, that do not signal a serious
intention to die. As psychologists Neuringer and Lettieri point out, suicide
attempts, which the authors refer to as ‘gestures’, are expected from women
because of their ‘dramatic and “hysterical”’ natures (1982: 17). Overdoses imply
feminine dependence, ambivalence, weakness, failure, foolishness, impulsivity,
helplessness and manipulation (Brockington 2001, Canetto 1991, Cato and
Canetto 2003a, 2003b, Clinard and Meier 1992, Dahlen and Canetto 2002, Lewis,
Atkinson and Shovlin 1993–94). In this way, women’s struggles with suicide are
translated into pathological, attention-seeking exercises, desiring rescue instead
of death (Canetto 1991, Canetto and Feldman 1993, Peck 1985–86, Stephens
1987). ‘Their survival’, writes Canetto, ‘is coded as a failure’ (1997a: 140).
In contrast, male methods of suicide are viewed as masculine, aggressive,
violent and serious, with limited chance of survival. Male suicides represent
strength, instrumentality, independence and decisiveness (Andriolo 1998,
Canetto 1992–93, 1995a, Denning, Conwell, King and Cox 2000, Lester 1993,
Lewis et al. 1993–94, O’Conner and Sheehy 1997, Russell and Judd 1999, Stillion,
White, Edwards and McDowell 1989, White and Stillion 1988). They embody
‘action-oriented, instrumental behavior directed towards reaching goals’ (Lewis
and Shepeard 1992: 189).
Lethality plays a crucial role in the interpretation of suicide methods. Kral
notes that
The term ‘lethality’ in the suicide literature has usually been taken to mean the
likelihood that the method used would cause death in a particular individual. The
term has been used rather loosely in the literature to mean a specific method, a
set of behaviours, or a description of a person. (1998: 223)
Even though lethality is likely to be viewed in a wider social and cultural context,
in medical studies it is considered entirely neutral. Lethality relates to different
physical levels of injury inflicted on the biological body through wounds on
the neck, arms, wrists and abdomen. For Rosen and Heard (1995), and Swahn
24
and Potter (2001), the potential to seriously disfigure and/or threaten life is
of utmost importance in determining levels of injury. For Peterson, Peterson,
O’Shanick and Swann (1985), gunshot wounds are the most serious and lethal
signs of suicide. The location of wounds on the body is crucial: the more
dangerous the wound is, the more likely it will be interpreted as lethal. In both
studies, however, lethality and the body are viewed in highly neutral terms. This
is despite the fact that methods themselves are interpreted through cultural
meanings of gender. On the one hand, lethality is part of the gender of suicide.
On the other hand, it is detached from gendered explanations to be a neutral,
self-evident and transparent measure of suicide.
Not surprisingly, the issue of bodily disfigurement features strongly in
cultural interpretations of gender. A number of researchers including Clarke
and Lester (1989), Rich, Kirkpatrick-Smith, Bonner and Jans (1992), Stack and
Wasserman (2009), and Callahan and Davis (2011) contend that, even though
most individuals fear physical pain, women fear it more because they are
concerned about the damage to visible parts of their bodies, like the face. The
process of social learning plays a part in this fear as traditionally women more
than men are taught to be aware of their bodies (Denning et al. 2000). Because
of this, women are said to be less likely to choose violent means of suicide. Social
norms about gender are therefore not only part of cultural acceptability and
familiarity, but also part of particular concerns about direct impacts on bodies
(Boor 1981, Callahan and Davis 2011, Canetto 1992–93, 1994, Heshusius 1980,
Lewis et al. 1993–94, Stephens 1995, White and Stillion 1988). In saying this, my
point is quite simple. What initially comes across as neutral – namely, lethality
and disfigurement – is dependent on gendered assumptions about the body.
Motives or reasons are especially important in the interpretation of gender
in suicide. One of the most enduring myths in Western culture is that women
(assumed as heterosexual) die for love, whereas men die for glory (Canetto
1992–93). Emotional weakness and internal turmoil are seen as significant in
interpreting women’s suicides as a result of relationship breakdowns. In contrast,
men’s suicides are signs of courage, pride and resistance against external
circumstances such as loss of employment or severe physical illness (Canetto
1992–93, 1997a, Platt and Robinson 1991, Range and Leach 1998). ‘Men will
make a list of things they can do to sort out their crisis and tick these off as
they go’, outlines Krieg, a suicide prevention officer. ‘At the end of this list
may be suicide. And this is something a man knows he can succeed at’ (cited in
Davies and Waldon 2003: 12). Researchers assume that in crisis men assert their
independence and physical prowess, but women internalize crisis by becoming
depressed, dependent and passive (Coleman, Kaplan and Casey 2011, Galligan
et al. 2010, Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Friend and Powell 2009, Langhinrichsen-
Rohling et al. 1998). This is because, as Sanborn suggests, ‘since masculinity
is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment,
25
male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is

threatened by separation’ (1990: 153).
Although I deal with his work later on, at this point it would be unreasonable
of me to ignore the impact of Sigmund Freud’s work on the interpretation of
women’s suicides. For Freud, suicide results from excessive identification with,
and dependence on, the love object. Since relationships are assumed to be more
important for women than men, women are at much greater risk of suicide.
Women’s desire to suicide is predominantly interpreted through individual
loss, pathological dependence, impulsivity, maladjustment and manipulation,
as well as personality disorders, hysteria, neurosis and depression (Bradvik
2007, Canetto 1994, Canetto and Lester 1995a, Edwards and Holden 2001,
Grumet 1988, Kushner 1985, 1995, Stephens 1987, 1995). Stating it as if it were
a matter of fact, Neuringer says that ‘women have had social sanction to be
passive, “inept” and to declare and display their emotional perturbations’. Such
‘perturbations’ include ‘crying, fainting, illogical thinking, physical weakness,
tantrums, etc’ (Neuringer 1983: 45–6).
In a nutshell, suicidology’s most prevalent validation of gender in relation to
motives presupposes that men and women are inherently different. As such, their
intentions to suicide will also be different. Male suicide is continually situated
as publicly resisting loss, and female suicide as privately reacting to it. The former is
a symptom of public social upheavals and the latter a symptom of individual
pathology. Because of these differences, women’s motives are not taken seriously
enough, and more often than not are seen as irrational, ambivalent and as ploys
for attention; ploys that are thus about something else other than suicide. Men’s
motives are invariably read as attempts to restore ‘their lost power and dignity’
(Canetto and Lester 1998: 178). Their intentions are more rational, lacking the
sort of ambivalence, ambiguity and scepticism attributed to women’s suicidal
intentions. The problem with these gendered differences is not difference per
se. Rather, the problem is that gender differences ‘become so entrenched as to
be taken for universal truths’ (Canetto and Lester 1998: 163). Things must be the
way they are because that is what they are. My problem so far is quite simple:
suicidology pays almost no attention to the interpretive processes that enable
the interpretation and thereby understanding of suicide as a male phenomenon.
So what do the ingredients on my chopping board say about gender in
suicide? On the one hand, interpretations of suicide methods and motives are
gendered. On the other hand, crucial aspects of suicide methods – the body,
lethality and violence – are mostly devoid of gender. This is contradictory even
though the active–passive binary distinction is successfully maintained. The
gender of suicide is intelligible as a male phenomenon on the basis of what is
attempted/passive and completed/active. What is important about this framing
of suicide is that we cannot know ‘male’ without its opposite, ‘female’. We
recognize male suicide as male and as masculine because it is not female and
26
feminine. We recognize male suicide because it is active and not passive. What is
male and masculine is not immediately attributed to gender, yet what is female
and feminine is all about gender.
It is tempting to infer that gender in suicide is a problem for women only.
This is particularly the case since qualities associated with femininity and female
bodies render women incapable of suicide, whereas the opposite becomes
true for men. I think the problem is more substantial. By saying this, I am not
implying that gender is less important in the interpretation of male deaths.
Rather, I am saying there is a pattern in how gender is interpreted in male and
female suicides. In so doing, I am also arguing that how knowledge about suicide
is constructed is overshadowed by a masculinist subject ideal, constructed as
male, neutral, objective, rational, white, heterosexual, transcending time and
the materiality of the body. This ideal is part of making sense of intent and
outcome in men’s or women’s suicides and might explain why contradictory
interpretive differences exist.
Let me focus on the interpretation of the body to make the above claim
clear. Whether through methods or motives, the conceptual framing of female
suicide is bound to women’s bodies because of cultural assumptions about the
female body and femininity. Even though methods such as firearms wound the
body violently, male suicide seems to transcend the materiality of male bodies. It
is as if the male body and masculinity frees suiciding men from their bodies. The
deadly fate of women belongs to the body, and that of men to the mind. What
is troubling about this perspective is that women appear to lack agency, and men
do not. To borrow from Higonnet, ‘women’s very autonomy is in question and
their intentions are therefore opaque’ (1986: 68). This, I argue, is enabled through
masculinist conditions of knowing. By this I mean there are certain conditions
of knowledge through which men are interpreted as possessing serious suicidal
intent and agency. This, I also argue, is further conditioned by understanding
bodies as only autonomous, neutral and natural. Lethality as a measure of intent
plays a significant part in sustaining assumptions about the body, occluding the
possibility that what is neutral might already be coded by gender.
Of course the interpretation of gender in suicide has been critiqued
heavily within suicidology since the early 90s. Some researchers have argued
extensively that women use less violent methods because they are socialized
to be less violent. Likewise, if men are more violent in their methods, it is
because masculinity is continually articulated as more violent and aggressive
(Canetto 1991, 1992–93, Canetto and Lester 1995b, 1998, Denning et al. 2000,
Kushner 1995). Determining intent on the basis of outcome is not always
straightforward. Echoing concerns I discussed earlier about intent and motives,
Canetto and Sakinofsky write:
27
Intention does not necessarily lead to the desired outcome. Some individuals
survive what they may have thought as a lethal suicidal act, such as a car crash.
Others will die of an action they did not think would be life-ending, like an
overdose of Tylenol … The majority of nonfatal and fatal acts are to some
degree ambivalent with regard to death intent or rescue. (1998: 9)
A number of studies have shown that male and female suicides are motivated
by reasons outside traditional explanations. Women suicide because of sexual
and emotional abuse, neglect and socioeconomic hardships (Canetto 1992–
93, 1994, Canetto and Lester 1995c, Sanadjian 2008). Financial hardship
may be the result of a loss of a relationship, but this loss is not emotional
alone. Furthermore, men suicide as a result of relationship breakdown, social
isolation and depression (Fincham et al. 2011, Mac an Ghaill and Haywood
2012, Oliffe et al. 2012, Payne, Swami and Stanistreet 2008, Shiner et al. 2009,
Swami, Stanistreet and Payne 2008, Witte et al. 2012). This is especially the case
for older men (Canetto 1992, Canetto and Stice 2008, Fung and Chan 2011,
Holmes and Holmes 2005). As Douglas (1967) argues in his famous critique of
Durkheim’s (1951) sociological work, men and women may be equally affected
by relationship breakdowns (e.g. divorce) even though they may react to them
differently because it means different things to them.
Not everything suicidology says about the gender of suicide is only about
gender. I now want to turn to race and sexuality to see how each figures in
suicidology’s construction of knowledge about suicide. I focus on Australian
Indigenous suicide and queer youth suicide. This focus is important because
the rates of suicide for Australian Indigenous people and queer young people
are extremely high in comparison to other population groups. Taking Australian
Indigenous and queer youth suicides into consideration is a politically sensitive
and highly charged manoeuvre. Nevertheless, as I want to show in the remainder
of this chapter, the analysis of gender in suicide cannot be without it.
Readings of Race and Sexuality in Suicide
In Australia, the use of the terms ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Indigenous’ and ‘suicide’ is

fraught with tensions. Terms such as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ are at the
heart of debates connected with the effects of colonization (Hollinsworth
1992, Lattas 1992, 1993, Muecke 1992, Tatz 2001).1 ‘Suicide’, as a word, is
riddled with worries about what it means to name something and what effects
1 I use ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ interchangeably. In so doing, I do not presume

the stability or political neutrality of such terms. Where possible, I draw on specific
references to nation and/or language groups.
28
this naming has. Colin Tatz notes that ‘no Aboriginal language or dialect has
a noun corresponding to suicide, although … the grammars may well have a
reflexive concept that accords or corresponds with killing oneself ’ (2001: 25).
Hence there is a cultural schism in how knowledge of Indigenous suicide is
produced (Eastwell 1982, Reser 1989). While Aboriginal dialects in Arnhem
Land and Central Desert have no word for suicide (as one instance), the rate
of suicide is incredibly high. For some writers, this is linked to the effects of
colonization (Hunter 1991a, 1991b, 1993, Tatz 2001). Similar effects can be seen
in countries such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the Pacific
Islands (Tatz 2001). Elliot-Farrelly (2004) notes that in the 1970s Indigenous
suicidal behaviour in Australia was on a rise, reaching alarmingly high rates in
the 1980s. It is safe to say that suicide has been a major cause of premature
death in Aboriginal communities over the last 30 years.
The current rate of Aboriginal suicide is around 40–45 per cent higher
than the national average (Elliot-Farrelly 2004, Tatz 2001). Various researchers
acknowledge this statistic. Hunter, Reser, Baird and Reser (2001) indicate that,
while the overall rate is very high, its distribution is uneven, occurring in clusters
particularly in regional areas. Male rates are much higher than female deaths,
which are reported as being extremely low (Elliot-Farrelly 2004). Hanging is
popular among young Aboriginal men (Elliot-Farrelly 2004, Hunter 1993, Tatz
2001). This is a matter of availability because, as Hunter et al. (2001) point out,
ropes and cords are readily accessible in north Queensland rural communities.
Accessibility, however, is not the only issue. Hunter et al. (2001) argue that
hanging is a cultural statement of intent. It is public and dramatic, symbolizing
resistance, defiance, individual control and blame. Yet given the number of
Indigenous men dying, little is said about gender. It is as if hanging is about
race but not gender. Furthermore, hanging and cutting are significant as both
involve the body as actor and as object, both of which are considered important
to Indigenous people’s heightened sense of bodily awareness (Hunter et al.
2001). For Hunter et al. (2001), the assumptions about the body further the
view of hanging as a politically defiant active statement.
In a book-length study entitled Aboriginal Suicide is Different, Colin Tatz
(2001) reveals another way of reading suicide methods. He describes a situation
as follows:
I visited the Mildura Aboriginal legal aid office … and asked if suicide was
occurring in the town. ‘No, absolutely not’, replied the male administrator,
whereupon a female staff member called out, ‘What about my two daughters?’
The girls have swallowed liquid paper and thumbtacks. The administrator
explained that this was merely ‘playing silly buggers’, ‘girls looking for attention’.
Stories of this kind emerged in subsequent communities I visited and in several
29
I revisited: generally, a concern by women about younger girls, and dismissal,

deflection or denial by older men. (Tatz 2001: 27–8)
Here gender plays a significant part in the context of race. Some methods are
counted as ‘playing silly buggers’ and so are less intentional and not a legitimate
source of concern. If the racialized bodies did not belong to girls, would it mean
something else? Is it just a matter of method, or is it a matter of interpreting
method because of the female body? I want to suggest that the interpretation of
young female bodies is part of seeing some methods as attention seeking. ‘Girls
looking for attention’ are nowhere near as active as the defiance and wilfulness
attributed to hanging. Keeping in mind that perhaps the male administrator did
not want to tell a researcher what was going on in the first place, it is safe to
assume that understanding particular methods as less intentional and thereby
harmful makes the degree to which young women struggle in Indigenous
communities invisible. Lack of attention to serious questions about gender is
not a matter of missing the mark, but missing the topic altogether.
In a nutshell, Indigenous suicide is saturated by culture, and race in
particular. Unlike gender, race is not considered to reside outside Indigenous
suicide. It is not a side issue. Race is the issue. Hanging is viewed as a self-evident
expression of race yet not gender, even though masculinity might be significant
to why so many young men die. Unlike the lack of attention to the male body
in suicidology more broadly, here the raced male body is present. Of course this
is not surprising given the cruelty of colonialism in Australia’s history, in which
hanging of Indigenous men was a common practice. Without undermining the
cruelty of this history, my argument is that gender counts as much as race not
only because it is an issue for young women, but also because the male body is
discursively visible. By this, I do not mean that gender is more important than
race. This is not a debate about the order of things. Rather, the debate is of
an epistemological nature, where we have to acknowledge that gender silently
shapes the interpretation of intent and outcome in Aboriginal suicide. This
does not mean we have to ignore the performance of male gender in suicide.
Rather it means working out why gender is so detached from the debate. It
also means working out why hanging is the only way of reading the tragic-
heroic politics of resistance – resistance that is read as masculine, active and
intentional without overt naming.
Strangely, a somewhat similar pattern about gender occurs in research on
gay and lesbian youth suicide. Empirical studies dominate research in this area
(Brown 2002, Dyson et al. 2003, Emslie 1996, Macdonald and Cooper 1998).
Rates of gay and lesbian youth suicide are 30 per cent higher than overall youth
rates (Suicide Prevention Australia 2009). Young gay men are three to four
times more likely to attempt suicide; young lesbians are two to three times more
likely to attempt suicide (Brown 2002, Dorais 2004, Dyson et al. 2003, Hillier
30
et al. 1998, Hillier, Turner and Mitchell 2005, Howard, Nicholas, Brown and
Karacanta 2002, Leach 2006, McDaniel, Purcell and D’Augelli 2001, Mustanski,
Garofalo and Emerson 2010, Russell and Toomey 2012).
Methods of suicide among queer youth have not gone unnoticed. Earlier
Australian studies note that methods such as drug overdoses and cutting are less
lethal and thereby less likely to be recognized as part of the bigger picture of
queer youth suicide (Hillier et al. 2005, Macdonald and Cooper 1998, Nicholas
and Howard 1998). Specifically, drug overdoses and cutting are seen as self-harm
rather than suicide attempts (Hillier et al. 2005). Interestingly, Macdonald and
Cooper (1998: 26) insist that suicide attempts are cries for help, but not attention-
seeking exercises. For these authors, attempts are indicators that something
serious is going on. This is in relation to young gay men, who are reported to
attempt suicide more often than young lesbian women. Unfortunately, there
is a problem saying anything of significance about young lesbian women’s
experiences of suicide other than noting the statistics. Their participant figures
in research are low (Hershberger and D’Augelli 1995). So while research does
not focus on young gay men exclusively, at least on a statistical basis, queer
youth suicide materializes as a male experience.
Sexuality and homosexuality are at the centre of explaining why so many
queer young people turn to suicide (D’Augelli, Hershberger and Pilkington
2001). Becoming aware of one’s sexual orientation and disclosing it to others,
or coming out, plays a crucial role especially for young gay men (Gibson 1994,
Hillier et al. 1998, 2005, 2010). Some researchers suggest that a significant
number of suicide attempts take place prior to coming out (D’Augelli et al. 2001,
Gibson 1994). Others argue that risk increases following disclosure (Brown
2002, Fullagar 2003, Howard et al. 2002, Rotheram-Borus and Fernandez
1995). Coming out increases the likelihood of rejection, homophobic violence
and victimization from family and peers (Brown 2002, Cato and Canetto 2003a,
Dorais 2004, Gilchrist, Howarth and Sullivan 2002, Hershberger and D’Augelli
1995, McAndrew and Warne 2010, Penley 1994, Proctor and Groze 1994,
Zhao et al. 2010). It also increases the likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse,
low self-esteem, depression, school failure and identity issues (Emslie 1996,
Fullagar 2001, Gibson 1994, Hatzenbuehler 2011, Proctor and Groze 1994).
While similar problems affect heterosexual youth, these tend to have a greater
effect on queer youth (Kourany 1994, Lebson 2002, Rutter and Soucar 2002).
For some queer youth, suicide becomes ‘an unavoidable rite of passage’ (Cato
and Canetto 2003a: 497).
In trying to raise greater public awareness and concern, many researchers
have been critical of the assumptions behind suicide prevention initiatives.
Brown (2002) argues that sexual orientation must be separated from mental
illness to understand better suicide motivation. Emslie shows that queer youth
continue to be ‘either ignored or marginalised by disciplinary frameworks’ (1996:
31
39). Specifically, Emslie (1996) argues that suicide prevention programmes do

little to address heterosexism and homophobia, undermining queer young
people’s capacity to voice their problems by over-emphasizing the mental
health model. Emotional distress and suicidal thinking is framed as a problem
inherent in an individual’s sexuality (Fullagar 2001). For Fenaughty and Harre
(2003) and Cover (2005, 2012), this means queer youth are continually framed
as victims only. The concerns of these researchers are valid for, as the content
of the recent Australian initiative Beyond Blue: The National Depression Initiative
shows, the topic of queer youth suicide receives minimal attention even though
a research-based position statement on depression and queer youth has been
released (Beyondblue 2012, Purcell, Scanlan, Callahan and Jorm 2010).
What about gender? It is tempting to suggest that queer youth suicide
is about sexuality alone. This holds some truth, as the focus rests on sexual
orientation and its effects. Yet as some authors point out, gender is part
of the picture. D’Augelli et al. (2001) note that young lesbian and bisexual
women have higher levels of suicidal thinking than young gay and bisexual
men. Gay male youth more often than young lesbian women consider their
suicide attempts to be directly related to their sexual orientation. For these
authors, this is related to greater victimization of young gay men (D’Augelli et
al. 2001). Macdonald and Cooper too take note of gender by suggesting that
gay men’s everyday conflicts arise ‘from societal perceptions of a gendered
masculinity. Central to the process of coming out was the young men’s
exploration of masculinity and identity – the conceptual framework against
which they evaluated themselves and were evaluated and judged by others’
(1998: 25). Gibson stresses a similar point by suggesting that gay male youth
are particularly ‘susceptible to cultural stereotypes while struggling to find an
appropriate identity’ (1994: 34). Gender nonconformity, including charges of
effeminacy in young gay males and masculinity in young lesbian women is part
of struggles with, and formation of, identity.
Cato and Canetto (2003a, 2003b) take a much closer look at gender in their
research on attitudes towards queer youth suicide attempts. They demonstrate
that attempts are viewed as feminine, particularly if in relation to relationship
breakdowns (Cato and Canetto 2003b, see also Molloy and McLaren 2004).
Organized around a distinction between activity and passivity, Cato and Canetto
conclude that these attempts are gendered: ‘A man’s suicidal decision was
perceived as most active when it was in response to physical illness; a woman’s
suicidal decision was perceived as most active when it was a response to parental
rejection, following “coming out”’ (2003b: 502). The authors point out that it
is not just sexuality that plays the central role in queer youth suicidal behaviour.
Gender assumptions about suicidal behaviour are part of the picture, made
available on the basis of methods, scenarios, letters, family history and so
32
on. This is because ‘the social meanings of suicidal behavior are the social
interpretations of the suicidal act’ (Cato and Canetto 2003a: 498).
Given what statistics continually show, it is hardly surprising that sexuality
continues to play a central part in suicidology’s explanations of queer youth
suicide. As with race, sexuality is the issue. When factored in, gender is a side
issue. Without wanting to dismiss the significance of sexuality, the problem
is more profound than that. How knowledge about queer youth suicide is
constructed is not a matter of working out whether sexuality or gender is
more or less important, or which of the two should come first. What is at
stake is how gender and sexuality work together in the gendering of suicide. If
gender is central to understanding suicide, this might have something to do with
sexuality. Likewise, if sexuality is central to understanding suicide, this may have
something to do with gender. The two articulate each other.
Yet the fact that sexuality is made more visible cannot be ignored. At a first
glance, the visibility of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, may have
something to do with the use of statistical data. Queer youth suicide has lacked
recognition in the past, and receives marginal amounts of attention in the present.
While the documentation of queer young people is extremely important, my
concern with visibility is of another order. Sexuality is visible precisely because
of the focus on homosexuality. Rarely does research acknowledge or discuss
the possible significance of heterosexuality in suicide. By saying this, let me
be clear that my quarrel is not with whether or not heterosexuality has been
overlooked. Nor is it about doing away with sexuality in the analysis of queer
youth suicide. Rather, my contention is that the reason homosexuality makes
such a visible appearance in queer youth suicide might have something to do
with it being outside the norm of the masculinist subject, which is shaped by
heteronormative ideas.
Based on what I have discussed so far, it is tempting to conclude that suicide
is written into what it means to be young and queer. I want to suggest that the link
between homosexuality and pathology is not a matter of numbers telling it like
it is. Rather, it has something to do with the gendering of intent and outcome.
Attempted suicides, closely associated with women, femininity, passivity and the
materiality of the female body, position young gay men as crying for help but
not attention seeking. Young gay men’s attempts are perceived as more active,
and thereby more serious. I am not suggesting that all suicide attempts should
be interpreted on exactly the same basis. Yet it is unclear why, despite motives
still retaining a gendered reading, young gay men’s suicide attempts come to
matter in ways that are not devoid of agency. What is curious is that intent and
violence are seen to be devoid of gender even though gender happens to matter
in how both are interpreted.
33
Conclusion
There is more to gender in suicide than the fact that more men than women
suicide. Suicidology’s construction of suicide as male is contradictory yet
effective because it interprets suicide as neutral, self-evident and gendered at
the same time. On the one hand, there is something deeply gendered about
suicide and this relates to how we understand masculinities and femininities.
On the other hand, gender comes across as an attachment, a structural add-
on to how knowledge of suicide is constructed. Suicide is made sense of –
intelligible – via binaries such as male–female, masculine–feminine and active–
passive. The body is not entirely absent. It too is neutral yet gendered in the
interpretation of lethality and violence. Alongside gender, race and sexuality
matter as well. Through the lens of Australian Aboriginal suicide and queer
youth suicide, problematic assumptions about gender are part of interpreting
intent and outcome. All this provides a rich ground for constructing knowledge
of suicide as masculine and masculinist.
To borrow from Butler, suicidology generates its own ‘afterlife of words’
(2005: 29). Standing between life and death, such an afterlife speaks of, and
speaks for, those who are no longer alive and those who continue to live after
an attempted suicide. In so doing, some experiences of suicide are validated
as serious at the expense of disqualifying others. They do not fit; they are less
intelligible. I have two problems with this. First, making some acts matter more
than others is deathlike because the agency and autonomy of those whose
experiences do not fit are denied. And secondly, the discursive mechanics – the
interpretive processes and practices – of constructing knowledge of suicide are
seriously taken for granted. Knowledge is treated as neutral and self-evident
even though what we know is hardly self-evident or neutral. In my mind, we not
only need a different analytical approach to understanding gender in suicide. We
also need to unpack how assumptions themselves work and, importantly, how
they fail to work.
34
Chapter 2
Performative Knowledge:
Re-reading Gender in Suicide1
Introduction
Statistically more men than women die by suicide. in this way, suicide is
interpreted as a male phenomenon. numbers tell it like it is. The problem
with this ‘fact of suicide’ is not whether numbers really tell the truth. The
problem is the interpretation of suicide as self-evident in the face of research
showing the extent to which suicide is not self-evident on the basis of gender.
Yet if something about suicide is obvious, and if gender differences are just
differences, then why do contradictory interpretations exist? why does being
male or female, masculine or feminine, make such a difference? could it be that
gender has something to do with how knowledge about suicide is constructed?
could it be that gender is not a structural add-on – that it is more than an
addition to the way we come to know suicide?
in light of these questions, i have two aims in this chapter. one is to unpack
what ‘self-evident’ might mean in the way suicide is constructed as being male on
epistemological and ontological levels. The second is to challenge how gender
differences have been interpreted in suicide to see if there are other ways of
thinking about them. To accomplish these aims, i draw on Judith Butler’s work
on performativity. in so doing, my intention is not to ‘prove’ whether or not
suicide is performative. rather, my intention is to use performativity to work
out how assumptions about gender render suicide as masculine and masculinist.
here, i am concerned with the process of materialization – gendering – rather
than focusing on discursive outcomes or effects alone.
in the face of many pressing concerns about the loss of life through suicide,
what difference does it make if we examine how knowledge is constructed?
will this change anything for those who come to experience the tragedy of
suicide? will the use of performativity save any lives? Sadly, understanding how
knowledge ‘works’ will not stop people from suiciding. at the same time, i want
1 earlier versions of this chapter were published in: (1) Jaworski, K. 2003. Suicide
and gender: reading suicide through Butler’s notion of performativity. Journal of
Australian Studies, 76, 137–146, and (2) Jaworski, K. 2010a. The gender-ing of suicide.
Australian Feminist Studies, 25(63), 47–61.
to suggest that questioning ideas is crucial to rethinking how we respond to

those struggling with suicide. We need to understand not only what ideas mean,
but also how people articulate them. Put differently, we need to understand the
antecedents that frame how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. Thus,
I use performativity as a heuristic tool to think through ideas rather than about
them. How we think about ideas relating to suicide is just as important as the
approaches to preventing suicide, since ideas inform our practices as much as
practices inform our ideas. Understanding antecedents might seem like taking
two steps back but, as this chapter illustrates, sometimes this is precisely what
must be done in order to open space for further thinking and responding in
truly life-affirming ways. With this in mind, I now take a step back to sketch
relevant aspects of Judith Butler’s work on performativity.
Butler Theorizes Gender as Performative
In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) challenges the idea that sex and gender are
mutually exclusive, or the conceptualization of sex as ontologically given,
existing outside of time, culture and history. For Butler (1990), what shapes
this conceptualization is the humanist notion of a subject who, understood as
a transcendental ‘I’, is an essential mark of personhood. Whatever social and
cultural context a person happens to be in is external to their being a person
(Butler 1987, 1990, Poovey 1992, Standford 1999). If context is considered part
of what it means to be, this is only once a person exists.
To explain how sex and gender constitute each other, Butler (1986, 1987,
1988, 1989, 1990) theorizes gender as performative. Influenced by Nietzsche’s
work, Butler argues that ‘gender is always a doing … performatively constituted
by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ rather than a subject
who is wilfully behind the doing and the deed (1990: 25). In this sense, gender
is already part of the performed act, rather than performance alone. Gender
is a condition for understanding the body’s intelligibility: ‘a set of repeated
acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time’ to produce
the appearance of sex as a natural cause of gender (Butler 1990: 33). The
appearance of sex as a natural cause is part of maintaining the false idea that
sex and gender are epistemologically distinct (Butler 1990). Gender is treated
as an attribute of sex, inscribed on the body, which is interpreted as a neutral
medium or container.
In Bodies that Matter, Butler (1993a) continues to challenge the distinction
between sex and gender by shifting towards Derrida’s reformulation of Austin’s
speech act theory. Butler (1993a) reworks performativity ‘as the reiterative
and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’
(Butler 1993a: 2). Through reiteration, gendered practices repeat ritualized sets
36
Performative Knowledge
of norms to the point where they appear as the norm and, in so doing, conceal
meanings and assumptions that are part of understanding something as the
norm (Butler 1993a). Gender is a social and cultural practice continually re-
enacted through repetition. Repetition is not an exact process of replication,
but rather a practice that influences one act after another (Butler 1993a, 2004a).
Through reiteration, actions ‘precede, constrain, and exceed the performer’
(1993a: 234). This sort of production shows that ‘discourse has a history that
not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages’ (Butler 1993a: 227).
What is produced and reproduced as natural turns out to be dependent on
social and cultural meanings.
In Excitable Speech, Butler (1997a) further reworks performativity as
citationality on the basis of Althusser’s linguistic notion of hailing, and Austin’s
theorization of speech acts. Here, citationality is a practice that reiterates and
cites meanings through which subject positions are recognized. For this to
happen, however, a subject must recognize the position to which it is hailed.
This means hailing needs authority in its address. The authority of the address
is possible, Butler argues, because of ‘the historicity of convention that exceeds
and enables the moment of its enunciation’ (1997a: 33). In this sense, naming
is not a single act, nor does it come from a purely humanistic subject position
(1997a, 2004a). Importantly, performativity continues to involve the body
because ‘speaking is a bodily act’ (Butler 2004a: 172). Bodies of speakers and
addressees are equally important.
The Question of Agency
The topic of agency has been one of the most contested aspects of Butler’s
work. For Benhabib (1995), Butler’s notion of performativity negates agency.
The idea that there is no doer behind the deed leaves little room for conscious
reflexivity (Allen 1998, Benhabib 1995, Brickell 2005, Nelson 1999). McNay
(2000) argues that, while Butler’s work is useful for understanding agency per se,
it does not offer tools for analysing agency in specific historical contexts. Lovell
extends McNay’s (2000) critique by suggesting that the problem with Butler’s
account ‘lies in too narrow a search for transformative agency in the socially
constituted self ’ (2003: 1). Mills’ (2000) critique moves in a different direction,
suggesting instead that Butler’s work does not explain why people might resist
normative ways of being. This partly stems from some conceptual ambiguities,
Butler’s tendency for abstraction, and her pessimistic characterization of the
subject in later works (Mills 2000).
In response, Butler contends that her work is a reformulation of agency. For
Butler, the problem is not with the presence of agency, but rather with how it
is theorized. Traditionally, agency belongs to the subject as a sovereign origin
37
of intentions. Agency is considered to be a property of a body, a possession

that exists as autonomous, unmediated and transparent (Hall 1996). For Butler
(1995), however, agency does not stem from the subject but is the effect of
socio-historical conditions and conventions. Butler writes that
when words engage actions or constitute themselves a kind of action, they do

this not because they reflect the power of an individual’s will or intention, but
because they draw upon and reengage conventions which have gained their
power precisely through a sedimented iterability. The category of ‘intention,’
indeed, the notion of ‘the doer’ will have its place, but this place will no longer
be ‘behind’ the deed as its enabling source. (1995: 134, original emphasis)
This suggests that agency is indeed present. Its presence, however, is located at
the very moment of a practice brought into being through performative actions
(Butler 1992, 1993a, 1995). Consequently, the subject may choose something,
but that very choosing is influenced by conditions that exceed the subject. Thus,
as Butler explains further:
We come into the world on the condition that the social world is already there,
laying the groundwork for us. This implies that I cannot persist without norms
of recognition that support my persistence: the sense of possibility pertaining to
me must first be imagined from somewhere else before I can begin to imagine
myself. My reflexivity is not only socially mediated, but socially constituted. I
cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede
and exceed me. (2004: 32)
This offers a paradox, one that Butler (2000a, 2004a) sees as enabling rather than
disabling, because recognition indicates the presence of a conscious reflexivity.
What is important about Butler’s reformulation of agency is that it does not
take for granted what conditions the human capacity to exercise agency, nor
does it claim that agency is impossible.
Suicide through Performativity
What happens when suicide is read through performativity? What strategies

can performativity as a thinking practice offer to help us to challenge the ways
that gender shapes how suicide is understood? I want to begin addressing
these questions by taking as an example a definition of suicide provided by the
38
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).2 The ABS defines suicide as ‘the deliberate
taking of one’s life’ (2004: 3). This definition can be read as performatively
hailing suicide as an explicitly individual act – an act that happens because the
individual decides that it should happen. That is, the definition summons an
individual as the author of the act, solely responsible for the act. There is an agent
behind the act, recognized as being the one who decides on the act. As such, the
deliberate choice decided by the agent appears to be determined largely by the
activities of the mind. It seems to have nothing to do with the body.
Yet suicide is an explicitly individual act not because a person is automatically
responsible, but because they are hailed and therefore recognized as responsible.
By having responsibility attributed to them, individuals are situated as the origin
of the intention to suicide. At the same time, suicide is marked as a ‘doing’
constituted by the taking of life that expresses an outcome. The outcome,
however, is not made clear by the definition – other than that there must be,
or will be, an outcome as a sign of the taking of one’s life. What is made clear
is that the intention behind such an activity must be deliberate in order to have
an outcome recognized as suicide. In sum, these are the elements that name
suicide as a material act.
For suicide to be named, however, it requires the body. Although the body
is not directly named, it is still needed for the taking of life to occur. In other
words, the body as the medium and site of the action is the reference point
through which the doing of suicide is identified. It provides a point of origin as
the basis for determining the tangible existence of suicidal intent and outcome.
Without the body, intent cannot be identified with certainty, making suicide
difficult to determine, particularly in the legal context. As a site of activity
to which suicide can be attributed – a surface yielding signs of suicide – the
body appears to exist as neutral and self-evident, divorced from any context.
It is self-evident to the point where there is no need to name it. The lack of
naming, however, is itself important since what exists without the need to be
named specifically still hails a particular bodily existence. Such existence can be
summed up as an absent presence.
The definition produced by the ABS (2004) is important because it offers
what can be referred to as ‘conditions of possibility’ through which suicide
is understood. Such conditions give the idea of suicide material form as an
intentional and deliberate act of death: a wholly contained phenomenon that
can be distinguished and described. In this sense, it is assumed that suicide
exists prior to, or is independent of, any process of interpretation (Smith
1990). Such an existence, I am arguing, constitutes suicide as prediscursive,
2 Legally established as Australia’s central statistical authority, the ABS provides

statistical data to all Australian governments, and the community more broadly (ABS
2006). I draw on an Australian definition as one example of a definition of suicide.
39
despite the processes and practices that are part of generating definitions and
understandings, be it coronial inquests, medical autopsies, psychiatric reports
or media representations. It is assumed that the individual is the origin of the
intention to die: a reference point for the activities of a largely disembodied
mind filled with masterful agency. While the naming of suicide requires a body,
that body is viewed as prediscursive. The body is a neutral and self-evident
biological source of the evidence of suicide. Yet despite the necessity of the
body, it is as if suicide transcends the body. Suicide is all in the mind.
I want to begin problematizing the way suicide is framed by highlighting
how suicide, as a death act, is constituted in relation to life. The materialization of
suicide as individual and intentional is dependent upon the fact that someone at
some stage was alive and thus was able to take their life. This may seem patently
obvious, requiring little or no acknowledgement. However, it is significant to
underscore this point, since it shows that life and living are enmeshed with
death and dying, and here, suicide. In a sense, for suicide to be hailed as suicide,
it must be recognized as being in relation to something other than itself. To use
a metaphor, suicide is like a coin. One side represents death through suicide and
the other side represents life and living. While each side represents something
different, neither can be clearly separated. They remain interconnected with
each other and, as such, relational. The point I am making is that suicide cannot
be given its meaning(s) outside the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs.
How then does suicide seem to have its own meaning outside contexts of
its interpretation? Suicide gains its a priori status because, I am arguing, it is
constituted by masculinist conditions of knowing, which privilege the mind
over the material body, even though the body is needed. On the basis of
such conditions, suicide is constituted as neutral. Its agency seems marked by
autonomy, sustained by a humanist conception of the subject. If anything else
matters – and here I am referring to gender – it is only after the results of the
deliberate choice have taken place. This is despite the fact that gendered norms
and assumptions might already be part of interpreting suicide the moment it
occurs, if not before.
Yet this masculinist conditioning of suicide is not convincing. For suicide to
be autonomous, it needs something outside autonomy. In fact, the interpretation
of suicide needs a context in which to recognize and understand autonomy and
the capacity for mastery or the ability take one’s own life. In this sense, the
way in which suicide is constituted is contradictory. Masculinist conditioning of
autonomy cannot sustain itself completely – and this limit indicates that suicide
could be interpreted differently.
To interpret suicide differently, it might be useful to think of it as a form
of ‘doing’. Suicide has a performative dimension: a set of repeated bodily acts.
These produce the effect of an internalized intent: the ‘choice’ to suicide. To
draw heavily from Butler, suicide can be read as made of the very expressions
40
that are set out to be its results. Across the surfaces of the suicided body suicide-
as-gendered is produced: marked by the method chosen to suicide through
which something about suicide is interpreted as male or female, masculine
or feminine, active or passive. The existence of suicide as an act is sustained
through corporeal signs, etched by the individual who carried out the act, and
others are part of interpreting the outcome of the act. These give material form
to the deliberate taking of one’s life. And, as I will illustrate in greater detail,
these signs convey gendered norms and assumptions, through which suicide, as
an act of deliberately taking one’s life, materializes.
Let me explain my reading further by considering ‘rituals’ that might
condition suicidal intent and outcome. Bearing in mind that these rituals may
or may not lead to particular consequences, the taking of life may consist of:
thinking about suicide; imagining possible outcomes; writing a note; gaining
access to specific means, such as a gun or pills; estimating what will be lethal
or perhaps what is an ‘appropriate’ method; planning the location of the act;
performing the actual act, whether this involves swallowing pills or pulling the
gun’s trigger; and awaiting the loss of consciousness if it has not immediately
taken place, and providing that nothing else has intervened. These specific
gestures, however, convey suicide by deploying differently gendered meaningful
actions. What it means to take one’s own life, and what violence means, are
part of these rituals. In other words, suicide materializes on the basis of those
particular rituals and gestures that bring it into existence, but these gestures
themselves are bodily acts – and they are already shaped by gender.
But suicide as a performative act does not rest with the individual alone.
This is because the way that the body is part of different acts, and the way such
acts are interpreted, exceeds the individual and his or her intentions. Whether
someone lives or dies, different bodies of knowledge such as law, medicine or
psy-knowledge, and their particular practices of interpretation, play roles in
interpreting suicide at a macro level. Legal verdicts, autopsy reports, psychiatric
assessments and media representations may become part of enabling and
constraining the interpretation of suicide as an individual act. Secomb’s
philosophical work on death as an inter-relational rather than isolated event
highlights my point:
We only become human in our relations with others: we approach our Being
through others, adopting their habits, imitating their techniques of living and
being, and also learning modes of dying from them. Our “outmost” experience
of dying is founded on a prior experience of the other’s death. (1999: 114)
Hence, whether different acts, their intentions and outcomes are

interpreted as serious or not, such interpretations are possible because of
the reiterative and citational power of particular gendered understandings of
41
violence. Gender norms suicide over and over again and, in so doing, sustains
and conceals a particular economy of gendered meanings through which the
material act of suicide is interpreted to the point where the context in which
it occurs hardly matters.
If suicide is performative through ritualized bodily gestures that speak of
gender, it is also because gestures themselves are repetitive. Through repetition,
suicide can be read as a re-enactment of meanings already there to signify
suicide. In this sense, the act of suicide is not novel, nor is its intentions, because
suicide has a discursive history that signifies a particular bodily act (Jaworski
2003, 2010a). For now, one way of examining the gendered performativity of
suicide is to look at Australian trends in methods of completed suicides. In an
earlier monograph, the ABS (1994: 9) notes that during the period between
1971 and 1998 the most common method was hanging, followed by firearms,
car exhaust poisoning and substance overdoses. Trends, however, change and
fluctuate over time. While firearm use peaked during the 1970s, hanging appears
to have taken this position over 20 years later (ABS 1994: 9). It also appears
to have dominated more recently, since both men and women tend to select
hanging more frequently. However, where men suicide by using car exhaust
poisoning, firearms and hanging, women suicide by drug overdoses and car
exhaust poisoning. Drug overdoses are least popular in male statistics, whereas
firearms are in female statistics. While statistical representations themselves
shift, reading suicide against the backdrop of historical patterns shows that
something about the act is ritualized and repetitive enough to produce trends in
which gender plays a part.
While statistics indicate that there is a pattern of suicide as a discursively
repeated ritual, this does not explain how suicide is citational, namely, how each
bodily act draws upon other bodily acts and their gendered meanings. To read
suicide as citational, we need to consider particular meanings of some methods.
Research in suicidology indicates that a significant number of women fear bodily
disfigurement. Thus, methods involving guns are likely to be avoided because
these tend to cause particular kinds of physical disfigurement to the exterior
surfaces of the body. Other research also shows that men tend to engage with
guns because other methods such as pills are viewed as ‘unmasculine’. Such
patterns and themes show that the translation of violence in acts of suicide is
influenced by meanings signifying masculinity and femininity, shaping what is
inscribed on and by bodies identified as male and female. This suggests that
suicide is recognized as citational. In order to kill oneself, a person must draw
on already existing meanings of suicide. If suicide is articulated through gender,
it is because meanings of gender ‘become available only through a reflective
posture made possible through that articulation in action’ (Butler 1995: 129).
Meanings of gender become available when individuals select a method already
influenced by gendered assumptions.
42
What then might we say of agency? If the individual is not the origin of
intentions, how can suicide exist? Given some of the problematic gendered
assumptions in suicide, this could further silence those experiences and acts
deemed to be not serious enough. The issue, however, is not about questioning
whether there is agency or intent in suicide. Instead, the issue is how agency and
intent are interpreted as a result of particular assumptions that render some acts
as full of intent and others as lacking intent, on the basis of what is interpreted
as visibly violent. How agency is interpreted matters because suicide as self-
evident and neutral is understood on an assumption that intent is obvious
and transparent. In other words, agency is seen to have very little to do with
discourse and gender, despite the gendered interpretation of agency in suicide.
Against the understanding of intent as obvious and transparent, it might be
more useful to consider that intent cannot be understood outside contexts in
which suicide occurs. This does not mean that a person cannot carry out the
act of suicide, or that the act cannot be attributed to them. Rather, agency is
socially and culturally situated. One can take one’s life precisely because such
taking is shaped by and through re-articulated conditions. One can take one’s
life precisely because suicide is relational, in mutual relationship with the context
in which it occurs, of which gender is a part.
Contentious Distinctions: ‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ in Suicide
To begin understanding and unpacking how gender plays a part in the

construction of knowledge of suicide, I want to examine notions of ‘active’
and ‘passive’. How suicide is understood as ‘active’ and ‘passive’ is based on
the socio-cultural interpretation of suicide methods. As discussed in Chapter
1, active methods in suicide are most frequently associated with firearms. Seen
as decisive, violent, aggressive and masculine, guns communicate serious intent.
This is because opportunities for intervention and survival are limited and
thereby outcomes are likely to be final and deadly. Such methods do not lack
bodily disfigurement – what is displayed on the surfaces of the body is likely to
be messy, visual and horrifying, no longer contained but open and leaky. This
is in stark contrast to passive methods such as drug overdoses which lack a
certain amount of bodily ‘mess’, because they do not visibly and openly damage
the body. What they inscribe on the body appears bloodless. Such methods are
often associated with survival broadly, and women and femininity in particular,
because they lack bodily disfigurement – something that women are said to fear.
It is the lack of visible violence that is most likely to be seen as passive – a cry
for attention and help, with something else other than suicide in mind.
But what if what is visually ‘messy’ can also be about seeking attention? For
example, in terms of the gunshot wound, bodily disfiguration invites some kind
43
of attention through its physical visibility. It generates fluids, such as blood, and
extreme damage, which require attention. The ‘mess’ needs to be cleaned up
from the scene, but the body must also, somehow, be arranged in order to make
the person recognisable. Thus, at the performativity of disfigurement, gendered
meanings that surround ‘active’ suicides become realigned with ‘passive’
suicides. Attention seeking may be inherent in passive methods, but also already
present in active methods. If this is the case, can the interpretation of any
bodily inscription to determine levels of agency ever be taken as self-evident
and obvious? Can something remain self-evident in the face of interpretations
of suicide as male–female, masculine–feminine and active–passive? Can some
suicidal behaviours, outcomes and intentions always, exclusively, be assumed
as belonging to men, and others to women? Is attention in actual fact about
recognition? If so, what does this recognition mean?
Lack of exclusivity between active and passive suicide indicates that the
terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’ are not distinct. One is implicated in the other. This,
however, does not seem to apply to both of the terms equally. When it comes
to judging what serious violence is, activity remains privileged over passivity.
In a sense, passivity comes to occupy the position of the ‘Other’, bound to
femininity and the material body. Paradoxically, active acts sustain the effect of
transcending the body, even though they cannot transcend the materiality of
the body. Yet transcendence appears necessary in order to sustain activity as
masculine and masculinist, embodied by the disembodied mind, with the body
acting as its absent presence. For, as Butler writes,
Masculine disembodiment is only possible on the condition that women occupy

their bodies as their essential and enslaving identities … By defining women
as ‘Other’, men are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their
bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies – a symbol potentially of
human decay and transience, of limitation generally – and to make their bodies
other than themselves. (1987: 133)
While in the chapters to come I will debate the degree to which women are
their bodies in suicide, the binary organization of suicide as active and passive,
masculine and feminine, indicates the workings of masculinist conditions of
knowing. Even though the binary distinction between active and passive is not
convincing, the gendering of suicide seems to require differences to sustain
suicide as a transcendentally masculine act. This requirement, however, is not
neutral, or transcendent, but rather is always and already dependent on gender
as one condition of knowing suicide.
This leads me to ask the following questions. What if the supposedly
passive methods are in fact disturbances in the overall masculinized framework
of interpreting suicide as masculinist? What if the intelligibility of activity as
44
masculine is possible only because others are rendered more feminine and
simultaneously as lacking the will to suicide? Are passive acts failures because
the outcome is not ‘completed’, or does their ‘failure’ actually reveal the forceful
workings of gender norms made apparent in how bodies are interpreted? And
what if failure in this instance indicates that what is displayed on the surface
of the body may not always be self-evident? By posing the last question in
particular my aim is not to dismiss agency and intent, but rather to beckon
us to recognize that perhaps passive acts may be just as serious as active acts,
especially when they enable us to hear someone who wants and needs to be
heard and, in the end, who wants to live. After all, is this not one of the primary
purposes of suicide prevention?
We can also study gender norms by examining something that is referred
to as ‘unmasculine’: men surviving suicide. For example, as Canetto’s (1995a)
research indicates, surviving suicide is considered ‘unmasculine’ by some men.
It seems that surviving suicide, at least for some men, is unbearable because it
risks suffering an almost unthinkable loss – the loss of masculinity. This fear
of being emasculated is related to being viewed as feminine. On some level,
death appears to be preferred over life, not only because it might bring an
end to unhappy circumstances, but because it will not dissolve the normative
performance of the male gender. In this instance, something about masculinity
is enmeshed with suicide, a masculinist form of punishment that secures ‘the
conditions of intelligibility by which life becomes liveable, by which life also
becomes condemned and foreclosed’ (Butler 2000b: 23). In this way, survival
is feminine and death is masculine, the stuff ‘real’ men know how to do since,
as Secomb explains, ‘socio-historically it is men who tend to stake their lives’
(1999: 122). This staking can be read as masculinist, for it seems that survival
threatens the transcendent active autonomy of intent, restricting the reading of
suicide as relational but, more importantly, failing to recognize that survival is
good, even when the method is deemed to be ‘passive’.
Conclusion
Performativity as a heuristic tool is useful for thinking through how the

construction of knowledge about suicide occurs at epistemological and
ontological levels. More importantly, it is useful for understanding how gender
fits the picture without treating it as a structural add-on to the interpretation of
suicide. It turns out that suicide is implicated in gendered antecedents. These
antecedents reveal suicide to be relational, indicating that what is self-evident
and neutral is quite the opposite, and in fact gendered. This reminds us that we
cannot take for granted how knowledge of suicide becomes knowledge.
45
Recognizing suicide as relational is crucial for questioning the use of

different gendered terms and the effects these terms have on the interpretation
of some acts as serious and others as abject scripts. The task of interrogating
intent and agency is important not only for those who die, but also for those
who conclude that life is not worth living, yet for whom in the end living
continues. It is also relevant to those who try to suicide over and over again,
only to have their struggle recognized after they have died, when it is already
too late. Therefore, understanding what construction means is important
because it might enable us, the living, to recognize how assumptions ‘work’.
This, however, is only the beginning. The particularities of how gendered
assumptions ‘work’ need to be examined next, with performativity acting as a
tool guiding the analytical trajectories.
46
Chapter 3
Durkheim’s Social Recognition of
Gender in Suicide
Introduction
emile durkheim’s work on suicide has been in print for well over a century.
nevertheless, his theoretical and methodological frameworks continue to
receive attention in contemporary analyses of suicide in sociology, psychology,
psychiatry and medicine.1 writing in the context of suicidology, Goldney and
Schioldann acknowledge that ‘durkheim is generally regarded as the founder
of the scientific study of suicide’ (2000: 181). Berman confirms this view by
insisting that no ‘suicidologist-in-training could possibly earn their stripes
without mastering Durkheim’s typology’ (2002: 10). Thus, while Durkheim’s
work on suicide has shaped the discipline of sociology, it remains historically
and philosophically connected to suicidology. in light of this, durkheim’s
sociological theorization of suicide is my first analytical ‘case study’.
Despite the lasting impact of Durkheim’s work, I find myself in a strange
position. i think durkheim’s treatment of gender is appalling and inexcusable.
The temptation to disregard his approach is hard to resist. Yet his approach to
understanding the social make-up of suicide is still compelling. and so i remain
convinced that we can still learn from durkheim’s classic text, Suicide (1951),
which was first published in 1897. What I think we can learn from Durkheim,
however, is not quite what durkheimian sociologists and suicidologists would
expect or discuss. Suicide begins with numbers, only to reveal that numbers can
never tell it like it is. it begins with numbers, only to tell us that suicide has been
implicated in gendered antecedents all along.
numbers, or statistics, were of utmost importance to durkheim’s work on
suicide. Statistics allowed him to qualify suicide as a social phenomenon. So
1 In fact, Karl Marx (1999) published a brief piece on suicide before Durkheim
(1951) under the title, ‘Peuchet on Suicide’ in 1846 in a small German socialist journal,
Gesellschaftsspiegel (Mirror of Society). Marx drew on the memoirs and work of Jacques
Peuchet, a prominent French police administrator, economist and statistician. Like
Durkheim, Marx discussed suicide in social terms. Unlike Durkheim (1951), Marx
(1999) identified the oppressive nature of the bourgeois family as a significant cause of
suicide among French young women.
did gender. Yet to this day, Durkheim’s treatment of gender is yet to receive
proper scrutiny in mainstream empirical sociology in particular, and suicidology
more generally. The problem with Durkheim’s theorization is not his failure to
recognize gender or, as some feminist sociologists have argued at length, his
attempt to erase women’s experiences in theorizing suicide as social. While the
latter is a significant critique, the problem with Durkheim’s approach lies in how he
recognizes gender, and how this recognition weaves his theorization of suicide.
I dismantle the mechanics of Durkheim’s sociological approach to find
out how he recognizes gender in theorizing suicide. My aim is to show that
Durkheim’s persistent attempt to theorize suicide as devoid of gender is in
fact saturated by gendered assumptions, based on his preconceived ideas about
society at large. Paradoxically, the more he tried to ignore gender, the more he
became dependent on gender to develop his theoretical framework. This paradox
turns out to be critical to constructing knowledge about suicide as masculine
and masculinist. This paradox is dependent on the principles of rationality and
autonomy and their simultaneous denial of, and dependence on the body.
I unpack this paradox in three ways. First, I situate Durkheim’s work on
suicide in its historical context by briefly identifying some of the intellectual
forces that shaped his approach to gender as a social and political issue in France
towards the end of the nineteenth century. Secondly, I examine Durkheim’s
use of the terms ‘integration’ and ‘regulation’ in his categorization of suicide
as egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. Thirdly, I interrogate Durkheim’s
recognition of gender and how this relates to the construction of suicide as an
empirically based social phenomenon. Here, I scrutinize Durkheim’s reliance
on rationality to determine its role in the gendering of suicide. What I do here
may come across as tedious and obsessed with textual detail. Whether it does
or not, I want to show that the recognition of gender at a methodological
theoretical level has an enormous impact on how we think about agency in
the material act of suicide. This, I think, is of fundamental importance to how
we understand suicide.
Situating Durkheim’s Suicide
In writing his work on suicide, Durkheim was multi-tasking. He saw sociology

as the study of social facts and wanted to ‘prove’ it to be scientifically objective
and valid (Durkheim 1960b). Published two years earlier in 1895, The Rules
of Sociological Method (1964) was a strategic attempt to substantiate sociology’s
quantitative methodological framework. Suicide became its testing ground
(Seidman 1998). It worked. Sociology was established as an autonomous
academic discipline in the French university system, in tandem with the
publication of the journal, L’Annee Sociologique (Cahn 1998, Pedersen 2001).
48
Durkheim’s Social Recognition of Gender in Suicide
Durkheim’s work on suicide is entangled with broader social concerns

attributed to the period of French history in which he lived and worked. As
Pickering reflects, ‘Durkheim’s Le Suicide is not just about suicide’ (2000: 66).
In the last pages of the text, Durkheim himself concluded that ‘a monograph
on suicide has a bearing beyond the special class of facts which it particularly
embraces. The questions it raises are closely connected with the most serious
practical problems of the present time’ (1951: 391). Durkheim referred to a
time marked by intense social turmoil associated with continual struggle over
government control (Lehmann 1994, Pedersen 2001, Ramp 2001). Still coming
to terms with the effects of the French Revolution in 1789 and with the advent
of the Third Republic during the 1870s, French social structure ‘vacillated
between dictatorship, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism’ (Landes
1988: 171). Heated debates consumed many intellectuals and activists. Much
of what was debated in fact focused on whether women should have equal
rights in public and private spheres, including the right to vote, own property,
obtain a divorce, be educated and earn a living (Gerhard 2004, Kandal 1988,
Scott 1996, Shope 1994).
Despite the turmoil and heated debates, most of Durkheim’s writings
remain silent about gender issues.2 Pedersen (2001) finds this surprising because
it contrasts with Durkheim’s public involvement in debating the legalization
of divorce. Furthermore, as Lehmann (1994, 1995b) argues, as a republican
Durkheim saw himself as radical, given his belief in freedom, universal
human rights and civic obligations. Yet part of this radicalism was bourgeois
conservatism, since Durkheim believed in the necessity of natural inequalities
between men and women for the purpose of sustaining social cohesion (Gane
1983, Roth 1990, Shope 1994). Persistent opposition to divorce by mutual
consent was one example of such conservatism, even though Durkheim
acknowledged the need for limited divorce (Pedersen 2001).
What is significant about these historical aspects is that they contradict a
well-rehearsed claim in sociology. It is often said that Durkheim’s work is the
product of his times, and therefore his views about gender should be left alone
(Lehmann 1994; Sydie 1987, 2004). I am not going to let Durkheim off the
hook so easily because, as Lehmann argues, ‘given his daring, “radical” rebellion
from the hegemony of classic, laissez-faire, utilitarian, individualistic liberalism,
he could have improvised and advocated feminism … in the same iconoclastic
and powerful way’ (1994: 30). He did not and, as later pages show, his lack of
rebellion offers an opportunity to read his work differently.
2 Suicide contains a single reference to the feminist movement and its goals as follows:
‘As for the champions today of equal rights for woman with those of man, they forget
that the work of centuries cannot be instantly abolished; that juridical equality cannot
be legitimate so long as psychological inequality is so flagrant’ (Durkheim 1951: 386).
49
At this point, it is worth noting that Durkheim’s theoretical enterprise was

shaped by questions of what it meant to be human and live in a modern society
(Ramp 2001). Suicide was increasingly recognized as one of modernity’s ills, as
social anxieties were translated into facts, fuelled by moral fears (Kushner 1993,
Ramp 2000). Durkheim’s contemporaries saw health issues, including mental
illness, as the price of ‘civilization’ (Kushner 1993). Specifically, ‘civilization’ was
an explicitly masculine activity, associated with men’s participation in the public
sphere (Sydie 1987, Witz and Marshall 2004a, 2004b). ‘What commentators
considered to be self-destructive behavior was framed by their assumptions
of what (modernity) caused self-destructive behavior and who (men) would
be susceptible to it’ (Kushner 1993: 461). Men’s deaths were the result of the
pressure associated with public life and women’s the price for being deviant
after attempting to enter its sphere (Kushner 1993). While women’s suicides did
not go unnoticed, male bodies and specific masculine norms marked suicide as
a visible notation of modernity’s pathology.
Durkheim’s views about modern life did not differ greatly from the
commentators of his era. He too saw modernity as largely belonging to the
daily lives of men. What it meant to be human related to men alone. The use
of terms such as ‘individual’, ‘he’ and ‘humanity’ exclusively referred to men,
male bodies and masculinity (Gane 1983, Marshall 2002, Scott 1996). A few
years earlier in The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (1933: 247) considered
women to be less civilized, a conclusion he returned to in Suicide when he said:
‘society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability’
(1951: 215). It is clear that in Durkheim’s view women lacked ‘the essential
elements of humanity’ (Lehmann 1990: 167). The presumed generic status of
Durkheim’s terminology was not neutral nor was it a case of a linguistic bias.
Durkheim’s use of language was sexually marked across his works including
Suicide (Lehmann 1990, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, Marshall 2002, Witz and Marshall
2003). What first appears as gender-neutral in Durkheim’s use of language turns
out to be imbued by gender.
Durkheim’s view of what it meant to be a human was based on the Cartesian
mind–body dichotomy. He wrote: ‘civilization can be fixed in the organism only
through the most general foundations on which it rests. The more elevated it is,
the more, consequently, it is free of the body’ (1933: 321). For Durkheim (1951:
346), the social is literally superimposed on the body. Transcending the material
conditions of the body is what enables the social to materialize (Gane 1983,
Witz and Marshall 2004b). Rationality enables this transcendence because ‘what
characterizes the morality of organized societies … is that there is something
more human, therefore more rational, about them’ (Durkheim 1951: 407). Thus
the social constitutes what it means to be human, enabled by the capacity to
transcend the natural body, aided by the rational abstract mind. By amplifying
the significance of the rational abstract mind at the expense of the material
50
body, I am arguing, Durkheim was able to privilege the masculinist conditions

of knowledge that in turn shaped how he understood the social as masculine
and masculinist, prior to writing Suicide.
For Durkheim, the family was the nerve centre of society, ‘a collective
being’ so to speak (Durkheim 1951: 377). Its strength depended on producing
well-integrated and regulated individuals through the sexual division of labour
and authority (Durkheim 1893, 1951). Thus the best safeguard against suicide
was the restoration of the traditional family structure and values (Durkheim
1951: 384–6). Monogamous heterosexual marriage was the key ingredient to
this restoration, regulating and ‘civilizing’ sexuality and heterosexual desire
(Durkheim 1951: 270–6). He argued that the higher male rates of suicide were
due to lack of limits on male heterosexual passions (Durkheim 1951: 248).
By imposing limits, marriage would have a preventative effect and restore the
much-needed social equilibrium (Gane 1983). Legalized divorce was almost
unacceptable since its introduction would further compound social problems
given ‘the parallel development of divorces and suicides’ (Durkheim 1951: 273).
Therefore, as Marshall aptly points out, ‘women’s sexuality was implicated, but
it was men’s sexuality that was critical to the project of rational mastery over
nature’ (2002: 139). Sexuality and male heterosexual desire, I am suggesting,
condition how Durkheim recognized gender to theorize suicide as social.
It is clear that Durkheim’s writings are in a dynamic relationship with the
past in two ways. First, while Suicide embodies the social theorization of suicide,
the topic appears in his earlier writings. In this sense, Durkheim’s earlier claims
are strengthened in Suicide. Secondly, the theorization of suicide as social
cannot be recognized outside Durkheim’s moral evaluation of modernity. It
seems that his contribution remains in ‘dialogue’ with the debates concerning
modernity. The dialogue between suicide and modernity not only conditioned
the manner in which Durkheim read suicide, but also how he drew on gendered
assumptions to theorize suicide. This demonstrates that there is more to
gender than the descriptive differences between male and female deaths. This
is because Durkheim analytically depended on the rational and abstract mind,
bodily transcendence and the manner in which sexuality and heterosexual desire
in particular shape family life as the source of social integration and regulation.
These frame the ontology of the social and, in turn, become implicated in
Durkheim’s recognition of gender in suicide.
The Scientific Study of Social Facts: Durkheim’s Social Theorization of

Suicide
Durkheim stipulated that suicide must be seen as an observable act to be

interpreted as a social fact. To be observable, suicide must be recognisable,
51
something that intent often fails to provide because ‘[i]ntent is too intimate a
thing to be more than approximately interpreted by another’ (Durkheim 1951:
43). Suicide must have ‘an easily recognizable feature’ (Durkheim 1951: 44). The
outcome is this recognizable feature, through which suicide, as a performed act,
can be clearly named. Durkheim stated: ‘the term suicide is applied to all cases
of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the
victim himself, which he knows will produce this result. An attempt is an act
thus defined but falling short of actual death’ (1951: 44).
Having separated suicide from attempted suicide, Durkheim asked whether
this grouping is of interest to sociologists, since the definition situates the act as
highly individual. Individuals, however, are not outside the social because
instead of seeing in them only separate occurrences, unrelated and to be

separately studied, the suicides committed in a given society during a given
period of time are taken as a whole, it appears that this total is not simply a
sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a new fact sui generis,
with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature – a nature,
furthermore, dominantly social. (Durkheim 1951: 46)
Hence, suicide can be read as social on the basis of statistical patterns that,
regardless of any fluctuations, ‘express the suicidal tendency with which each
society is collectively afflicted’ (Durkheim 1951: 51). As Durkheim added later
on, to understand suicide as collective, one must regard it ‘through statistical
data, from the start’ (1951: 148). This ‘expression’ is what configures suicide as
a social fact.
In my mind, there are several issues with Durkheim’s framing of suicide as
a social fact. Durkheim relied not only on statistics but also on the assumption
that suicide must have its own ontology. Individual capacity to suicide forms the
basis for suicide’s ontology. Thus as Butler (2000c) suggests, ontology is collapsed
into capacity, with function acting as the point of reference. Recognized on the
basis of suicidal outcomes, capacity establishes the social ontology of suicide.
This, however, is not entirely clear because Durkheim was dependent on society
as a source of framing and recognizing the social uniqueness of suicide. At
the same time, the individual does occupy a space external to society since the
causes that lead to suicide are themselves external.3 Thus, the social ontology
3 Unpacking this in detail, Jennifer Lehmann states: ‘For Durkheim, “society” is

a living, conscious being. His organicism combines materialism (collective organism/
biology) and idealism (collective consciousness/psychology) to portray society as …
replete with body and soul … The social subject is the ultimate unity, the pinnacle of
nature, incorporating individual human subjects … The “subject” of knowledge, like
the “subject” of reality, is society’ (1993: 2).
52
of suicide is dependent not only on the individual capacity to carry out the act,
but also on the fact that the causes themselves are external.
What marks an individual and their capacities is heavily saturated by gender.
Durkheim was very clear that ‘man is much more highly socialized than woman.
His tastes, aspiration and humor have in large part a collective origin, while
his companion’s are more directly influenced by her organism’ and hence, one
‘is almost entirely the product of society, while the other has remained to a
far greater extent the product of nature’ (Durkheim 1951: 385). While this
requires more attention, at this point I want to argue that Durkheim’s social
ontology of suicide is informed by gender as the capacity to perform the act of
suicide. A binary division between nature and society frames this, signalled by
the ability to transcend the material conditions of the body. If transcendence
is read as an ‘activity’, conditioned by a masculinist understanding of activity,
then Durkheim’s social ontology of suicide is already gendered. The capacity
to transcend the conditions of one’s material body invokes suicide as devoid of
gender, when in fact understanding it is imbued with gender. The social is not
simply about men or men’s lives in the public sphere. The social is bound to
masculinist conditions of knowing, which in turn shape suicide.
In defining suicide, Durkheim differentiated between suicide and attempted
suicide. Attempted suicide was disqualified because it does not hail the act as
factual death. Thus, for suicide to be recognized as a social fact, it must be a
‘completed’ act even though, as Kushner and Sterk (2005) contend, Durkheim
relied on data published by the French Criminal Justice Ministry, which did
not distinguish between suicide and attempted suicide.4 While Durkheim
categorized attempts as different to suicide, his data was invisibly influenced
by attempts. As a result, suicide as a completed act was also shaped by suicide
attempts. And since ‘completed’ suicide turns out to be higher among men
(Durkheim 1951: 101), male data became the norm.
For suicide to be social, it must be a voluntary act ‘performed by the victim
with full knowledge of the facts’ (Durkheim 1951: 227). This means that at
some point suicide requires a measure of rationality. Reinforced by capacity,
this appears in the form of a wilful desire to die. Durkheim (1951: 72) saw
men as possessing higher levels of rationality and capacity, because they have
higher suicide rates. Discussing egoistic suicide, Durkheim insisted: ‘This is an
active suicide contrasting, accordingly, with the depressed suicide discussed
above’ (1951: 283). This, I am arguing, highlights a certain brand of agency
4 For useful criticisms of Durkheim’s use of empirical data, see for instance
Douglas (1966, 1967), Johnson (1972), Atkinson (1978), Johnson (1979), Breault and
Barkey (1982), March (1982), Thiele (1986), Taylor (1988), Lemert (1994) and Poppel
and Day (1996). Johnson (1979) and Thiele (1986) are among very few who pay
attention to gender.
53
in Durkheim’s theorizing. Rationality and capacity are the defining features of

suicide as social. If women are asocial, then their social capacity for suicide is
limited. Their suicides are more likely to be passive since only social beings are
capable of activity. My suggestion is that activity can only truly make sense if
viewed through the lens of masculinist conditions of knowing. If this is the
case, then the social meaning of suicide is hardly gender-neutral.
Two core concepts formulate Durkheim’s social theorization of suicide:
social integration and social regulation. Durkheim conceived of integration
as the measure of collective life; it is ‘more unified and powerful the more
active and constant is the intercourse among its members’ (1951: 202). Equally
important to the health of collective life is regulation. Regulation places moral
limits on the individual, sustained through the collective adherence to norms,
customs, rules and authority (Durkheim 1951: 248, 249, 253, 288). Durkheim
contended that, under adverse social conditions, people become very prone to
suicide when they do not have the right balance of attachment and/or regulation
(1951: 201, 241). Four distinct types of suicide illuminate such an imbalance.
Where low or high levels of integration define egoistic and altruistic suicides
respectively, similar patterns of regulation define anomic and fatalistic suicides.5
Situating egoistic suicide in the context of religion, family and politics,
Durkheim argued that egoistic suicide results from excessive individualism.
When individuals find themselves detached from social life as a consequence of
relaxed social bonds, they are more likely to commit suicide (Durkheim 1951:
214). In stark contrast to egoism, altruistic suicide occurs not because a person
has the right to commit the act in the face of unbearable circumstances but
because it is their obligation to do so (1951: 219–21). The ego is not ‘its own
property’ but rather the property of the social group to which a person belongs
(Durkheim 1951: 221). Durkheim drew on Japanese disembowelment, or the
seppuku tradition, to demonstrate how the threat of loss of role within the
social group leads to suicide without explicitly forcing the individual to commit
suicide (1951: 222).6
Linking it to economic crises, Durkheim framed anomic suicide as the effect
of de-regulation. Suicide occurs not because of poverty caused by financial
upheavals, but because upheavals lead to sudden disturbances in the collective
5 Durkheim (1951: 287) acknowledged that some types share similarities and
examined some of the common themes. Nevertheless, Durkheim (1951: 276) stressed
that there are stark differences between different types where egoism is opposite to
altruism, and anomy is opposite to fatalism.
6 Other examples included sati suicides in India, suicides amongst Native American
peoples, military soldier suicides and Christian martyr deaths (Durkheim 1951: 219–20,
222, 228–36).
54
order (Durkheim 1951: 241, 253, 257–8, 266–9). Juxtaposing egoistic, altruistic
and anomic suicides, Durkheim clarified these distinctions as follows:
Egoistic suicide results from man’s no longer finding a basis for existence in
life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated
beyond life itself. The third sort of suicide … results from man’s activity’s lacking
regulation and his consequent sufferings … society’s influence is lacking in the
basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein. (1951: 258)
For Durkheim, lack of regulation corresponds to traditional rules losing their

regulatory effects in people’s lives. He linked this to marriage, arguing that
anomy is the outcome of ‘more unhappy households’ (1951: 273). While lack of
regulation fails to protect individuals against suicide, so do its excesses. Too much
regulation leads to what Durkheim termed fatalistic suicide. Using examples of
very young husbands, childless married women and slaves, Durkheim defined
fatalistic suicide as ‘that of persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions
violently choked by oppressive discipline’ (1951: 276). Unfortunately, Durkheim
had little to say about this type of suicide. He relegated his explanation to a
mere footnote, stating its categorization was simply ‘for completeness’ sake’
(Durkheim 1951: 276).
It is evident that gender has relatively little to do with the methodological
framing of suicide as social. Yet gender troubled Durkheim. His evaluation of
egoistic and anomic suicides concludes with a debate about gender differences.
I want to suggest, however, that gender is a problem for Durkheim not because
of women per se, but because of what happens to the masculine and masculinist
character of the social in suicide. Gender is a problem because it threatens the
masculine and masculinist character of the social, even though the social is
already gendered. This has effects on suicide and rationality, to which I now turn.
The Troubling Effects of Gender in Suicide
Gender makes an appearance in Suicide in two ways. First, gender appears as

a statistical difference. Durkheim found male rates of suicide in general to be
substantially higher than female rates, thus concluding that ‘suicide happens
to be an essentially male phenomenon’ (1951: 72). Secondly, gender impacts
on the effect of marriage and divorce on male and female rates (Durkheim
1951: 183, 262, 264, 267–8). In egoistic and anomic suicides, Durkheim found
marriage decreases male rates of suicide yet increases female rates. Divorce has
an inverse effect by increasing male deaths and decreasing female deaths (1951:
184, 188–9, 268–9, 272). Durkheim deduced that ‘conjugal society is harmful
to the woman and aggravates her tendency to suicide’ (1951: 189). He actually
55
admitted that marriage is favourable to women only when divorce is more

widely practised (Durkheim 1951: 269). It is clear that this was a surprise for
Durkheim, one he found disturbing (1951: 384) since it undermined his view of
the monogamous heterosexual marriage as the safety net against suicide (1951:
173, 178–80, 198, 202). To deal with this problem, Durkheim turned to gender.
Focusing on egoistic suicide, Durkheim explained that lower female rates
of suicide are signs of women’s immunity thanks to their emotions. ‘Actually,’
Durkheim clarified,
if this is her privilege it is because her sensibility is rudimentary rather than

highly developed. As she lives outside of community existence more than
man, she is less penetrated by it … Man, on the contrary, is hard beset in this
respect. As his thought and activity develop, they increasingly overflow these
antiquated forms … Because he is a more complex social being, he can maintain
his equilibrium only by finding more points of support outside himself, and it
is because his moral balance depends on a larger number of conditions that it is
more easily disturbed. (1951: 215–16)
Durkheim’s explanation demonstrates that men and women are different and,
as a result, these generate different suicidal outcomes. Where one is rudimentary
and asocial, the other is social, moral and cultured (Sydie 1987, 2004, Witz and
Marshall 2004b). This, however, is constituted by one’s ability to transcend
the material conditions of the body. Unlike the male body, the female body
fails at this project and therefore is moored by nature (Lehmann 1990). For
Durkheim, this signals immunity to suicide. In contrast, I am arguing that
immunity actually gives form to something else by considering the following.
If women’s rates are lower, it is not because for instance they rationally choose
to suicide less, but because they are more passive by ‘nature’. In so doing,
women’s suicide is invoked as lacking agency and this lack is bound to their
female bodies. This lack of immunity, however, signals men’s lack of immunity
as agentic, governed by the rational abstract mind. What looks like a move to
erase gender reinstates gender. Durkheim configured the social construction
Durkheim continued to invoke suicide as masculine and masculinist in his
evaluation of anomic suicide. This time, however, he focused on the regulation
of male and female sexual desire in heterosexual marriage. Troubled by the
association between divorce and the male rate of suicide, Durkheim wrote:
Woman’s sexual needs have less of a mental character because, generally

speaking, her mental life is less developed. These needs are more closely
related to the needs of the organism, following rather than leading them,
and consequently find in them an efficient restraint. Being a more instinctive
56
creature than man, woman has only to follow her instincts to find calmness and
peace. She thus does not require so strict a social regulation as marriage, and
particularly as monogamic marriage … marriage is not in the same degree useful
to her for limiting her desires, which are naturally limited, and for teaching her
to be contented with her lot; but it prevents her from changing it if it becomes
intolerable. (1951: 272)
Once again Durkheim situated women as natural, tethered to their material

female bodies. This time, however, their bodies are governed by sexual instincts.
Within the normative framework of heterosexuality, female sexuality appears to
be naturally self-regulating and therefore, unlike heterosexual men, heterosexual
women need marriage less to regulate their sexual desires (Lehmann 1990, 1991,
Pedersen 2001). And their less developed ‘mental character’ explains why their
rates of suicide increase with marriage and decrease with divorce. This, I think,
invokes female suicide through the material, natural female body that women
are unable to control and transcend. Furthermore, female suicide is constituted
by feminine lack of rationality. Thus, women may suicide, but their deaths do
not match the standards of masculine conditions of agency.7 In a nutshell, the
nature of their suicides is passive.
Durkheim’s recognition of gender situates men as possessing and women
as lacking agency and rationality in the gendering of suicide. This, I want to
suggest, has serious analytical implications. Although Durkheim (1951: 385–6)
explicitly indicated that differences between men and women will disappear
over time, his overall framework fails to be socially grounded in a coherent
manner since part of it derives from highly deterministic biological assumptions
about women. If women are too primitive and therefore unable to assimilate
into society, then it is logically impossible for women to experience altruistic
suicide (March 1982). Since anomic suicide is situated as a morally grounded
outcome, and since women are virtually pre-moral, a breakdown of regulative
norms should have a marginal effect on women (March 1982; Lehmann 1995a).
Egoistic suicide suffers the same fate, as it requires excessive individualism
with the presence of civilized mental capacities (March 1982). Since women
do not possess either of these characteristics, egoistic suicide fails to account
for women’s experiences of suicide (Lehmann 1995a). And although Durkheim
seemed to attribute excessive regulation to women, he nevertheless contradicted
himself in his conception of fatalistic suicide. This is because women cannot be
fatalistic since they lack passions and desires despite the fact that, as Kushner
7 In later sections, Durkheim contradicted his emphasis on the body as a source

for restraining suicide by arguing that ‘[w]oman kills herself less … not because of
physiological differences from man but because she does not participate in collective
life in the same way’ (1951: 341).
57
and Sterk (2005) emphasize, the lack of equality for women during Durkheim’s
era would have led to plenty of deaths that could be categorized as fatalistic
suicides. It is surprising that women’s suicide can be recognized at all given that
one needs to have the will to be integrated into, and regulated by, society.
It is tempting to conclude that Durkheim’s theorization of suicide is
relevant to the analysis of male suicides only. It is also tempting to conclude
that Durkheim’s contribution is about men’s lives only, since the social is largely
characterized by the public sphere. This is exacerbated by the assumption that
what it means to be a man materializes through the mind and what it means to
be a woman materializes through the body. Combined, these factors reinforce
the Cartesian opposition between the mind and the body. Suicide is constituted
as belonging to the highly abstract mind and not the body, despite being
performed through and dependent on the body. Although Durkheim (1951)
discussed the body, he denied the body any theoretical significance. At best, it
was constituted as inert matter, superimposed by the social. At the same time,
it was the male body that mattered to the social theorization of suicide, made
evident on the basis of empirical data.
Yet something more complicated takes place in Durkheim’s theorization.
Witz and Marshall (2003) argue that, while women in Durkheim’s work occupy
their bodies and men occupy their minds, men are also bound to their material
bodies. The authors identify this difference as ‘a deep ontology of difference’ (Witz
and Marshall 2004b: 21, original emphasis). This ontology, the authors contend,
saturates women with corporeality (Witz and Marshall 2003). Men, however,
are located in their bodies, yet simultaneously transcend their bodies to become
embodied (Witz 2000, Witz and Marshall 2004b). Thus, there is a double sense
to being a man in Durkheim’s work through which social experience can be
treated as ‘a medium for the constitution of social life’ (Shilling 2001: 336).
Embodiment becomes the platform for the social, furthered by the masculinist
capacity to transcend the corporeal body.
Durkheim was quite aware of this double sense of being a man. In an essay
entitled ‘The dualism of human nature and its social conditions’, Durkheim
identified the double sense of being a man as ‘homo duplex’ (1960a: 328). Homo
duplex is the ‘double center of gravity’, made up of ‘our individuality – and, more
particularly, our body in which it is based; and on the other is everything in us
that expresses something other than ourselves’ (Durkheim 1960a: 328). Homo
duplex plays a central role in the theoretical framework of suicide. In relation to
egoistic suicide, Durkheim noted that ‘man is double, that is because social man
superimposes himself upon physical man’ (1951: 213). This, I think, shows that
something about masculinity in suicide is dependent on the body. For Durkheim,
however, this was not the case. In relation to anomic suicide, he argued that this
‘is not the case with man, because most of his needs are not dependent on his
body or not to the same degree’ (1951: 247). He explained his point further by
58
stating that man ‘is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on
him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels.
Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes
the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society’ (1951: 252).
Thus masculinity is already located in the social, constituted via morality,
sociality, abstractness and rationality. Durkheim’s claim, I am arguing, is
contradictory. Suicide as social cannot avoid being dependent on the material
body. If it were not for this dependence, it would be difficult to make certain
claims about suicide as social, not only because men and masculinity are at the
centre of the social but because the male body is men’s connection to the social.
Put simply, the body is part of materializing suicide as social and, therefore,
the body is also implicated in the social. Hence, suicide as an outcome is not
a matter of men and women intrinsically having different levels of agency.
Instead, suicide as an outcome is a matter of how gender norms shape agency,
constituted by masculinist conditions of rationality and autonomy. These
conditions render the male body an absent presence.
Marshall writes that the ‘male sexual body … requires more active and more
actively internalized social regulation precisely because it, unlike the female body,
is unmoored from nature through its sociality, rendering it far more vulnerable
to disruption and dysfunction’ (2002: 142). Durkheim implied this vulnerability
by suggesting that ‘he can maintain his equilibrium only by finding more points
of support outside himself, and it is because his moral balance depends on a
larger number of conditions that it is more easily disturbed’ (1951: 216). Thus,
we have a paradox. The double sense of man constitutes male embodiment and
agency via autonomy, rationality and corporeal transcendence. At the same time,
this sense is a source of vulnerability. This, I am arguing, reveals maleness as
no less corporeal. By being invested with sociality, and divested of corporeality,
the emphasis on homo duplex conceals male corporeal vulnerability to disavow
masculine abjection in suicide.
Despite the contradictions, Durkheim’s analysis is useful for challenging
the construction of suicide as masculine and masculinist. This begins with
Durkheim’s recognition of suicide as performance. In discussing individual
forms of the four social types of suicide, Durkheim wrote: ‘There are really very
different varieties of suicides, and these differences appear in the way suicide is
performed. Acts and agents may thus be classified in a certain number of species;
these species also correspond in essential traits with the types of suicide’ (1951:
287, my emphasis). A few pages later Durkheim (1951: 291) made a connection
between performance and methods of suicide. He emphasized that there is no
connection between suicide and ‘the most common methods of performance’,
identified as strangulation and hanging, drowning, firearms, jumping, poisoning
59
and asphyxiation (1951: 291).8 For Durkheim, the ‘form of death chosen by
the suicide is therefore something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide.
Intimately related as these two elements of a single act seem, they are actually
independent of each other (1951: 293).
Once again Durkheim contradicted himself. While methods of suicide bear
no relationship to suicide as social, the two cannot be independent. Suicide has
to be carried out by particular means for us to understand it as a social outcome.
Put differently, how can you have a performance without performance being
constituted by and through something that shapes that performance? My point
is that the social ontology of suicide is informed by what the performance
of the act hails. This does not mean that suicide is a matter of performing
something. Rather, suicide is bound to the way particular methods shape it as an
outcome, enabled rather than disabled by the body. Durkheim’s contradiction
reveals suicide as performative.
In light of the above, my argument is that suicide as masculine and
masculinist is simultaneously corporeal and embodied. Durkheim’s positioning
of male bodies as vulnerable tells us that male bodies are corporeally present
even if the absent present form of social embodiment replaces corporeality.
This, however, is short-lived since the male body is social and material at once.
Critically evaluating Durkheim’s masculine ontology of the social, Witz and
Marshall assert that,
because the boundary between the natural and the social must be slippery
and unstable, male bodies are abject as they disappear at the unstable boundary
between ‘the corporeal’ and ‘the social’. It is in that borderland, then, between
female corporeality and male sociality that, for a fleeting conceptual moment,
male bodies appear, only to effect their immediate disappearance through
an implicit notion of male embodiment – an always, already mediate and
approximate fleshiness, as distinct from the immediate, proximate fleshiness of
female corporeality. (2004b: 28, original emphasis)
In some sense, the separation between suicide and its methods becomes yet
another way of not only denying the corporeal vulnerability of the male body
but also ignoring the corporeality of autonomy and rationality in Durkheim’s
gendering of suicide.
Having said this, I want to return to one fleeting moment of male corporeality
I examined towards the end of the previous chapter. In trying to blur the
distinction between passive and active suicide, I argued that active suicide is
no less ‘attention seeking’ – a description often attributed to passive suicide. I
8 Durkheim noted that a man may kill himself with something ‘nearest to his hand
and made familiar to him by daily use’ (1951: 292).
60
thought this to be the case because active suicides draw significant amounts of
attention as a result of the horrifying disfiguration inscribed through wounds,
fluids and blood. Alongside this, I considered whether what is interpreted as
‘unmasculine’ in some interpretations of male suicides is, to some degree,
shaped by a fear of losing one’s masculinity, because it looks as if survival is
almost unbearable for some men.
Curiously, Durkheim’s contradictions highlight that active suicides are
saturated with male corporeality as a result of men using methods such as
firearms. As such, this corporeality speaks of vulnerability and abjection.
Understanding suicide as masculine and masculinist can never be outside
vulnerability and abjection. My suggestion is that whatever is deemed as active
is not solely conditioned by a disembodied form of masculinist agency and
rationality. Instead, what is active is conceptually dependent on corporeal
vulnerability without which we cannot understand suicide. My suggestion is
that too much attention to female corporeality in passive methods might very
well be a discursive way of denying the failure of the masculinist paradigm to
maintain its ideal of bodily transcendence. This denial, I think, masks the fear
of vulnerability let alone the degree to which vulnerability is real. What is at
stake is not only the economy of meanings that interpret suicide, but how this
economy functions to conceal some effects and render others visible in the
construction of suicide as social.
Conclusion
This first analytical ‘case study’ offered a series of reminders. It has reminded
us that our knowing of suicide cannot be discussed outside of Durkheim’s
contribution. Over a century later, I have also reminded Durkheim posthumously
of the conditions of his own project. While statistically suicide may have been
a male phenomenon during his era, how he theorized suicide privileged what
is male, masculine and active over what is female, feminine and passive. While
statistics qualified his arguments, they also established ‘the authority of certain
visions of social order, of organizing perceptions of “experience”’ (Scott
1988: 115). This is precisely what suicidology should examine in its continual
recognition of Durkheim’s contribution. This, I think, will put a stop to treating
suicide as self-evident and obvious, for the sake of sustaining the normative
power of statistics.
Durkheim’s work is complex and relatively radical given that he saw society,
rather than the individual, as a source of understanding suicide. Gender troubled
Durkheim over and over again. Even though he tried, Durkheim could not get
away from gender. Presumably against his intentions, it is clear that it would not
have been possible to conceptualize suicide as social without gender. Therefore
61
Durkheim’s theorization of suicide can never be read outside of gender. To

do so is to miss an important point about the social construction of suicide.
Alongside this, it is clear that the material body plays a role in concealing the
gendered assumptions at work in thinking of suicide as social. Exactly how
such concealment happens is the focus of the next chapter.
62
Chapter 4
‘Fact-Finding Exercises’:
The Coroner, Suicide and Gender1
Introduction
The coronial process of inquiry speaks not only of the dead, but also for the
dead. in the context of suicide, this inquiry is composite. it is a composite of
legislation and judicial precedent. it is also a blend of multiple and different
parts that enable the recognition of suicide. despite law’s dependence on the
authority of expert discourses such as medical and psychiatric knowledge, the
coroner truly has the last word on what counts as suicide. in my mind other
expert discourses are the supporting actors. So for now, the centre stage will
belong to the coronial process of determining the factuality of suicide.
how legal processes speak of and for the dead is problematic. without
denying its importance, my quarrel with this form of speaking is that gender
does not matter. Quite simply, gender is not a legal matter for the coroner’s
court to consider. This is because, as freckelton (1998) points out, inquests are
objective, fact-finding exercises. While this might be the case, I will argue that
gender matters quite a lot. in fact, suicide is simultaneously produced as gender-
neutral and gender-saturated, via the mind–body dichotomy. while this comes
across as a strange paradox – more so than the one durkheim facilitated – i
will show that this process that is supposedly devoid of gender is a discursive
strategy imbued with masculine and masculinist norms. Thus, my aim in this
chapter is twofold: to show how neutrality in legal articulations of suicide can
never be thought of outside gender, and to show how the invoked materiality
of the body is part of concealing gendered norms in suicide.
i will begin chapter 4 by once again returning to history. i will discuss
aspects of past legal representations of suicide, to see what they offer to
the more contemporary and specific context of coronial inquest practices in
australia.2 following this, i will analyse examples of South australian coronial
1 a very early version of this chapter was published as an article in: Jaworski, K. 2002.
Bodily inscriptions and gender in legal discourses of suicide. Sister in Law, 6, 168–84.
2 The determination of causes of death is based on what is termed a ‘reportable
death’. in South australia’s Coroners Act 2003, s. 3, a reportable death is defined as the
State death of a person under an array of circumstances, which include ‘unexpected,
inquests, and focus on the relationship between medico-legal and psychiatric

interventions deployed to determine the cause of death.3 Even though I draw on
the Australian context, in no way do I consider it to be universal. Nevertheless,
its specificity elucidates how neutrality operates in the gendering of suicide.
Attentive to how gendering discursively fashions our understanding of suicide,
I will finally examine whether the way the dead are spoken about can be read as
performative speech acts, and whether the factual neutrality of language is, as
suggested above, always and already gendered.
Historical Legal Representations of Suicide
The Coroner’s Court is one of the oldest English institutions of law. Since 1194,
the Coroner’s Court served an administrative function, investigating the causes
of sudden and violent deaths, including suicide (Dix, Errington, Nicholson and
Powe 1996, Howarth 1997, Knapman and Powers 1985, Matthews and Forman
1986, Smith 1904, Waller 1992, 1994). This function, however, was not always
neutral. Influenced by tensions between Roman and canon laws from earlier
centuries, suicide was treated as a felony (Aries 1974, Groot 2000, Schrage
2000). In fact, the Coroner Court’s administrative function was inquisitorial
– a mechanism for discovering and punishing the dead suspected of suicidal
motives (Murray 2000).
From the outset, the body played a vital part. Without its actual presence
it was almost impossible to commence the coronial investigations. In some
cases, writes Murray, ‘pedantic lawyers could “make” a body, in the form of the
puppet, and “punish” that, a form of legal play-acting’ in cases where bodies
were too decomposed (2000: 17).4 Bringing a suicide to legal attention, however,
depended on what clues were inscribed on bodies by the actual methods of
killing oneself. For instance, Seabourne and Seabourne explain:
Bodies of those who starved themselves to death might not have been brought
before the coroner because there would be no external signs of violence. If they
were investigated by the coroner … the inquest itself concentrated on searching
for bruises and wounds, so that it would not be likely to discover causes of death
as starvation or dehydration. (2000: 21, 26, my emphasis)
unnatural, unusual, violent or unknown cause’. An earlier version of the Act – Coroners
Act 1975 – omitted unexpected and unnatural from the criteria.
3 I draw on older inquest findings. Aside from the fact that they do not appear
frequently, the structure of the findings always remains the same.
4 Writing in the context of Victorian and Edwardian England, Anderson notes that
by law an inquest almost always ‘included a view of the body, often unclothed’ (1987: 33).
64
‘Fact-Finding Exercises’
Hence, not only was the body significant but also what was ‘written’ on its
surfaces via wounds, bruises and cuts (Foucault 1984, 1991, Grosz 1990, 1994,
1995). Suicide was legally recognized therefore through physically sustained
visible markings that confirmed and conformed to what was interpreted as
violence. This was not a matter of what was recognized but how given bodily
inscriptions were recognized. In this sense, suicide was legally present by virtue
of its visibility, rendered as material and observable (McManus 2004).
Punishment of suicides included confiscation of property, repossessed
by the Crown (Knapman and Powers 1985, Matthews and Forman 1986,
Murray 1998). As a result, the body was necessary not only because it qualified
specific meanings of violence, but also because it provided the grounds to
confiscate wealth and issue punishment. Similar to what Foucault (1991: 3–6)
describes at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, penalizing suicide was an
elaborate, tortuous practice during the Middle Ages. At first, the corpse was
dragged through the streets, followed by hanging and/or beheading, staking,
quartering and burning. In Foucault’s words, ‘justice pursues the body beyond
all possible pain’ (1991: 34). Neeley (1994) and Murray (1998) note that in
the case of hanging, unless the body was left to the mercy of the birds and
wind, only a judicial officer had the authority to take the body down from the
gallows. In this sense, law had a regulatory grip upon the body, thus making
the intelligibility of suicide dependent rather than independent of the legal
apparatus of production (Foucault 1991).
It is clear that the body, and what is done to it, play a central role. Suicide was
legally produced as publicly immoral and illegal, where ‘suicides’ bodies served
as a graphic symbolic warning to others’ (McManus 2004: 195). Such practices
can be argued as systematically marking suicide or, as Foucault suggests, ‘the
instrumental coding of the body’ (1991: 153). Thus, rituals of torture are
expressions of power invested in the Coroner’s Court and its investigative
processes (McManus 2004). The intelligibility of suicide materializes on the
basis of the body being ‘marked, transformed and written upon’, generating
‘an interior, an underlying depth’ that reveals the intentions as suicidal, and
thereby criminal (Grosz 1995: 33–4). Suicides were punished not because they
were already dead but because dead bodies represented the intention to kill
oneself (McManus 2004, Murray 1998). Sometimes it was difficult to prove
intentions since the dead could no longer speak. Eliciting a confession was
literally impossible. Thus, as Murray explains, witnesses served the purpose of
‘making windows into their minds … into the minds of the dead, who did not
yield up their secrets’ (2000: 173).5 This, I think, can be read not only as law
5 Curiously, as Tatz (2001) points out, lawyers instead of doctors devised the idea
that suicide was caused by mental illness.
65
speaking of the dead but also for the dead, with the body residing at the centre
of such speaking as an effect of legal power.
Punishment did not stop with torture. The corpse was denied burial on
consecrated grounds. For instance, burial under the gallows demonstrated
that punishment was within legal jurisdiction. In other instances, bodies were
disposed of at crossroads, open fields or garbage pits. Burials often reflected
the method of death; for example if a person hanged herself or himself, the
noose would be replaced around the neck (Leiboff 2005, Murray 1998, 2000,
Neeley 1994). In light of this, I am arguing that coronial inquests did not simply
deal with, or account for, suicide. Instead, inquests recognized and utilized the
body as an inscriptive signifying surface on which suicide, as a material act,
was rendered intelligible. Such practices did not set suicide apart from legal
discourse. Suicide was ‘realised only in and through the discursive elements
which surround the objects in question’ (Prior 1989: 3). The body was ‘made
visible and palpable through the existence of discursive practices’, which
means that making sense of suicide did not consist of ‘referents about which
there are discourses but objects constructed by discourse’ (Prior 1989: 3). The
interpretation of suicide was not only dependent on coronial law but also on
the power of such law to produce effects in particular contexts of practice.
What can be said of gender? I am tempted to conclude that some of the
historical representations of suicide are devoid of gender. However, there are
glimpses into the past that negate this total absence. Murray (1998) notes that in
France and England judges, who were totally male until the twentieth century,
were chivalrous towards women, ensuring that their sentencing was less harsh.
If the discovered body were male, it would be dragged and hanged, and if female
it would be ‘burned under the gallows’ (Murray 2000: 33). While both forms of
punishment involved public displays of torture, the male body occupied more
public, visible space, both inside and outside the coroner’s courtroom. Gender
did matter. I want to suggest that suicide was produced as more visibly male.
Men and male bodies belonged to the public realm not only in life, but also in
death. Such visibility was furthered by practices of recording death. Female
suicides were not documented as regularly as male suicides because, as Murray
comments, ‘the suicides of women scarcely justified the elaborate procedure of
an inquisition’ (1998: 320). This was justified on the basis that men knew what
they were doing, as opposed to women, because their rate of suicide was much
higher (Murray 1998). Yet the first known coronial inquest relates to a suicide
committed by a woman, recorded as having hanged herself with her wealth
amounting to seven shillings and a penny (Murray 1998: 121). This comparative
wealth perhaps explains the decision to conduct an inquest, positioning the
woman in the otherwise unfamiliar public realm of ownership.
I want to suggest that patterns of investigating, punishing and documenting
suicide in coronial inquests reveal the gender ascribed to suicidal agency. Men
66
were assumed to ‘know what they were doing’. Because of how their doings
were read, male deaths were given more validity, recognized as instrumental in
regard to suicidal intentions. This has a number of immediate implications for
the gendering of suicide. First, agency is made to appear as residing principally
in male bodies. Or, at the very least, male bodies are represented as having more
capacity to carry out the act of suicide. Secondly, by interpreting agency through
male bodies, some meanings are included at the expense of others. Thirdly, and
almost in contradiction to what I have just said, suicide is positioned as passive,
because it is invoked by law as criminal. This is particularly the case because, as
Seabourne and Seabourne (2000) argue, coronial inquests sought to demonstrate
signs of psychological failure and despair as reasons for the deceased’s intention
to suicide. In a nutshell, even though gender appears shrouded in absence and
silence, there are still traces of the normative workings of gendered norms.
Corporeal punishment was no longer part of coronial inquests sometime
towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In England, the last known record of corporeal punishment took place ‘in 1823
at the crossroads formed by Eaton Street, Kings Road and Grosvenor Place
in Westminster’ (Thurston 1958: 114). Although suicide was still regarded as
a criminal act, the coroner’s powers to sanction torture and subsequent burial
were removed in 1824 by the Burial of Suicides Act suspending the prohibition
of burying the body on consecrated grounds (Thurston 1958). Despite white
colonial Australia’s inheritance of British judicial law, there seems to be little
evidence of corporeal punishment of suicide in Australia (Waller 1992). Still, it
is clear that suicide was regarded as a criminal act. For instance, The Manual for
Coroners in South Australia classed suicide as homicide, even though it was noted
that the rites of Christian burial were no longer forbidden (Smith 1904). Despite
such changes, the body remained a central part of coronial investigations,
acting as the basis upon which causes of death could be established, with the
assistance of expert knowledge such as medicine and later psychiatry. And as
I will demonstrate in a little while, gender norms reside at the heart of the
composite nature of contemporary coronial inquests.
Coronial Findings in South Australia
In contemporary coronial inquests, the body still plays a key role. Although its
presence is no longer required in the courtroom and neither are juries, without
bodies it is almost impossible to investigate the causes of sudden deaths (Coroners
Act 1975, s. 17; Coroners Act 2003, s. 32). The starting point of any inquest is
the evidence of a dead body within a given jurisdiction (Matthews and Forman
67
1986).6 In the case of South Australia, a reference ‘to a dead person means the
whole, or any part, of the body, whatever its physical state may be’ (Coroners
Act 1975, s. 6). This interpretation of the body continues in the latest South
Australian Coroners Act 2003, s. 3 where the ‘body of the dead person means the
whole, or any part, of the body (whatever its physical state may be)’. Both Acts
infer the meaning of the body as biological, distinct from the deceased mind or
person. The dead body is a vessel for the mind or, as Naffine suggests, ‘mere
housing’ (1999: 105). The purpose of the inquest is to discover and determine
the intentions this housing housed. In some sense, the mind–body dichotomy
is implicitly invoked in coronial law.
According to Ranson (1998) and Moles (2004), the translation and
understanding of the body as biological in coronial jurisdictions is produced
through an almost exclusive reliance on medical autopsies. As I will explain
in Chapter 5, the function of autopsies is to establish the medical cause of
death. The dependence on medical autopsies is evident in the initial explanation
located at the beginning of each inquest document:
I, the said Coroner, do find that Debby Edgell, aged 39 years, late of 10 Halba
Crescent, Paralowie, died at 10 Halba Crescent, Paralowie on the 11th day of
February, 1998 as a result of neck compression due to hanging. (Coroner’s
Court of South Australia 2000b)7
This is crucial since the same description and wording can be found in the
section summarizing the results of the autopsy. Using the same example, this
is as follows:
A post-mortem examination was carried out on the body of the deceased by Dr.
J. D. Gilbert, forensic pathologist, at the Forensic Science Centre on 12 February
1998. Dr. Gilbert confirmed that the cause of death was ‘neck compression due
to hanging’ (Exhibit C.3a, p. 1). (Coroner’s Court of South Australia 2000b)
This example portrays the law’s dependence on other sources of expert

knowledge to determine the cause, and thereby the category, of death. Here,
the cause of death is pinpointed to an anatomical site: the neck. The neck bears
6 Although the body is no longer required to be physically present during coronial

inquests, it still remains ‘under the exclusive control of the State Coroner until the State
Coroner considers that the body is not further required for the purposes of an inquest
… [and] issues an authorisation for the disposal of human remains in respect of the
body’ (Coroners Act 2003, s 32(1)).
7 Although summaries of findings are publicly available, information is still
sensitive. Thus, I have masked the names throughout the chapter.
68
an inscription described as compression. What compression means is important

because, as one post-mortem textbook explains, ‘in all cases of hanging a ligature
mark on the neck and the appearances of the mark are of considerable help in
deciding whether the strangulation was suicidal or not’ (Gresham and Turner
1979: 110). Therefore, the interpretation of suicide relies not only on the fact
that there is an inscription, but also on how the inscription is recognized. The
actual marks on their own do not matter, even though, to borrow Foucault’s
expression, ‘the body manifests the stigmata of past experience’ (1984: 83).
Rather, the marks gain a sudden expression by the manner through which they
are joined in a body (Foucault 1984). This expression is interpreted on the basis
of what is physically inscribed upon the biological surfaces of the body. The
body as biological is signified as the point of origin for the act, bearing the mark
of suicide – and all of this appears as if beyond the influence of accentuating
effects such as gender.
Although significant, medical knowledge is not the only discourse that
produces suicide as gender-neutral in coronial inquests. Where medical expertise
speaks of and for the state of the body, psychiatric interventions speak of and
for the deceased person’s state of mind, as another way of determining ‘the
truth’ about the act. This is often expressed as follows:
There is no doubt that Ms Edgell has had a long history of emotional disturbance
… It is recorded in the case notes that Ms Edgell has been treated in the past by
Dr. O’Brien, psychiatrist, and had received psychiatric medication in the form
of Prozac (an anti-depressant) and lithium (a mood stabiliser). (Coroner’s Court
of South Australia 2000b)
Psychiatric discourses inscribe the individual through the state of mind

referred to as a ‘condition’. Even though intentions to suicide are established
physically, these are pathologized through psychiatric markings of instability, to
‘reveal’ an individual out of control. Hence suicide is an act not only reduced
to its outcome, but also to the mental state of the one who acted. Nevertheless,
references are made again to bodily inscriptions, for instance through narratives
of behaviour prior to death such as: ‘Whilst in the hospital that time she tried
to slash her wrists’ (Coroner’s Court of South Australia 2000b). In this sense,
psychiatry is deployed to construct ‘the body’s movements into “behavior,” that
then has interpersonally and socially identifiable meanings’ (Grosz 1995: 35).
The meanings identified here relate to establishing whether or not they signify
suicide. While the state of mind turns out to be paradoxically dependent on
bodily inscriptions for its articulation, and the body sits within a gendered set
of cultural understandings, the ‘behaviour’ said to attest the state of mind is still
represented as if devoid of gender.
69
I want to suggest that the initial problem with bodily inscriptions in these
examples of coronial inquests lies with the assumption that ‘body’ and ‘mind’
are neutral, impartial and stable terms, residing outside culture and context and,
in particular, cultural interpretations of suicide. One could argue that gender
neutrality is sustained by treating such terms as natural, based on logic that
‘law is a function of enlightened reason’ (Cheah, Fraser and Grbich 1996: xi).
This sort of logic is sustained by the mind–body binary through which the
body is interpreted as a factually independent substance (Cheah and Grosz
1996: 6). Asking what constitutes the body in coronial law and practice, Burton,
Chambers and Gill state that ‘this is mostly a matter of common sense and
degree’ (1985: 23). Although the authors are concerned with whether body
parts can be treated as evidence, they see the body as ‘obvious evidence’ in
reference to the physical remains of the person. If something is so self-evident
then, as Naffine and Owens (1997) comment, there is no reason to question its
usage. However, legal theorists such as Davies (1997) and O’Donovan (1997)
argue that terms such as ‘neutral’ and ‘natural’ in law are political categories that
have served to neutralize meanings that do not fit into what is proclaimed as
self-evident and value free. Consequently, the tendency to assume something
is neutral may already be imbued with gender, sustaining the invisibility of
gendered norms in the gendering of suicide, and suppressing gendered elements
that might otherwise trouble the formulae guaranteeing ‘fact’ and ‘objectivity’.
The last inquest finding I cited above demonstrates the possibility of
neutrality as gendered. Note the female suicide in question: ‘she tried to slash
her wrists’. Precisely what this means is unclear. Presumably she made an
attempt to do so, but failed. What is unknown is if this involved for instance
the concealment of a blade, discovered before any physical act commenced.
Or maybe a full ‘slash’ at the veins and arteries of the wrists, with successful
intervention by the medical staff. Exactly where a line should be drawn between
‘slashed her wrists’ and ‘tried to slash her wrists’ is also left unclear – and this
uncertainty works in very interesting gendered ways to evade the ‘certainty’
of intention for this case. My point is that language invokes the deceased’s
intentions as opaque.
The practice of law makes a claim to neutrality, objectivity and universality,
on the assumption that law possesses its own autonomous, internal logic
(Edwards 1996, Naffine 1990, Naffine and Owens 1997). The effects of this
claim can be considered here. Through its reliance on the scientific world of
‘evidence’, what and who enters the proceedings is rendered free of any cultural
influences via the inductive process of searching for the causes of death. As
Naffine (1997: 84) contends, the law simply takes and responds to what it finds.
But, as Edwards (1996) argues, it is through this reasoning that underlying,
value-laden practices are hidden from view. One such underlying aspect is the
use of evidence itself. The South Australian Coroners Act 1975 (s 22) and the
70
more recent Coroners Act 2003 (s 24) state that the coroner is not bound by
strict rules of evidence, but may nevertheless follow them as applicable. This
is because, as Freckelton (1992, 1998) explains, it is inappropriate to make any
findings and recommendations that are not based upon reliable evidence. Yet,
as Hunter and Mack (1997) observe, if the rules of evidence are neutral –
namely, outside cultural contexts – so that the law appears neutral, then why
are Acts updated? And if they are updated, does this indicate that something
within law is in fact not fixed precisely? Is law too dependent on the larger social
context in which it functions as an institution? If this is the case, can we ever
claim with absolute certainty that legal interpretations of suicide rest outside
socio-cultural influences? In posing these questions, I am not disputing that
suicide is real. Nor am I dismissing the importance of evidence. My point is
that we need to consider whether establishing the cause of death is always and
already entirely autonomous and neutral.
Of course the physical body is the primary source of legally admissible
evidence via the law as well as medical autopsies. In light of this, I want to
suggest that the body is interpreted as a machine, which, at some point, ceased
to operate due to an identifiable malfunction or cause. Through this lack of
function death is interpreted, even though suicide must be analysed from its
details. But are these details in fact sufficient for such analysis? Writers such
as Naffine (1997, 1999) show that the legal understanding of the biological
body is intertwined with concepts of autonomy and self-evidence. Cheah and
Grosz (1996) argue that the body has been traditionally linked with women and
femininity, a linking influenced by the mind–body dichotomy. The association
with malfunction and lack of control situates the body as in need of reason,
which can step in and regulate meanings signifying death. At the same time,
however, the body is bound to masculinist norms through its superior capacity
to demonstrate actions culturally interpreted as autonomy. This autonomy is
culturally inscribed onto the male body through the assumption that the body
pre-exists the act. What is found on its site can be observed objectively, and used
to determine the verdict of suicide. This assumption, however, is problematic.
Given that the deceased corpse within legal discourses comes with a sense of a
gendered history, this neutral/objective/factual processing is both impure and
self-justifying. To emphasize a similar point, Gatens argues that the ‘human
body is always a signified body and as such cannot be understood as a “neutral
object” upon which science may construct “true” discourses. The human body
and its history presuppose each other’ (1996: 70).
I too want to argue that history exceeds the body because it cannot be
separated from its past. Suicide cannot be presumed to be neutral, as its
discursive production continues to be based on unquestioned meanings
and assumptions. If the conventional interpretation of suicide is exceeded
by history, such performative excess indicates that the manner in which
71
the body is inscribed cannot rest outside gender in the form of masculinist
norms of autonomy. If suicide is retained as having little to do with gender,
masculinist conditions will continue to determine the norm for autonomy in
its materialization. If this is the case, how can this discursive production of
knowledge of suicide be truly gender-neutral?
Naffine and Owens (1997) claim that all versions of law rely on a certain
description of a person. In coronial inquests, this certainly takes place
where the person is referred to as ‘the deceased’. Reference to the person is
preoccupied with only one element: whether the person possessed the intention
to kill himself or herself. This is demonstrated through reliance on psychiatric
knowledge that ‘explains’ an unsound state for the mind in question. However,
as Cheah and Grosz (1996) argue, the notion of mind in legal practice refers
only to autonomy and rationality. This is based upon liberal humanist notions
of the subject that treat the mind as the basis upon which personhood is
constructed, abstracted from cultural contexts. The ‘essence’ of the person is
associated with the mind and its ability to reason (Naffine 1999). This ability,
however, has been traditionally associated with masculinity (Gatens 1996, Grosz
1994, 1995). The mind and reason are linked with masculinity, as opposed
to femininity with the body. If this is the case, what are the implications for
suicide in coronial inquests? In some sense, whether male or female, each case
will be articulated in terms of personhood measured against invisible gendered
criteria of the masculinist subject. In other words, masculine reason regulates
an out-of-control body, which must indicate both ‘un-reason’ and femininity
once it bears the inscriptions of suicide. Hidden from view, this decline from
masculinity maintains a neutral interpretation of suicide. Even though notions
of universality are implicitly connected with masculine norms in Western
legal practice, femininity as weakness and illogicality threatens. Hence, I am
suggesting that the use of ‘the state of mind’ in coronial inquiries imbues
suicide with gender – and so suicide becomes a masculine and masculinist
form of knowing.
How is it that coronial inquests maintain gender-neutral interpretations of
suicide, when suicide is simultaneously gender-neutral and gender-saturated?
By reading some aspects of coronial inquests, it is clear that the body enters a
particular kind of space, in which only specific bodily inscriptions are interpreted
as visible.8 Visibility, however, is highly dependent on the power vested in
the Coroner’s Court, enabled by a range of required legal activities (Alsop
1998). Thus, I am arguing that the gendering of suicide as gender-neutral has
something to do with the way neutrality materializes through coronial power. I
8 This is because, as Moran writes, ‘many key terms within the law, such as
jurisdiction, sovereignty, are metaphors of space; as boundaries and parameters of
power, authority and violence’ (1999: 40).
72
am also arguing that what appears as neutral in suicide may be interlinked with
the already gendered character of legal reason. Margaret Thornton maintains
that legal texts and sites of practice are dominated by what she calls ‘the male
speaking subject’ (1995b: 200). Addressing this in the context of Australian law,
she writes:
The questionable intellectual basis of the dualism that elevates mind over
body also categorises mind as benchmark male and body as other, that is, as
woman, Aboriginal, homosexual or disabled. Thus, the feminine for example,
is constructed not simply as one of the two sexes, but always as the ‘other’
to the masculine norm … The idea of woman as the inhabitant of a sexed
body is counterposed against disembodied man, the epitome of reason … The
historical and social power of benchmark men has nevertheless enabled them
to monopolise the cultural and the cerebral, propped up by a specious claim to
reason. (Thornton 1995a: 12–13)
On the basis of Thornton’s (1995a, 1995b) assessment, I want to suggest that

gender neutrality is strategically sustained by masculine norms of reason whose
workings are simultaneously made invisible by being disembodied and abstract.
As such, what is gender-neutral in suicide cannot be distanced from what is
gender-saturated. As Foucault writes, ‘the body becomes a pretext’ (1984: 83).
In this case, the body is a pretext for securing the power of the masculinist
subject position to which the legal interpretation of suicide is bound, and
through which suicide is produced as masculine and masculinist knowledge.
‘Finding of Inquest’: Performative Speech Acts in Legal Discourses of

Suicide
Throughout coronial inquests, the dead do not speak. Nevertheless, a form of

speaking on their behalf takes place. Examples of this can be located at the
beginning of each ‘Finding of Inquest’ document. These are as follows:
I, the said Coroner, do find that Anthony Roy Graetz, aged 28 years, late of
Loxton-Berri Road, Loxton, died at Loxton on the 3rd day of April, 1997 as a
result of traumatic brain damage complicating contact .22 calibre gunshot wound
to the midline of the forehead. (Coroner’s Court of South Australia 2000a)
I, the said Coroner, find that, Norman Samual Dean Ball, aged 35 years, late of
37 Hamley Crescent, Mansfield Park, South Australia, died at Mansfield Park on
the 31st day of December 1999 as a result of neck compression from hanging.
(Coroner’s Court of South Australia 2001b)
73
I, the said Coroner, find that Mary Brady, aged 64 years, late of Unit 2, 2 Second
Avenue, Payneham South, South Australia, died at Payneham South on the 15th
of January 2000 as a result of haemorrhagic bronchopneumonia complicating
Doxepin overdose. (Coroner’s Court of South Australia 2001a)
The above examples illustrate a repetitive and coherent pattern in language

about death. This pattern includes significant details such as name, age and place
of residence of the deceased. It communicates where and when the deceased
died and, most importantly, the cause of death. What is significant about such
statements is that they do not address suicide directly. Instead, particular bodily
inscriptions describe suicide indirectly. A gunshot wound to the forehead, neck
compression due to hanging and a haemorrhage as a result of an overdose.
Each inscribes ‘suicide’ onto a body, as far as the ‘evidence’ is read, but onto
a person, as far as the coronial finding positions the report sequencing. Here,
fields of knowing intersect, producing a socially ‘identified’ person, followed by
a scientifically established set of diagnostic marks.
Interestingly, coronial findings move in alternating bands from the socially
named agents – coroner, doctor, psychiatrist – set against scientific ‘facts’. These
facts, or physiological details, bear the suicide act and its legacy to the body.
This oscillation between subject and object works to occupy all epistemological
territory and ‘guarantee’ the ‘finding’. Bodily inscriptions qualify not only the
cause of death but also the manner through which death occurred. Suicide is
named on the basis of a particular method: the use of a firearm, a hanging and
an overdose. In this sense, as Grosz writes, ‘bodies speak, without necessarily
talking, because they become coded with and as signs’ (1995: 35). The coroner’s
pronouncement on the behalf of the deceased encodes the intelligibility of
suicide as a neutral matter of fact, by encompassing both subject and object
positions from which a ‘presence’ can be asserted. In this case, it is the presence
of certainty, or ‘truth’.
These assertions of truth offer a possibility of reading the gendering of
suicide differently. I want to consider the manner in which deceased bodies are
spoken about as performative speech acts. In her analysis of what it means to
name, Butler (1997a) examines Althusser’s idea of interpellation. For Althusser
(1971), the moment in which a person is hailed reiterates and cites meaning
through language choice.9 This grants particular subject positions. As Butler
asserts, ‘the act of recognition becomes an act of constitution: the address
9 Althusser (1971: 163) identifies the concept of interpellation or hailing through

an example of being addressed by a police officer on the street: ‘Hey, you there!’
Althusser explains this example as follows: ‘Assuming that the theoretical scene I
have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this
mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why?
74
animates the subject into existence’ (1997a: 25). For this to happen, however,
one has to recognize that they are called upon, which for Althusser (1971: 163)
involves physically turning towards the direction of the address. In this sense,
Butler (1997a) claims, interpellation requires authority in its address for the
performative effects to materialize. In coronial inquests, the dead cannot respond
to the coroner’s hailing, and cannot ‘recognize’ they are hailed. Instead, the
coroner hails suicide; rendered intelligible by citing particular bodily inscriptions,
simultaneously declared as the causes and methods of death. Even though the
dead cannot ‘speak’, speaking on their behalf is made possible by coronial law
that prescribes and regulates inquest proceedings on the basis of particular
procedural rules (Coroners Act 1975, s. 5;. Coroners Act 2003, s. 42.). This is how
the coroner’s speech act gains power, and why particular statements become
legitimate. What is performative about the coroner’s declaration, however, is
not founded on any material act of suicide. Rather, suicide is constituted in
the act of naming. Suicide is discursively installed through a tightly controlled
linguistic mode of address, mobilized by legal power to name particular forms
of corporeal visibility.
The authority of the coroner’s address depends on an established and
reiterated legal convention, bound to the history of its own practice. While
coronial law is not entirely static, suicide cannot be named outside of the history
of coronial practice – nor can it be named outside the norms that navigate its
interpretations of the body. Therefore, the coroner’s hailing does not reside in
the coroner alone; nor is the interpretation of suicide bound to a single hailing.
Sources inciting speaking on behalf of the dead derive from previous speech
acts. In Butler’s (1997a: 33) terms, whether someone responds to being hailed,
hailing still ‘works’ because of the citational dimension of the speech act and
the historically based conventions that enable hailings.
If this is the case, what can one make of naming suicide as a factually based,
gender-neutral truth? Initially, interpretations of suicide are located in the
body, by emphasizing the physical state of the body. The body appears to be
secured as the point of origin of suicide. But since the coroner’s interpellation
is performatively exceeded by a history of practice, is it ever possible to read
the body as the point of origin for suicide? I do not mean that suicide is not a
bodily act, particularly since hailing always involves the body of the addressee
and the addresser (Butler 1997a, 2004a). What I do mean is that the deceased
body, hailed as the vessel bearing the mark of suicide, is not the only source
that signifies death. It is here that the maintenance of a gender-neutral account
of suicide fails to work.
Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was
really him who was hailed” (and not someone else)’ (1971: 163, original emphasis).
75
If gender neutrality does not work, how might the presence of gender be
read? Butler’s (1997a) analysis of speech acts suggests that certain conditions
must be present in order for subject positions to be granted. The conditions
through which suicide is named, I have been arguing, are based on masculinist
norms. As identified by Thornton (1995a, 1995b), these norms dominate much
of the Western legal tradition. Such norms privilege disembodied reason and
rationality over the material body. What is hailed in coronial investigations is
addressable only through processes of reasoning that ascertain the exact causes
of death and the circumstances under which such causes came to be. Suicide is
named as if gender-neutral, but at each level there are norms that allow naming
to occur – and these norms are always and already gendered. This has significant
implications for the gendering of suicide and the interpretation of suicidal
agency. While coronial inquests take into consideration the state of the body
and the mind, suicide as a completed outcome is reduced to a ‘truth’ elicited only
via the material and visible conditions of the body. The intelligibility of suicidal
intent materializes on the basis of how the causes of death are discursively
constructed as visible, neutral, self-evident and autonomous. A particular brand
of agency is produced, one that appears to have very little to do with gender, yet
one that cannot claim to exist as entirely outside gender. What is gender-neutral
has been masculinist all along.
If the gendering of suicide is dependent on what is inscribed on deceased
bodies and is made available through the one who speaks, then this can only
make sense providing we acknowledge that agency is not autonomous. This, I
think, undermines the interpretation of agency in suicidology as independent
and as reliant on masculine norms of violence. Yet both the body and the signs
that signal methods of suicide appear to be both passive and active. On the one
hand, the dead are rendered passive, for they are spoken about through coronial
investigations. On the other hand, the dead are rendered active, through the
interpretation of different bodily inscriptions, which give form to suicide as a
completed outcome. If the two sides are taken into consideration, what happens
to a gendered interpretation of suicide methods as active and passive? While
coronial speech acts may further secure firearms as active methods, based on
how their use is interpreted as visibly violent, overdoses too seem to be aligned
with activity more than passivity. While overdoses may be further secured as
passive because they are aligned with the material body, firearms too involve the
body even though what this involvement means is not identical to overdoses.
This, I think, shows that the gendered interpretations of suicide can be the case
of ‘either/and’ rather than ‘or’ only. These interpretations can be positioned as
‘active’ and/or ‘passive’. It also shows that what appears as devoid of gender
is caught up with gender. For me, this offers room to question even more the
conditions of our knowledge of suicide.
76
Conclusion
Surprisingly, coronial inquests of suicide consist of more than facts. The

body, as a gendered inscriptive site, appears to be entangled with meanings
that go beyond the immediate surface of the summarized inquest findings.
Whilst terms such as ‘body’ and ‘mind’ may be presented as gender-neutral
on the basis of medico-legal and psychiatric discourses, such terms cannot be
dislodged from the masculinist logics of rationality, reason and autonomy. This
is magnified by historical representations of the English legal tradition, which,
in the course of discovering, investigating and punishing suicide, produced it
as public, recorded, visible and male, literally and philosophically. This is also
magnified through the performativity of coronial language, which signals the
discursive production of suicide as always and already gendered. And so the
highly organized regularity in which the dead are spoken about sustains the
intelligibility of suicide as masculine and masculinist.
My endeavour in Chapter 4 has been to bring the discursive operations of
the masculinist legal subject to the surface, rendering its status of power more
visible. But what happens to this kind of interrogation when the body is in fact
visible? What happens when everything about the body comes across as direct
rather than indirect through reports? What happens when the ‘evidence’ of the
body comes across as corporeal? Does gender matter more or less? I address
these challenging questions by examining medical autopsy practices next.
77
Chapter 5
‘What it Means to See’:
Reading Gender in Medical
Examinations of Suicide1
Introduction
usually carried out by a pathologist, the post-mortem examination is crucial

to verifying whether a death is a suicide. investigating what is required in this
examination, holmes and holmes ask: ‘how does one determine whether a
death is a suicide? .. for example, does the death appear to be self-inflicted?’
(2005: 113, my emphasis). For me, analysing what appears to be self-inflicted is a
difficult task. This is because it involves examining what is visually confronting,
and should come to the attention of very few, excluding those who are grieving
after losing someone through suicide. in this sense, i am cautious about the
analysis i am about to offer. Yet i remain convinced that what happens to
the physical body holds the key to understanding suicide in social and cultural
terms. The body, as an inscriptive corporeal site, is at the heart of suicide’s
epistemological wiring. if we do not consider the physical body more directly,
we will not understand more fully the gendering of suicide.
The body must be rendered an object, one that can be cut open and
inspected to then transform it into an object of scrutiny. Only then can this
object testify self-infliction. The act of seeing is vital to the object’s capacity
to testify self-infliction. Unfortunately, what influences the act of seeing is an
enduring understanding that the body exists as a neutral, autonomous, stable
and visually mappable tableau for displaying suicidal intent. Thus, my aim in
this chapter is to call into question the visual intelligibility of completed suicide
to show that what is rendered visually neutral is never outside cultural and
social norms of gender and, more importantly, to show how knowledge about
suicide is constructed.
Let me be clear about two things. i will not dispute whether post-mortem
practices should be part of verifying suicide. To be honest, I think they should
be. I will also not challenge specific science-based practices integral to the
1 This chapter was published earlier in Abjectly Boundless, edited by Trudy Rudge and Dave
holmes (see Jaworski 2010c). for the purposes of this book, i have amended some sections.
medical examination of deceased bodies. I am not a scientist and I am not

going to delve into the fascinating world of medical science here. Instead, I
am interested in how a scientific practice becomes part of gendering suicide
in ways that at first may appear completely unrelated. With this in mind, I will
argue that the medical gaze inscribes the body as neutral, autonomous and
stable. I will also argue that the gendering of suicide fails to maintain suicide
as ontologically secure. As an effect of power, what it means to see suicided
bodies is discursively entangled with masculine and masculinist norms even
when such norms remain unseen.
Drawing on Foucault’s (1994) work on the medical gaze and on analytical
resources from visual culture, I will begin by situating the issue of what
it means ‘to see’ in the context of medical knowledge. I will then analyse
selected photographic images portraying the examination of deceased bodies
and depicting particular methods of suicide. Lastly, I will interrogate the
interpretation of lethality as a neutral measure of suicidal intent by deploying
Kristeva’s notion of abjection.
Seeing and Knowing: Foucault’s Reading of the Medical Gaze
The threshold between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning
of the nineteenth century witnessed an increase in efforts to observe, measure
and record the natural and social environments. Such efforts were of particular
interest to Foucault (1994) who documented the shift towards hospital-based
medical teaching and research in France at the end of the eighteenth century
in The Birth of the Clinic. This shift occurred as a result of the replacement
of traditional methods of diagnosis with empirically motivated anatomical
dissection of the corpse. From being a largely public spectacle, dissecting
deceased bodies became a hospital-based private practice (Armstrong 1997,
Barker 1984, Young 1997).
Foucault (1994) was interested in the idea of how medical truth became
visible. Disease and suffering, he argued, was ‘not conjured away by means of
a body of neutralized knowledge; they have been redistributed in the space in
which bodies and eyes meet’ (Foucault 1994: xi). Isolating and reducing the body
to ‘the plane of visible manifestations’, the gaze of the doctor now penetrated
the body via the ‘technique of the corpse’ to reveal signs and symptoms of
disease (Foucault 1994: 19, 141). It was not so much that disease suddenly
changed. Rather, new forms of visibility reorganized disease into new patterns,
which now could be mapped onto different bodily surfaces and organs. Foucault
described these new forms of visibility as follows:
80
‘What it Means to See’
it was no longer the gaze of any observer, but that of a doctor supported and justified
by an institution, that of a doctor endowed with the power of decision and intervention.
Moreover, it was a gaze that was not bound by the narrow grid of structure … but that
could and should grasp colors, variations, tiny anomalies, always receptive to the deviant
… it was a gaze that was not content to observe what was self-evident; it must make it
possible to outline chances and risks; it was calculating … The access of the medical gaze
into the sick body … was the result of a recasting at the level of epistemic knowledge
(savoir) itself, and not at the level of accumulated, refined, deepened, adjusted knowledge
(connaissances). (1994: 89, 137)
In this sense, the gaze not only dealt with diseases afflicting individuals; it
became the means through which individual truths could be established.
Bringing individual truths into existence was an effect of power and knowledge.
Medical truths became visible through the clinic as a site of hospital teaching.
The clinic, Foucault (1994) stressed, did not emerge out of nowhere. Instead,
repetitive and rigorous practices of examining, observing and measuring
disease gave rise to this space. The clinic, therefore, was a significant site of
practice because direct physical examination of bodies allowed the physician
to qualify the nature of disease on and in the body (Osborne 1994, Fox 1999).
The individual patient, whose body was rendered as the source and object of
illness, could be treated as a single case available for scrutiny and capable of
comparison with other cases (Armstrong 1983, 1997, Foucault 1994, Young
1997). In this sense, clinical teaching and speaking became synonymous with
learning and seeing, inciting new ways of knowing bodies through language.
What is Visually Mapped as Self-Inflicted?
To analyse the gendering of suicide in post-mortem practices, I want to examine

black and white photographic images of deceased bodies taken from a medical
text entitled Post-mortem Procedures by Geoffrey Gresham and Franklin Turner,
published in 1979. As a text, Post-mortem Procedures is distinctly visual, relying
heavily on visual depictions of deceased bodies and bodily organs.2 Nevertheless,
the text also contains detailed explanations of images. Most of the discussion is
focused on describing relevant details necessary to verify whether the deceased
has suicided (Gresham and Turner 1979: 110). Such details include determining
the extent of injury and damage, the significance of various wounds, bruises and
2 Nowadays, photographic images are used less frequently in post-mortem textbooks. While
the topic of suicide has not disappeared, written language has become the predominant mode
of explaining suicide (Burton and Rutty 2001, Ludwig 2002). Where photographs are included,
the focus is on body organs and tissues (Sheaff and Hopster 2001, 2005, Wagner 2004).
81
marks, and the techniques required to examine various forms of self-infliction

on the body. What is represented in various images exemplifies what is known
of different methods and, importantly, the signs the pathologist should look
for when examining deceased bodies. This connection between visual images
and language maintains the Cartesian philosophical tradition that stipulates that
to see is to perceive (Jenks 1995). Photography then is a significant mechanism
through which the evidence of suicide is captured and represented. In this sense,
photography is part of rendering suicide visually and medically intelligible.
Rendering suicide, however, is not a matter of mechanically capturing the
evidence. This is because, as Evans and Hall (1999), Mirzoeff (1999) and Tagg
(1999) argue in various ways, the production of photographs heavily relies on
institutional practices that define and mobilize their use. Furthermore, what
is displayed in and by images is configured through institutional relations of
power where images ‘exert power and act as instruments of power’ (Sturken
and Cartwright 2001: 93). Taking photographs is enabled by the power to
access and capture something on camera (Tagg 1999). Thus, depicting and
representing something can never be thought of as neutral. What is seen in a
photograph is not simply the result of what literally appears, captured by the
camera’s lens at some point in time. Rather, what appears is conditioned by the
means through which an image is made available, how it becomes circulated
in different sites of practice, and by the values attributed to qualify what is
represented (Jenks 1995, Mirzoeff 1998, van Dijck 2005). Visual depictions of
suicide are already discursively conditioned the moment the deceased body is
framed by the camera’s lens.
The configuration of autopsy space in which the body is examined also plays
an important role. Gresham and Turner (1979: 27) describe various aspects of
what they refer to as ‘the dissecting room’. This room must be arranged in such
a way as to enable efficient visual description and measurement of the corpse.
The room must contain various ceramic or metal tables with bath-like features,
drainage systems, points of water supply, ventilation and instruments for the
pathologist to use (Gresham and Turner 1979: 25–6). Light and colour are
significant in illuminating what becomes available to the eye because ‘excellent
light is needed to pick up details of wounds and the like’ (1979: 25).3 ‘The
walls should be tiled’, with the preferred colour being ‘ice blue, which shows
natural colours to advantage’ (1979: 25). It seems that the medical gaze must
have specific conditions under which the pathologist can make the facts of
3 More recently, Sheaff and Hopster state that ‘lighting needs to be bright in order
to allow thorough examination and optimise safety. This is particularly important over
the dissection area and additional spotlights here are often very useful … The table
itself should be made of non-porous material – usually porcelain in more old-fashioned
mortuaries or stainless steel in more modern ones’ (2001: 12).
82
death transparent (Wagner 2004). Yet, rendering something transparent is not

only dependent on what evidence the body yields. It is also closely connected
to the attentive manner in which the medical gaze functions under particular
spatial conditions. In some sense, the autopsy space becomes an interrogation
room, where deceased bodies are framed as yielding their secrets to determine
whether what appears is indeed self-inflicted.
The selected images speak of different methods of suicide. The first image
below locates the chest as a bodily site on which a wound inflicted by a bullet
from a shotgun is displayed. While the second image is a close up of the first,
both images focus on measuring the wound, drawing attention not only to the
external width of the wound but also to the extensiveness of bruising.
Even though the surface of the skin is no longer intact in both images,
the second image in particular focuses on the presence of fluid around the
inscription bearing the mark of the gun’s barrel. The caption underneath
the images explains the presence and significance of relevant inscriptions.
Gresham and Turner state that ‘proof of suicide by shooting rests, in part,
by demonstrating that the individual could have done it himself ’ (1979: 110).
Photographic images of the same hand serve the purpose of illustrating that
the deceased was directly responsible for the wound caused by the discharge
of the shotgun.
The two images draw attention to the marks or abrasions on the thumb due
to the recoil of the shotgun’s trigger. The external measurement of abrasions
appears important. In contrast to the caption explaining the wound on the
chest, the caption explaining the abrasions on the thumb identifies the body of
the deceased as male. It is difficult to tell why this is so. Is it a matter of wording,
which identifies particular details? Is it a matter of ensuring that the relationship
between the chest and thumb is clear? Or is it because, unlike the chest, the
hand is presumably a less distinctive sign qualifying the deceased body as male?
According to Gresham and Turner, ‘in all cases of hanging a ligature mark
on the neck and the appearance of the mark are of considerable help in deciding
whether the strangulation was suicidal or not’ (1979: 110). The ligature mark is
the focus of the image depicting suicide by hanging. The image frames the neck
as the site bearing the ligature mark. Although impossible to tell, since the image
is black and white, the colour of the mark is described as brown. While the
focus predominantly rests on the mark itself, further emphasized by measuring
its length, the knot of the rope is included. The knot is important because ‘the
way in which the knot has been tied often helps to identify the person who
tied it’ (Gresham and Turner 1979: 110). Further, the image captures facial
hair, indicating that the deceased body is probably male. The authors did not
seem to think this was worth remarking on, however. The caption underneath
situates the position and colour of the ligature mark on the neck and stresses
the importance of not disturbing the knot.
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Figures 5.1 and 5.2 Wound caused by a discharge of a 12-bore shotgun.

A fine spray of powder marks surrounds the hole.
The mark of the undischarged barrel can be seen
in the second figure (arrowed).
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Figures 5.3 and 5.4 Abrasion of the thumb due to recoil of the
trigger of a 12-bore gun used to kill himself. This
indicates the victim pulled the trigger.
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Figure 5.5 Showing the noose which has dropped away from the brown
ligature mark. It is important not to disturb the knot.
Figure 5.6 Blood removed from the right iliac vein with a wide-bore
pipette (1 – iliac vein; 2 – right common iliac artery).
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The final image selected here is quite distinct from the previous images. This
image captures a dissected area of the body, identified as the pelvic brim. Unlike
the previous examples, the method of suicide is more difficult to recognize
since the image does not bear particular external inscriptions through which
self-infliction might be interpreted. Instead, the image represents a body cut
open, revealing various internal organs and tissues. The focus rests primarily
on the manner in which particular instruments remove fluids. The discussion
in the text indicates that this is an example of self-poisoning, a method
acknowledged as relatively common at that time (Gresham and Turner 1979:
110). The discussion suggests that self-poisoning requires a number of samples
for toxicological analysis, which should be collected using specific instruments.
While ‘[b]lood and urine are always taken for analysis; whole organs such
as brain, liver, kidneys, stomach … are not always required’ (Gresham and
Turner 1979: 110). Although other methods of suicide may require internal
examinations as well,4 it seems that the gaze of the pathologist invades the body
at a deeper level in order for the death to qualify as self-poisoning, and so this
requires technological extension and intensification of the diagnostic ‘gaze’.
What has been described canvasses the visuality of suicide on the basis
of particular methods, made available to the reader by the medical gaze and
framed by the camera’s lens. The gaze travels across and draws attention to bodily
surfaces, decoding lethality and intent by observing, examining, measuring
and documenting various inscriptions. It is as if to be verified suicide must be
‘named by being tagged or branded’ on bodily surfaces (Grosz 1990: 65, original
emphasis). The deceased body is ‘inspected, palpated, poked into, cut open …
transformed into an object of scrutiny’ (Young 1997: 1). Suicide materializes
by being mapped onto and through the surfaces of the corporeal body as
the object and source of scrutiny.5 The signs, be they ‘external’ or ‘internal’, I
am arguing, are privileged since what is recognized as visible is interpreted
as essential and, in turn, as evident truth. The problem with such privileging
is that it presupposes the body is an ontologically secure point of reference
for suicide – an inert prediscursive given through which lethality and, in turn,
suicidal intent are rendered transparent and self-evident. Presupposing the body
as a prediscursive given, I want to suggest, implicitly ignores that the body has
to be turned into a particular kind of body to verify suicide. What is additionally
overlooked is the possibility that autonomy itself may be generated by norms
4 Gresham and Turner (1979: 110) suggest that in some instances hanging requires
the pathologist to take an x-ray of the neck area. Some cases of suicidal strangulation
also require the dissection of the neck.
5 The corporeal body includes what is ‘external’ and ‘internal’: ‘its epidermic
surface, muscular-skeletal frame, ligaments, joints, blood vessels and internal organs …
on which engraving inscription or “graffiti” are etched’ (Grosz 1990: 62).
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that privilege bodies as more or less autonomous, so that what is visually

inscribed can represent violence. Such norms belong to the masculinist ways
of knowing which, despite privileging the mind over the body, require a certain
kind of body to render the activities of the mind coherent.
In a way, the corporeal body could well be the point of origin for interpreting
suicide throughout post-mortem practices. The body certainly appears as
neutral, its surfaces stripped of any cultural meaning. What the images depict
is framed as the raw basis on which signs of lethality of particular methods are
visually displayed. This could be feasible, provided that the manner in which the
body has been rendered visible did not depend on the workings of the medical
gaze, was not influenced by the camera’s lens, or by the space to which the body
was brought for interpretation. By saying this, I do not mean that the body is
unreadable, but rather that the way particular meanings materialize is dependent
on something other than the body – that something being the medical gaze. This
means that, rather than simply responding to deceased bodies bearing the mark
of suicide, the medical gaze is part of constituting and regulating that which
it sees, as an effect of its own power to see. Lethality as a transparent measure
of suicidal intent cannot for instance be thought outside the power of the
medical gaze and its capacity to constitute the visibility of particular corporeal
inscriptions – a capacity to recognize the body as autonomous, navigated by the
discursive workings of gender norms in medical knowledge.
The gendering of the corporeal body as the source for interpreting the
transparency of lethality cannot be thought of outside gender norms operating
in photography. ‘When we are thinking about photography’, Evans writes, ‘we
should keep in mind the way it is often discursively put to use in order to
make appearances equate with reality’ (2001: 107). Evans (2001) insists that the
manner in which photography is used to situate something as real cannot be
divorced from positivism, which seeks to establish essential and universal truths,
ignoring the contexts in which such truths are produced and the purposes they
serve. For Evans, ‘the realism of photography seems to justify the essentialist
assumptions of masculine forms of institutionalized knowledge’ (2001: 109).
This is because, as Evans further explains,
the whole apparatus of sexual difference, as with racial difference, appears to be uniquely
based on the centrality of ‘vision’, of what can be seen. These differences are made to
seem ‘real’ and therefore ‘true’ – and unchangeable – because the difference we can
‘see’, the biological differences between men and women’s bodies, appear to ground their
‘truth’ beyond history, in what is naturally so. (2001: 109, original emphasis)
My argument then is that, if the photographic display of lethality appears

transparent, this too has something to do with the operation of masculinist
norms, encoded into the visual display of bodily surfaces. What may appear
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unmediated, and in turn ‘true’, may already be conditioned by gender, even if it

appears simultaneously as resting outside gender. In this sense, the gendering of
suicide is epistemologically entangled with gender norms, since what it means to
‘see’ via photography cannot be disentangled from gender with absolute certainty.
Are medical models of the body part of framing the corporeal body as a
neutral and transparent object? Shildrick claims that the medical model presumes
that ‘the body is some kind of stable and unchanging given, differentiated simply
by its variable manifestation of signs and symptoms of health or disease’ (1997:
15). This certainly appears to be the case here, for deceased bodies are treated
by the gaze as autonomous, stable givens, differentiated only by different types
of lethal inscriptions. For scholars such as Lupton (1994), Shildrick (1997),
Cartwright (1998) and Shildrick and Price (1998), the medical interpretation of
the body as neutral and autonomous is a gendered effect of medicine’s power,
reducing it to the status of a malfunctioning machine – something we saw earlier
in Chapter 4. This particular gendered effect is sustained by the mind–body
dualism and the framing of the body as neutral and autonomous – and as unlike
the cultured mind (Shildrick 1997). It is also shaped by a largely unchallenged
bias towards acceptance of the male body as the normative standard upon
which gender differences can be established in medical knowledge (Cartwright
1998, Eckman 1998). Hence if lethality is configured as neutral to verify suicidal
intent, this process cannot be divorced from the masculinist privileging of the
male body in medical knowledge. This is especially so because suicide depends
on how the body is rendered intelligible in post-mortem examinations. Thus,
the very visibility of suicide may actually be dependent on the invisibility of
these gendered norms through which suicide is bound to masculinist ways
of knowing. This is likely to produce two effects: an over-determined view
of suicide as inherently a male act, and an ongoing uncertainty as to whether
female acts of self-harm are ‘true’ suicide. As such, it is possible to see the
visible appearance of self-infliction as inciting the production and reproduction
My analysis thus far has a number of implications. First, lethality as a marker
and measure can never be thought outside the sites of practice required to
verify self-destruction. Secondly, the transparency of lethality cannot be
easily separated from gender, particularly since what is transparent, as van
Dijck (2005) argues, is in fact culturally mediated by the power of the medical
gaze, intensified by medical technology and its instruments, as well as social
conventions and norms. Thirdly, if lethality as a transparent measure of intent
is represented continually as having little to do with gender, this might be the
effect of power aiming to sustain a false sense of the body as a given. If we
take all these points into consideration, then, I think, it is possible to see the
visible appearance of self-infliction as contributing to and inciting the knowing
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Seeing Suicide through Abject Bodies
To further explain the gendering of suicide in post-mortem practices, I now

want to consider whether what appears as self-inflicted can be read as abject. In
Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva (1982) examines three forms of abjection, which
involve food, waste and the corpse. Given the relevance of the corpse, Kristeva
defines it as follows:
The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the outmost of abjection. It is
death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from
which one does not protect oneself as from an object … It is thus not lack of cleanliness
or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (1982: 4)
The images analysed here frame what is inscribed on and through bodies as
unsettling, confronting and horrifying. The images can be described in such
terms not only because what appears signals a tragic end to life, but also because
the border between life and death has been disrupted. The deceased bodies can
be read as representing this disruption because they no longer visually display
signs of vitality and life. The bodies – dead yet not out of sight – disturb order,
even if the inscribed wounds and marks have been made sense of in order
to verify suicide. Perhaps the bodies also disturb order precisely because they
have been made sense of – have been rendered intelligible. The bodies in the
photographic images are abject because, as Kristeva (1982) points out, what is
abject draws attention to and heightens fragility and vulnerability. The display
of fragility and vulnerability revealed is not ‘real’. Yet the effects, incited by the
powers of the medical gaze and those of its affiliates, are so compelling that
what they represent seems ‘real’ enough.
More specifically, fluidity and seepage at the entrance to the wound caused by
the shotgun depict disruption through a lack of bodily order. The presence of
blood here does not signify life, or the possibility of living, as it can elsewhere,
but rather is an element representing the loss of life.6 The presence of blood is
abject because it reveals bodily surfaces as fragile and vulnerable. The body is no
longer whole and intact – the border between the exterior and interior surfaces
has been disrupted – an interiority that opens the carapace of the male body
surface to both destabilizing fluidity and feminizing penetrability (Grosz 1994,
Williams 1998). Something similar can be said of the image that displays the
dissection of the pelvic rim in relation to self-poisoning. The body is cut open
to gain access to the inner cavities to obtain a blood sample for toxicological
6 For an interesting discussion of blood, see for instance Foucault (1978: 147–8)
and Fuery and Fuery (2003: 17–18).
90
analysis. The image displays exposed interior organs and tissues. The body is
no longer proper. The exterior surface cannot hold back the internal organs.
Instead, the body is leaky. It threatens decay.
What the remaining images represent can also be interpreted as abject.
The abrasions on the thumb and fingers from pulling the shotgun’s trigger
may not necessarily be as confronting as the wound on the chest. Yet the
abrasions and marks are not signs of health and vitality. This is the hand
that extinguished life; it introduced disorder, fragility and death. The image
depicting the ligature mark displays the impact of strangulation. It focuses on
skin discolouration at close range, inscribed by the noose still attached to the
neck. The noose and the ligature mark draw attention to being strangled – to
the body suspended and lifeless.
Depending on the method of suicide, the photographic images represent
different forms of fragility and vulnerability, with signs of the body rendered as
medically intelligible. The reason the images are horrifying and transgressive is
not only because of particular inscriptions, but also because suicide is generally
understood as a private act, a very deliberate turn away from the social, and
not to be witnessed by another party. Hence, at one level, the images are a
breach of the intense privacy of the act, compelling us to imagine more vividly
that a human being actively carried out the act of violence upon themselves.
Nevertheless, even though someone actively chose suicide, the abject introduces
an element of passivity. This, I think, is strengthened by the power of the
medical gaze which, as Foucault (1994: 130) describes, responds to disease as
‘the passive, confused object’ that must be made readable. To be readable, the
inscriptions of the fleshy surfaces of the body must also be framed as passive
rather than active. ‘Passivity’ and ‘activity’, as two significant terms that are part
of understanding suicide, may not be entirely distinct on a conceptual level.
The medical site of practice that seeks to eradicate ambiguity and confusion in
suicide appears paradoxically to introduce an element of ambiguity.
Reading the selected photographic images as abject thus challenges the
medical interpretation of the body in suicide. Grosz (1994), Shildrick (1997) and
Williams (1998) contend that the medical gaze conceptualizes the body not only
as neutral and stable, but also as a bound and solid container. This masculinist
container, Williams argues, resists ‘external forces, while holding back internal
ones from expansion and intrusion’ (1998: 69). It resists the threat of being
aligned with corporeality, inscribed as female, feminine, dependent, passive
and leaky (Grosz 1994, Shildrick and Price 1999). This, I think, is significant,
particularly in relation to the visual example of the wound caused by the use of
the shotgun. In this instance, the body is identified as male, confirmed by the
corresponding images. What can be said then of a sexed/gendered body that is
not meant to seep or leak – a body which even in suicide is actively responding
to difficult circumstances, rather than passively reacting to them? In being read
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as abject, is the male body vulnerable, fragile and passive – terms frequently
invested in the interpretation of female bodies in suicide?
More specifically, what can then be said of active methods of suicide such
as firearms that are more commonly associated with being male and masculine?
On the one hand, it can be argued that interpreting the wound caused by a
shotgun as abject actually strengthens the connection between male bodies,
masculinity, lethality and violence. That is, what visibly appears as violent can
still be taken as lethal and thereby as serious, active, male and masculine. On
the other hand, reading the wound through the lens of the abject indicates
that the use of active methods binds suicide to the corporeal body, a body
which, in the context of passive methods, is read as feminine, dependent and
passive. By saying this, I want to return to several points I made in the preceding
chapters. First, the boundary between what is active and passive in suicide
may not be entirely clear-cut or obvious. As such, passive and active become
terms that in gendering suicide are visually implicated in one another. Secondly,
gendered meanings surrounding the interpretation of ‘passive’ suicides enter
the interpretation of ‘active’ suicides. Thirdly, if active acts appear to transcend
the material conditions of the corporeal body, aligned with female bodies
and femininity, then transcendence is not entirely successful. This is because
the appearance of the male body in the representation of death by a firearm
appears to be bound to the material conditions of the corporeal body. Thus,
something about gender is already present at the scene of bodily infliction. This
does not mean that suicide cannot be understood as lethal. Rather, lethality as a
neutral measure of suicidal intentions is dependent on gender.
If the abject contributes significantly to interrogating the framing of active
methods, can it also contribute to interrogating passive methods, such as
overdoses? To some degree it can be said that the dissected body discussed
earlier, identified as the site of self-poisoning, is rendered even more passive.
Although there is no way of knowing whether the body is male or female, would
self-poisoning be so closely aligned with the material conditions of the body
if it were identified as female? Would the method of suicide be read as passive
and feminine, rather than active and masculine? Would the same assumptions
be made, regardless of the fact that the deceased did suicide? Would the intent
to suicide be considered active and serious? Posing these questions shows that
what is important in the gendering of suicide is not only whether bodies are
male or female, but also whether they can be identified and culturally interpreted
as male or female.
Paradoxically, if, unlike most men, most women choose active and violent
methods of suicide less often because they fear bodily disfigurement, then in the
event of self-poisoning leading to death, disfigurement and violent spasms of
bodily disruption are unavoidable. What this might suggest is that understandings
of disfigurement are bound to particular contexts through which a range of
92
meanings is attributed. That is, the rendering of disfigurement is bound not only
to those who engage with the act of suicide, but also to those who, as in the case of
post-mortem examinations, either further disfigure or introduce disfigurement
for the purpose of verifying suicide. Why the extrusion of blood, rather than
the purging of vomit, urine or faeces, should be considered ‘more’ abject must
surely rest on cultural contexts in which the piercing of the body’s surface (a
gunshot wound) is somehow worse than exteriorizing the (abject) interior. If
the female body ‘is’ discursively framed as essentially abject, then enhancing its
abjection, through poisons or through medical sectioning, is acceptable. If the
male body ‘resists’ abjection, representations of penetrative suicidal acts, such
as gunshot wounds, risk both destabilizing fluidity and abjection, and must be
mitigated – through consideration of a ‘strong modality’ act.
The analysis of the abject in the gendering of suicide raises questions.
Despite the violence it bears, why is it that the gendered male body remains
hidden from view in the interpretation of suicide as ‘active’? If blood, fluidity
and seepage are present in methods such as firearms, why is so little said about
their relevance? Why focus only on blood and disfigurement as disincentives
for female suicide, when both seem to be absent in even more abject methods
such as overdoses? Finally, why not speak of disfigurement in active methods in
ways that move beyond acknowledging violence as of no real concern to most
men? And if both men and women choose hanging more frequently despite
the differences in mortality rates, why is it that stark differences in men’s and
women’s experiences of suicide continue to be posited?
Conclusion
What is configured as visible and lethal is important to how knowledge of suicide

is produced. The medical gaze constitutes the corporeal body as a mappable,
autonomous territory through which lethality, and thereby suicidal intent, is
verified with scientific precision. Yet lethality as a transparent measure of intent
is dependent on discursive conditions, of which masculine and masculinist
norms are a part. Wounds, cuts and abrasions carry meanings. These meanings
cannot be made separate from gender as gender conditions their configuration.
Thus, the gendering of suicide undermines suicide as an ontological given.
Visibility reveals the already gendered invisibilities operating in determining the
visibility of the act of suicide.
Once again I have problematized terms such as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. It is
now apparent that the male body risks being interpreted as fragile and vulnerable
– something too often aligned with what is understood as female, feminine and
passive. My suggestion is that the production of particular understandings and
terms protects the male body from being recognized as vulnerable to continue
93
to legitimize and privilege the male body in the production of knowledge

of suicide. Instead of participating in silencing the corpse, perhaps we need
to recognize more readily the body’s fragility, be it male, female, masculine,
feminine, active or passive. We will then be able to recognize that sometimes the
abject is a gift, one that is difficult to respond to yet crucial if we are to read the
corpse more readily to recognize the voices of those who live through the act
of suicide. If they live to tell their story of struggle, will they be pathologized
any less? Which will malfunction more? The body? Or the mind?
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Chapter 6
The Visibility of Difference: Gender
and Suicide in Psy-Knowledge
Introduction
The interpretation of suicide in psy-knowledge is different from legal and

medical sites of practice. Defined as the broad spectrum of sciences that deal
with the human mind, psy-knowledge focuses on the state of the mind instead
of the body (Rose 1998). This focus duly recognizes the vulnerability and fragility
of the human mind. and as the founder of suicidology, edwin Shneidman, tells
us, suicide is ‘chiefly a drama in the mind’ (1996: 4, my emphasis). For Shneidman
(1996), this interpretation is significant because it allows us to understand what
motivates people to suicide and, more importantly, what can be done towards
preventing suicide from occurring. But what if this drama does not belong to
the mind alone? if so, are we missing half of the story?
Even though Shneidman’s claim is logical and convincing, I cannot help
but find something about the definition a little misguided. I do not entirely
disagree with Shneidman’s point. But, to put it bluntly, his definition misses a
point about how suicide is interpreted in the field of psy-knowledge. On the
one hand, suicide is defined as a neutral, clinical symptom of illness. Here the
name for drama is depression. On the other hand, gendered explanations are
offered by experts in the mental health community to account for some of the
differences among those who not only suicide, but also attempt suicide and
exhibit ‘self-destructive behaviours’. Here the drama is recognized by external
differences, supplemented by cultural aspects such as gender. Strangely, the
body is absent, made irrelevant or invisible between these two positions. The
body is of little significance, while gender differences are described to give a
psychological account of the intelligibility of suicide.
To qualify my bluntness, my aim in this chapter is this. I want to bring to
attention what is cast aside, overlooked and concealed, at the expense of making
deeply contradictory, causative interpretations of visible gender differences
in psy-knowledge’s view of suicide. While discussing research evidence, my
intention is to examine how the interpretation of suicide through the lens of
mental illness is a product of gendered assumptions – assumptions that are
visible yet rendered irrelevant by masculinist ways of understanding suicide. My
intention is also to show how the body really does matter in interpreting the state
of the mind – and this mattering is not simply about the body’s importance.
Rather, it is about recognizing the already gendered conditions of the material
body – a body that has a habit of being absent in much of psy-knowledge’s
research even though such research cannot do without it.
With this in mind, the work of this chapter will be mapped across four
areas of analysis. In the first area, I will pay attention to the clinical criteria
of depression to problematize the way signs of self-destruction assume their
neutral and bodiless status. In the second area, I will examine the concept of
desire and how its analytical ingredients relate to our understanding of intent
and agency in suicide. It may look strange to discuss desire this far into the book,
and especially because desire is often about sexual desire. Yet, as I will show,
psy-knowledge is the crucible for determining whether someone really wanted
to suicide, and this is because of its Freudian inheritance.1 In the third area, I will
evaluate critically the extent to which gender matters in approaches to suicide
prevention. And finally, in the fourth area, I will take a look at contributions
feminist criticism has made, given that it has been most vocal about psy-
knowledge’s approach to understanding gender in suicide. I approach feminist
contributions in the same vein as Judith Butler first approached the work of
Simone de Beauvoir. While I recognize the contributions feminist criticisms
has made to unpacking problematic assumptions about gender in suicide, the
project remains unfinished, marooned by second wave understandings of
gender. In a nutshell, where the first two areas will pay attention to how gender
comes to matter, the latter two will pay attention to what I believe still requires
attention in understanding the conditions through which our knowledge of
suicide is made possible.
Depression: A Necessary Condition for Suicide
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – IV (American Psychiatric

Association 1994) plays a crucial role in psy-knowledge’s interpretation of
suicide. The manual, whose role is to classify mental illness on the basis of
empirically orientated statistical research, defines mental illness as:
A clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern

that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g.,
a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important
1 To avoid confusion, I want to make myself clear about my use of the concept
of desire. By drawing on the concept and its psychoanalytical heritage, I do not mean
desire in suicide is sexual. Rather, I am using the make up of the concept to establish
the basis for interpreting intent and motive in suicide.
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The Visibility of Difference
areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death,

pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom. In addition, this syndrome or
pattern must not be merely an expectable and culturally sanctioned response
to a particular event, for example, the death of a loved one. Whatever its
original cause, it must currently be considered a manifestation of a behavioral,
psychological, or biological dysfunction in the individual. (American Psychiatric
Association 1994: xxi–xxii)
In this way, mental illness is framed as clinically discernible and neutral.

Particular categories of dysfunction are named. The naming of categories is
important because it arms those working in the mental health community with
appropriate information to respond to people’s mental health needs in diverse
contexts of practice.
Suicide itself is not named as a category of mental illness. Instead, suicide
appears under the umbrella of mood disorders.2 Specifically, suicide is identified
as a visible symptom of the ‘major depressive episode’ – a building block of mood
disorders (American Psychiatric Association 1994, Morrison 1995). Apart from
the period of duration, a serious episode of depression includes a range of
symptoms such as depressed mood and a significant loss of interest in, and
ability to, engage in everyday activities. In addition, a person must experience
at least four other symptoms, including ‘changes in appetite or weight, sleep,
and psychomotor activity; decreased energy; feelings of worthlessness or guilt;
difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions; or recurrent thoughts of
death or suicidal ideation, plans or attempts’ (American Psychiatric Association
1994: 320). In a sense, suicide is the most serious sign and consequence of
depression. For Isacsson and Rich, this explains why ‘depression is a necessary
condition for suicide’ (1997: 168).
As a sign of depression, suicide receives a significant amount of attention in
clinical diagnosis. The manual lists criteria as follows.
Frequently there may be thoughts of death, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts

(Criterion A9). These thoughts range from a belief that others would be better
off if the person were dead, to transient but recurrent thoughts of committing
suicide, to actual specific plans of how to commit suicide. The frequency,
intensity, and lethality of these thoughts can be quite variable. Less severely
suicidal individuals may report transient (1- to 2-minute), recurrent (once or
twice a week) thoughts. More severely suicidal individuals may have acquired
materials (e.g., a rope or a gun) to be used in the suicide attempt and may have
2 Suicide is also identified as a symptom of the ‘premenstrual dysphoric disorder’

(American Psychiatric Association 1994: 715).
97
established a location and time when they will be isolated from others so that
they can accomplish the suicide. (American Psychiatric Association 1994: 322)3
While suicide unfolds in different phases, thoughts are not the only thing in the
bigger picture. Choice of method, time and location are all part of it. Although
one could argue that such factors simply reflect what is going on inside a
person’s mind, I am arguing that, without such factors, different categories
of suicidal risks would be quite difficult to assess. For me, this shows that
assessment of suicidal risk is dependent on aspects that embody the visibility
of the depressive state of mind. Something else is part of the materialization
of the drama unfolding in the mind, and this something is the corporeal body.
If the clinical assessment of the suicidal state of mind is dependent on
something other than mental states, can suicide be interpreted as entirely neutral
and as independent of the context in which it is identified? One could argue
quite convincingly that suicide can be interpreted as a neutral, prediscursive
phenomenon for three reasons. One, because, as Busfield (1986) and Fee
(2000) assess, the clinical manifestation of mental illness is understood on
the basis of liberal-scientific conceptions of reason and rationality that claim
to observe, describe and measure different symptoms in an objective, value-
free manner. Two, because psychiatry and psychology interpret personhood
as a unitary, transcendental ‘I’, independent of the cultural contexts in which
this ‘I’ suffers from mental illness (Venn 1984). Three, when sadness, anxiety
or hopelessness are observed or reported, they are framed as already existing
‘out there’, as ‘conditions’ to which mental health professionals respond. The
clinical interview is the lynchpin in this because a ‘careful interview is essential
to elicit the symptoms of a Major Depressive Episode’ (American Psychiatric
Association 1994: 322, my emphasis). To elicit suggests that something about
suicide needs to be drawn out and obtained. This something can be obtained
because, presumably, it exists prior to the context of elicitation.
The problem with interpreting suicide as a symptom of depression is
not depression per se. Rather, the problem is taking for granted the mind’s
connection to the material conditions of the body. While the evaluation of a
major depressive episode is primarily concerned with determining the degree
of distorted thoughts and feelings, the body plays a crucial part throughout
the clinical interview process. The American Psychiatric Association makes this
clear in the following statement.
3 DSM-IV International Version (American Psychiatric Association 1995)

conceptualizes suicide in the same manner. An earlier version of the manual, the DSM-
III-Revised, does not provide the same level of detail about suicide (American Psychiatric
Association 1987). Nevertheless, it states that suicide is the most serious complication
of major depression (American Psychiatric Association 1987: 221).
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In some individuals who complain of feeling ‘blah,’ having no feelings, or

feeling anxious, the presence of a depressed mood can be inferred from the
person’s facial expression and demeanor. Some individuals emphasize somatic
complaints (e.g., bodily aches and pains) rather than reporting feelings of sadness
… Psychomotor changes include agitation (e.g., the inability to sit still, pacing,
hand-wringing; or pulling or rubbing of the skin, clothing or other objects)
or retardation (e.g., slowed speech, thinking, and body movements; increased
pauses before answering; speech that is decreased in volume, inflection, amount,
or variety of content, or muteness) (Criterion A5). (1994: 320–1)
The above shows that the visibility of bodily acts is crucial to assessing
depression and suicide. It is impossible to know of the suicidal state of mind
unless the visibility of the body is taken into account. For Foucault (2001), visible
perceptions themselves rather than concepts make mental illness intelligible.
Without the presence of a visual image it is not possible to categorize states of
mental illness. Although here again one could explain the body as an exterior
that reflects internal states of mind, such an explanation fails to depict the mind
and body as independent of each other. One cannot assess suicide as a severe
symptom of depression outside the materiality of the body.
One problem still remains. While the role of the body cannot be denied in
assessing states of mind, the interpretation of bodily acts and activities remains
clinically neutral. Critically evaluating how the body is interpreted in psy-
knowledge, Stoppard argues that ‘dominant psychiatric theories of depression
focus on the depressed person’s body as a biological entity … defined in terms
of purely biological attributes and mechanisms’ (1998: 82–3). Such attributes,
Stoppard further argues, ‘are then treated, for theoretical purposes, as separable
and distinct from psychological processes and social influences’ (1998: 83). This
does not mean the body is not biological. Rather, it means that understanding
the body as biological requires one to recognize that the biological acquires
meaning in social contexts (Butler 1989). For Busfield (1996), the way the
biological body acquires meaning in the diagnosis of mental illness such as
depression is positioned against an invisible male norm, governed by rationality
and independence. Women in particular are more likely to be diagnosed as
emotionally disturbed, since female bodies and femininities are seen as culturally
more emotional. What is considered as emotional and emotionally disturbed is
framed by gendered readings of male and female bodies and masculinity and
femininity. Thus, the neutrality of diagnostic categories does not necessarily
‘mean that the categories are themselves constructed entirely independently of
gender, since the official categories refer to many aspects of mental life and
behaviour which are themselves gendered’ (Busfield 1996: 103). In this sense,
the clinical interpretation of suicide is not devoid of gender as what is ‘devoid’
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is replete with gender. This kind of epistemological invisibility makes gender

differences visible.
Outside epistemological unpacking such as the one I performed above,
extant literature shows a strong connection between depression and gender in
suicide (Kessler 2003, Piccinelli and Wilkinson 2000, Pilgrim and Rogers 1999).
The World Health Organization (WHO) continually reports that ‘depression is
not only the most common women’s mental health problem but may be more
persistent in women than men’ (WHO 2012). Yet there is a curious gender
paradox. On the one hand, more women than men suffer from depression
and attempt suicide. On the other hand, more men than women ‘complete’
suicide (Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998). While there are gender differences in
the experiences of suicide, how gender comes to matter in such differences
remains unclear. To examine this paradox, I now want to turn to the question
of desire and intentionality in suicide.
Gendered Contours of Desire in Suicide4
I want to begin by making several connections with Sigmund Freud’s work.

Platonian and Hegelian philosophical traditions influenced Freud’s conceptual
mechanics of desire. Whether it is because human existence is flawed (Plato)
or unfulfilled (Hegel), desire in both traditions is understood as a lack (Grosz
1995). Freud’s (1952) work incorporates these traditions, positioning desire as a
response to a perceived lack. This lack, however, is not inherent in the individual
but instead is part of social reality. In the context of sexual development, desire
is the effect of the child ceasing its incestual attachment to one of the parents,
which in turn leads to the creation of substitutes and satisfactions, representing
what is lost (Freud 1952).
Freud’s approach to desire is encoded with gendered meanings. Working
within a framework of bisexuality, Freud stresses that ‘when you say
“masculine”, you mean as a rule active, and when you say “feminine” you
mean passive’ (Freud 1952: 854, original emphasis). Acknowledging that such
meanings can be correlated with biological differences, Freud (1952) insists that
what constitutes masculinity and femininity cannot be grasped by biology alone.
While femininity has ‘passive aims’, this is not the same as passivity because
achieving passivity requires active participation (Freud 1952).5 Freud explains
this form of participation through the Oedipal phase when female children
4 An earlier version of this part of the chapter has been developed elsewhere (see
Jaworski 2005, 2012).
5 Likewise for masculinity, as a form of masculinity also contains passive impulses
(Freud 1952: 862).
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shift their emotional attachment away from the mother and towards the father.
The shift leads to a psychological conflict where the child suffers penis envy
and jealousy towards the mother (Freud 1952, 1990a, 1990b). For Freud, this
is precisely when heterosexual femininity is developed, as ‘her passive side has
now the upper hand, and in turning to her father she is assisted in the main by
passive instinctual impulses’ (1952: 860). While reaching ‘passive aims’ may be
a form of activity, this activity, I am arguing, is devoid of agency granted to
masculinity because it comes across as an instinctual reaction rather than action.
It is clear that the Cartesian mind–body dichotomy organizes Freud’s
conceptualization of desire. The body is located as the material grounds
for representing the ‘transformation’ of desire into mental processes, both
conscious and unconscious. As Grosz (1995) reads it, it is at the moment of
transformation, or participation in Freud’s terms, that desire becomes inherently
masculine. If desire is a form of agentic activity, it appears impossible for
women since passivity erases most forms of autonomy. Rather than (positively)
acting as a result of lack, women are only capable of (negatively) reacting to its
presence because they do not possess the same levels of agency (Freud 1952).
The ‘activity’ of passivity is reactive rather than active. Hence, we can read desire
as a masculine and masculinist activity, because masculinity itself is construed
as transcending the material conditions of the body – something that female
bodies and femininity cannot attain.
Suicide is commonly associated with lack. People choose suicide because
something is missing in their lives, leading to a desire to compensate
(Shneidman 1996: 7). This is especially visible in the way women’s desire to
suicide is interpreted. Based on mortality outcomes, women’s desire to suicide
is primarily explained through the lens of relationship breakdowns (Canetto
and Lester 1998). Influenced by Freud’s (1957) work on melancholia, suicidal
behaviour is generated by an excessive identification with, and dependence
on, the love object that has been lost.6 Since relationships are assumed to be
more significant in women’s lives, women are said to be at much greater risk
of suicide in the face of emotional difficulties, often linked to mood disorders
such as depression. In contrast, men’s risk of suicide is explained through
loss of independence, physical illness or economic hardships. While the focus
remains on lack, men’s acts of self-destruction are interpreted as resisting loss,
rather than reactively giving in to its conditions. Where women’s desire is passive,
men’s is active. Difference resides at the heart of interpreting agency in suicide.
6 Freud writes of melancholia as follows: ‘it is evident that melancholia too may be
the reaction to the loss of a loved object … The object has not perhaps actually died,
but has been lost as an object of love (e.g. in the case of a betrothed girl who has been
jilted)’ (1957: 245).
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The interpretation of physical damage on the body is also important. Defining

men as completers and women as attempters limits the naming of mortality
outcomes, reduced to the extent of physical, visible damage inscribed on the
body. This damage becomes the focal point for understanding whether a person
truly wanted to suicide. The higher the degree of damage, the more transparent,
serious and active is the intent to die. The lack of physical violence is interpreted
as passive and attention seeking, and as signifying feminine fear of blood and
bodily disfigurement. In a sense, how the act of death is carried out shapes not
only what suicide means but also why it has taken place. Suicidal intentions are
rendered intelligible through a gendered reading of suicide methods.
So here we have several threads. Bound to desire as lack, the intent
becomes a connecting causative point between why suicide occurs and
ultimately what different acts mean based on mortality outcomes. At the
same time, the interpretation of intent is visibly homogenous, emphasizing
binary differences. This appears to make sense because of what mortality
statistics tell us about men’s and women’s rates of suicide, alongside rates of
attempted suicide. Except that there is a problem: suicidal desires are already
gendered, and the binary differences are made sense of through a masculine
and masculinist way of knowing.
I want to consider the gendering of men and women’s reasons for suicide
to further my claim about intent. The explanation that women suicide because
of love presumes a connection to the female body, femininity, passivity and
dependence. This follows Freud’s argument that women’s psychological
existence is bound to instinctual embodied passivity. The passivity of the female
body is translated into mental processes where a woman cannot help but be
passive. Passivity is the essential marker of femininity and becomes expressed
through suicidal intentions. This creates a double bind. First, unlike men’s
suicide, women’s suicide is interpreted as passive on a physical and psychic level.
Secondly, not only is suicide construed as a response to perceived lack, but women
themselves are thought to lack any form of agency in their acts of suicide. The
desire for the missing relationship (in most cases assumed to be heterosexual)
is the only appropriate object of female suicide. Rather than having a sense of
active agency, women’s suicide is a reactionary gesture, articulated through the
feminine character of emotional turmoil. As Canetto concludes, the implication
is that a woman’s suicidal act, particularly when unsuccessful, ‘results from her
vulnerable feminine constitution’, and the act is understood as ‘a scheme to re-
engage and punish a desirable deserter’ (1997a: 142).7
7 Discussing the preconditions for melancholia, Freud explains: ‘If the love for
the object – a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up –
takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this
substitutive object … The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt
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Desire as lack plays an entirely different part in the gendering of men’s

reasons for suicide. In asserting that men’s suicidal behaviour primarily
stems from resisting defeat, the very notion of resistance signifies autonomy
and agency. Rather than being a reaction to distress, resistance is a form of
activity, even though its very basis stems from lack. What is interesting about
reasons such as physical illness is that the tangibility of the body and its
specific conditions are located at the centre of suicidal behaviour. Nevertheless,
masculine desire to suicide transcends the male body and its material effects.
Rather than being a site of reaction, the male body is inscribed as a locus of
activity. This too is quite clearly influenced by the Freudian perspective, where
masculinity not only escapes the binding conditions of the body, but the male
body itself is positioned as active rather than passive. This has two analytical
implications. One, although suicide results from lack, this lack does not erase
agency in men’s suicides. Two, although suicide may signify lack of power, desire
as activity protects men from the dissolution of masculinity, independence and
instrumentality. As such, there is nothing ambivalent about the male desire to
suicide. Male suicide is interpreted as ‘a form of mastery, as an affirmation
of autonomy and rationality in the face of unrelenting adverse circumstances’
(Canetto 1997a: 145).
So why is it that so little attention is given to desire’s effects in suicide?
What are the concealing effects of power in the interpretation of desire?
Like Canetto (1992–93), I am tempted to conclude that power conceals the
normative operations of gender via the assumption that what is interpreted is
what must be there. But I think there is more to this picture given Freud’s impact
on the gendering of desire in suicide. Examining Luce Irigaray’s critique of
Freud’s work, Toril Moi states that Freud’s view of femininity is ‘based on the
visibility of difference’ (1985: 132, original emphasis). Although this is apparent
in what I have analysed thus far, it is worth pointing out that the interpretation
of intent as transparent and obvious is bound to the visibility of violence, that
is, the more visually violent the method, the more real and tangible is the desire
and intention to die. Intentions are configured through what are recognized as
visible and thereby transparent markers on the body. This may explain why so
much significance is given to the fear of bodily disfigurement in explanations
of women’s higher rates of suicide attempts.
enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a

satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been
turned around upon the subject’s own self in the ways we have been discussing. In both
disorders the patients usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in
taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their
illness, having resorted to it in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him
openly’ (1957: 251).
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My point is that visible differences between male and female bodies are
already sexually coded through the gendering of desire. The explanations
concerning the lack and fear of disfigurement are therefore themselves
already gendered. Despite this, the visibility of difference positions women’s
experiences as a ‘negation of the male norm’ (Moi 1985: 132). This norm works
to conceal the workings of gender through the binary interpretation of activity
and passivity as an evident and transparent model in which desire remains a
masculine and masculinist activity in suicide.
What are the immediate implications of my interpretation? First, as Gibbs
argues, intentions are not simply ‘mental acts that precede the performance
of behavioral acts’ (2001: 106). Instead intentions arise out of a process of
interpreting or evaluating what is inscribed on the body. Consequently, suicidal
intent as a measure of outcome cannot be considered obvious and self-evident.
Secondly, desire as lack is interpreted through passivity and activity. Since both
work to produce a gendered effect in suicide, it is impossible for intent to be
transparent. The bind between intent and desire as masculine and masculinist
unravels intent’s conditions of transparency. The discursive act of concealment
becomes a paradox of revelation.
Why is the discursive production of intent so successful if it is a paradox?
One could suggest this success is tied to expertise and authority, especially if
we consider the kinds of discursive sites that are part of interpreting suicide.
Foucault takes authority as having a serious effect on discursive practices when
he says that ‘authority is characterized by the possible positions of desire in relation
to discourse’ (1997a: 68, original emphasis). This certainly is the case in the role
of desire in the interpretation of suicidal outcomes. The space occupied by
desire is already entangled with power, effectively maintaining homogenized
(and masculinized) truths about outcomes of self-destruction.
But I want to expand the above claim further. I want to suggest that
homogenous truths about intent in suicide are also sustained by a gendered
masquerade. Butler considers two possible ways of understanding this term.
She writes:
On the one hand, masquerade may be understood as the performative production

of a sexual ontology, an appearing that makes itself convincing as a ‘being’; on
the other hand, masquerade can be read as a denial of a feminine desire that
presupposes some prior ontological femininity regularly unrepresented by the
phallic economy. (Butler 1990: 47)
In light of Butler’s thinking, we can read the insistence that there must be a
particular gendered interpretation of intent as part of maintaining truths
about suicide, especially when the analytical basis for such truths remains
unquestioned. Thus, my argument is that the norms that frame what is interpreted as
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‘must be there’ need to be unpacked further. Otherwise intent will remain reduced
to the visible play of what appears as clear-cut and transparent – an appearance
that creates an illusion of an interior ‘face’ of suicide, sustained through the
masculinization of desire.
I also want to suggest that masquerade may hide other possibilities of
interpreting desire, particularly those that have the potential to disrupt the
masculinized economy of meanings at the heart of the active–passive logic.
As Murphy (1998: 166) critically points out, the characterization of femininity
as lacking is expected to be present in women’s suicidal acts – a lack Neuringer
(1983) attributes to passivity and emotional irrationality. Wirth-Cauchon (2000:
147) refers to this sort of attribution as the masquerade of femininity: particular
feminine elements are exaggerated to fulfil the fantasy of the masculine – a
fantasy, I am arguing, that articulates suicide as a masculine and masculinist
discourse regardless of whether at the receiving end of this discourse is a man
or a woman whose voice deserves to be heard equally.
Preventing Suicide, Preventing Gender
I want to focus on suicide prevention to show how truth claims about suicide are
produced in practice. Suicide prevention is a vastly complex and heterogeneous
field. It involves various government and non-government interest groups,
and experts such as medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors
and social workers, to name a few. Suicide prevention is made up of a range
of approaches, be it primary, secondary or tertiary (Lester 1994). At the
heart of all of these approaches is an underlying assumption that suicide is
a cry for help, communicated through behaviours that display hopelessness,
helplessness and despair (Williams and Pollock 2000). Naming suicide as a cry
for help is significant. As Dorothy Smith identifies in the context of mental
illness, to call someone mentally ill is ‘a way of organizing these kinds of
responses in order to do something definite about them’ (1990: 121). Primary
suicide prevention is one way of trying to do something about suicide. Primary
prevention focuses on identifying those who are at risk of suicide (Canetto
and Lester 1995b).8 Aiming to increase knowledge and awareness, primary
prevention focuses on training health care professionals who are likely to come
into contact with those contemplating or planning to suicide. The focus is
entirely on recognizing signs of suicide.
8 Where primary prevention focuses on those at risk of becoming suicidal, secondary

prevention focuses on reducing access to methods of suicide, e.g., gun legislation.
Tertiary prevention, also known as postvention, concentrates on bereavement issues in
the lives of those left behind.
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Informed by past initiatives, the Australian prevention framework Living

is for Everyone or LIFE emphasizes the importance of education programmes
(Commonwealth of Australia 2000a). General practitioners are the key players
among the variety of health care professionals targeted in the LIFE framework.
Medical doctors are important because, as some research suggests, up to 80 per
cent of depressed people contact their medical doctor a month before attempting
suicide (Commonwealth of Australia 2000b, Martin, Clark, Beckinsale, Stacey
and Skene 1997, Walinder and Rutz 2001). Thus, the purpose of educating
GPs is to increase their ability to recognize signs of depression and emotional
distress (Blair-West and Mellsop 2001, Commonwealth of Australia 2000c).
This is based on DSM-IV diagnostic criteria of depression, relying largely on
the voluntary reporting of symptoms in predominantly clinical settings (Blair-
West and Mellsop 2001).
Even though educating general practitioners has reduced suicide by up to 60
per cent in recent years, education programmes have been criticized for their lack
of attention to gender. Research suggests that most of those who suffer from
depression and see their medical doctor are in fact women (Walinder and Rutz
2001). By taking for granted the voluntary aspect of reporting mental illness,
researchers in suicide prevention cast aside the possibility that most men will
not seek help when struggling with depression, because seeking help signifies
masculine failure (Blair-West and Mellsop 2001, Canetto 1995a, Canetto and
Sakinofsky 1998). As one suicide prevention officer suggests, instead of seeking
solace and professional help as women do, ‘men seek solutions’ (Davies and
Waldon 2003: 12).
Who actually seeks help has several important implications for male
depression and broader questions of gender in suicide. It is clear that, like
women, men struggle with depression. This does not mean that women and
men’s experiences of depression are identical; nor does it suggest that they may
never share any similarities. Instead, it highlights that emotional turmoil, and
the manner it is ‘expressed’, is not feminine by default, and nor is recognizing
signs of emotional distress a gender-neutral activity. What needs to be explicitly
recognized is that how we understand mental and emotional distress in the
context of depression is already entwined with gender norms. Furthermore, if
gender is to gain serious attention in suicide, we ought to go a step further than
identifying whether it is men or women who see their doctors. Who actually
seeks help is important. This, however, is only the beginning of a possible
explanation, rather than the explanation itself.
More questions need to be asked. Why is it that male depression has not
received attention earlier? Is it because women and not men see their doctors?
Or is it because only some questions about gender have been asked? Why is that
emotional vulnerability in men’s lives gains attention when it becomes too late?
And why is it that so little attention is given to the notion that men seek solutions,
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particularly since seeking solutions seems such an active rather than passive thing
to do? Is seeking solutions a matter of being unable to speak openly about
emotional fragility? Or is there something else that needs to be considered?
Something that may in fact be part of the manner in which cultural meanings of
gender translate how we as human beings recognize who and what we are in the
course of interpreting suicide. These sorts of questions need attention before
we attempt to explain why women seek solace and men seek solutions.
Questions about male depression and emotional distress highlight yet another
area of concern. Canetto points out that most of those who seek the help of
their doctor a month before trying to suicide ‘are treated with psychotropic
drugs, which they overdose on a short time later’ (1995b: 238). This has serious
ramifications. The intention to provide help is totally undermined with little
attention given to how gender assumptions might be part of the problem. In
critiquing outcomes as valid measures of intent, Canetto and Sakinofsky (1998)
argue that women’s lower rates of suicide may be the result of ‘successful’
treatments for depression. Women may in fact be as suicidal as men, but higher
rates of intervention and treatment lower their rates of suicide. In light of this,
I am arguing that the management of suicide prevention may be contributing
to women’s lower rates of suicide. It is not so much that suicide is either self-
evidently passive or active. Instead, the interpretation of passivity and activity,
as Foucault (2001: 32) argues in the context of madness, is more to do with the
management and treatment of depression. As a result, we need to ask ourselves
whether the way we interpret gender differences in suicide has something to
do with the living, with the researchers and practitioners working on suicide
prevention, rather than those who want to die, try or succeed.
The gendering of suicide in suicide prevention has broader implication.
Self-harm is one area of broader implication. Riddled with conceptual tensions,
self-harm has become one way of understanding suicidal behaviour in the
absence of lethal injury in recent years (Bowen and John 2001, Rhyne, Templer,
Brown and Peters 1995, Rosen and Heard 1995). Healey (2002: 32) defines
self-harm as any act of physical injury brought to the attention of hospital
emergency wards. Among injuries such as cutting and burning is self-poisoning,
understood as ‘overdosing on prescription and non-prescription medicines’.
The LIFE framework contains a discussion on self-harm, noting that it ‘includes
the various methods and degrees by which people harm themselves, including
self-laceration, self-battering, taking overdoses or deliberate recklessness’
(Commonwealth of Australia 2000a: 90). The LIFE framework also notes that
‘women are more likely to be admitted to hospital after self-deliberate self-harm
than men’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2000c: 14). For Healey, this is because
‘women are more likely to seek help, while men tend to keep it to themselves’
(2002: 33). Young women in particular come into contact with health care
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professionals more often, ‘therefore giving rise to statistics stating the high rate
of young women’ who self-harm (Healey 2002: 33).
The above discussion connects to several points I made earlier. While self-
harm gains recognition, the manner in which it is understood is quite distinct
from suicide. Although Healey (2002) debunks misleading views of self-harm,
self-harm lacks a level of agency and intent credited to ‘real’ and serious acts
of suicide. My quarrel with this understanding is not about debating whether
self-harm should automatically represent something suicidal, especially since,
as Pitts (2003) argues, self-harm can embody multiple, shifting and often
contradictory meanings. Rather, my quarrel is with the possibility that methods
such as self-poisoning are treated as less serious, intentional and suicidal
because they not only lack the marks of ‘serious’ violence, but because they are
seen as self-harm. My quarrel is also with the possibility that the interpretation
of self-harm will strengthen the impact of gender norms on understanding
suicide as masculine and masculinist, despite claims that not all self-harmers are
attention seekers (Healey 2002: 32–3). Since self-harm is said to be the result
of extreme emotional responses, this may actually encourage the production
of homogenous gendered truths in suicide. The manner in which we interpret
violence cannot be taken for granted, as doing so can silence those who already
feel voiceless and etch this voicelessness on their skin.
Self-harm raises even more questions. Why do bodily inscriptions gain
attention in research literature when they lack what is considered the necessary
‘ingredients’ of ‘serious’ suicide? Why not discuss bodily inscriptions in the
interpretation of ‘real’ violence in suicide? What would it mean to discuss all
bodily violence, particularly if it would require one to take into consideration
the gendered male body? I want to suggest that perhaps the reason why some
questions are yet to be raised is because raising them may risk challenging the
operation of particular gender norms in suicide, especially those that sustain
the power of enduring homogenous truth claims. Thus, as Grosz highlights
in relation to desire, raising questions may risk challenging the ‘repressed
unspoken condition of philosophically privileged concepts’ (1988: 34) on
which the gendering of suicide relies to maintain suicide as a masculine and
masculinist practice. Raising questions about gender in suicide prevention, I am
convinced, is crucial. Questioning enables us to challenge deeply problematic
interpretations of suicide. If questions about gender are not raised, then
significant aspects of gender will be suppressed in the process of preventing
suicide. The experiences of those deemed ‘not serious enough’ will continue
to be marginalized and, in some instances, silenced indefinitely. No degree of
education can ever compensate for this loss.
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Feminist Interventions
Despite what looks like a daunting picture, the gendering of suicide in psy-
knowledge has been subject to critique, mostly by feminist theorists and
practitioners in the field of psychology. Reviewing different themes of feminist
critique in the late 1990s, Range and Leach (1998) highlight how feminist
thinkers have had to challenge the philosophical, theoretical and methodological
underpinnings guiding research practices in suicidology. Criticisms have led to
the development of different approaches to understanding gender in suicide.
One prominent approach has centred on the social learning model.
Indebted to the work of Emile Durkheim, the social learning model has
tried to account for how individuals become social beings. Social learning or
socialization has been critical to second-wave feminism’s explanation of gender
as cultural. Specifically, masculinity and femininity are theorized as social and
cultural ‘expressions’ of gender, arising from social interactions in institutions
such as family, education, media and religion (Connell 1987, 1995, 2000). In
the course of interacting with others, individuals learn or internalize social and
cultural norms and assumptions (Lorber 1994). If most women become more
emotional, dependent and passive, and most men aggressive, instrumental and
independent, it is because particular expressions of gender are encouraged as a
result of some norms and ideals being valued more than others (Connell 1995,
Nicholson 1999, Harding 1998).
Incorporating the social learning model to researching suicide, feminist critics
argue that women are not necessarily incapable of having serious intentions
to suicide just because they select less violent methods. Rather, their method
selection is culturally conditioned because cultural constructions of gender are
interrelated with how individuals interpret violence (Canetto 1991, 1992–93,
Canetto and Lester 1998, Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998, Clifton and Lee 1995).
For Canetto and Lester, cultural values not only influence the selection of
methods but also which ‘kind of suicidal behavior is perceived as permissible’
(1995c: 5). This explains why completed suicide is often viewed as masculine
and attempted suicide is interpreted as feminine.
Situated in a specifically Western cultural context, the social learning model
has been useful for challenging gender-biased explanations of suicide. But there
is a problem. Part of the problem is that to a degree social learning presumes
that individuals will take on norms, meanings and assumptions in a relatively
straightforward, equation-like manner. To become social beings, individuals will
simply absorb or internalize sanctioned social norms and values (Butler 1989).
Analysing subject formation in relation to power, Butler (1997b) questions what
the internalization of norms means. She writes:
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In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained
what incorporation or, more generally, internalization is, what it means for a
norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of
internalization. Is the norm first ‘outside,’ and does it then enter into a pregiven
psychic space, understood as an interior theatre of some kind? (Butler 1997b: 19)
I cannot quite embrace the challenge Butler offers in these pages for it
would require me to analyse suicide at a phenomenal level, posing different
questions and drawing on different methods of research and analysis in the
field of qualitative inquiry. Nevertheless, Butler’s (1997b) question is useful
in suggesting that we need to examine more closely what the internalization
of gender norms means in suicide and how it translates the intelligibility of
suicide. This would require researchers to address power as a relation that is
reiterated more organically rather than an external condition that allows the
social internalization of norms (Butler 1997b). This, I think, is important for
challenging even more the degree to which masculinist conditions of knowing
shape how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge.
In raising questions about the internationalization of norms, I am
concerned with how suicidal bodies are interpreted. Although feminist thinkers
acknowledge the importance of gendered bodies in their use of the social
learning approach, little is said about challenging the continual assumption that
the body is fixed, stable and neutral. Much of what is said about gender appears
to presume that the body exists as an ontologically secure, reflective and passive
surface. This, I believe, needs to be more thoroughly examined, to further
question the contradictory yet pervasive assumption that the mind is the sole
source for the interpretation of suicidal intent. Assumptions about the body
must also be examined to question binaries such as male–female, masculine–
feminine, active–passive, especially since these are part of legitimating some
experiences at the expense of others. The social learning model provides a
descriptive framework for thinking about gender norms. Yet description alone
cannot fully explain how gender norms operate as discursive effects of power.
While social learning explains what gender might mean, it does not explain how
it gains meaning in suicide.
If a suicidal person presumably absorbs cultural norms and values, and
these in turn become part of suicidal motives and methods, then we have to
admit that this person is passive and docile. Ironically, social learning as an
explanatory model risks situating women’s suicide as even more passive because
it does not challenge the operation of gender norms in the interpretation of
passivity. Social learning risks reinforcing the very explanations that render some
acts of suicide as active and serious, and others as passive, attention-seeking
exercises. Nor does social learning address completely why some men would
rather die than survive suicide. My suggestion is that the social learning model is
110
only a beginning to challenging the manner in which gender conditions suicide.

This might be because this model needs to address explicitly the masculinist
conditions of understanding agency through which suicidal intent is interpreted.
Conclusion
The message in this chapter is clear. The knowing of suicide is dependent not
only on what is recognized as visible, but also on the conditions that render
something visible. In psy-knowledge, suicide’s intelligibility rests on legitimating
the visibility of gender differences, often rendered coherent in a contradictory
yet selective manner. The mind, as the reference point for identifying suicide
as a symptom of depression, is connected to the cultural interpretation of the
material body. The gender of suicide is actively inscribed through the masculine
and masculinist lens of desire, rendering some forms of violence as visible,
active and serious and others as less visible, passive and reactive. Unfortunately,
the effects of such interpretation extend to suicide prevention, in which gender
gets attention in particular ways that do little to challenge how knowledge about
suicide in suicidology becomes knowledge. Feminist contributions have begun
to challenge biased assumptions about suicide, but this is only the beginning.
I have done what frustrates many researchers in the social sciences. I have
raised questions without always answering them. This, I hope, has shown just
how much we need to scrutinize our knowledge of suicide, especially when
it comes to suicide prevention. The task of asking questions is important to
challenging the way some meanings become available for interpretation and
others remain marginalized. How something becomes available for interpretation
indicates that production of knowledge is not only dependent on the effects of
gender norms, but also on the regulation of power. We need to pay attention
to what is cast aside, overlooked or marginalized. But we also need to review
why a strange kind of disavowal is continually put into practice – especially
since denying the feminine in suicide is what drives understandings of suicide
as masculine and masculinist. If disavowal plays a role, then what is rendered
visible relies on what is rendered invisible. The next step, then, is to find out if
anyone cares about the visibility of gender differences away from the confines
of the research world: the public sphere.
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Chapter 7
Intriguing Events, Spectacular
Deaths1
Introduction
Truth about suicide takes on a different meaning in newsprint media. writing

on intrusion into grief in journalism long before any guidelines were in place in
australia, richards observed that, while most newsrooms agree not to report
‘“average” suicides, exceptions are invariably made when the person involved
is a prominent “name” or when the individual has employed more spectacular
methods to achieve his or her end’ (1996: 101). for me, this suggests that there
is some kind of ‘filter’ that shapes what the public will come to know of suicide.
of course this is for a good reason given the upsetting nature of suicide. Yet
despite this filter, something very strange has taken place in recent times.
Very obvious, visible and contradictory interpretations of gender dominate
representations of suicide. Put bluntly, suicide is a deeply biased gender-
saturated spectacle. what is worse is that no-one really cares, or not enough to
consider the possibility that there is more to this spectacle than meets the eye.
Maybe i am too idealistic in my worrying, especially since nowadays we
have very good guidelines in australian media to avoid publishing distressing
content about suicide. But unlike researchers in mental health who worry about
publishing stories in the first place, I worry more about what I will show to
be implicit and explicit gendering of suicide as a universal masculine activity.
But gender is not the only thing that matters for, as i will also show, race and
sexuality also play a part.2 and because i worry so much, i will show that suicide
1 Sections of this chapter were published earlier in the following: (1) Jaworski, K.
2008. ‘elegantly wasted’: the celebrity deaths of Michael hutchence and Paula Yates.
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22(6), 777–91 and, (2) Jaworski, K. 2010b.
‘The male preserve of martyrdom’: Palestinian female suicide bombers in australian
newsprint media. Feminist Media Studies, 10(2), 119–32.
2 By addressing race and sexuality in this chapter, i do not treat either of the terms
as additions to gender nor do i see them to be precisely like gender. My approach is
influenced by Butler’s insistence that what might appear as separable categories in the
production of knowledge can also be seen as ‘the conditions of articulation for each
other’ (1993a: 117, original emphasis).
is culturally neutralized and desensitized to the point where universal givens

about it can be sustained with surprising ease.
Drawing on Guy Debord’s (1994, 1998) notion of spectacle and Judith
Butler’s (1997a) work on naming, I will make my case by examining four vignettes
of suicide-related deaths published by four popular Australian newspapers: The
Australian, The Advertiser, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. I will begin by
reading the representation of the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates,
followed by female suicide bombers in the context of the Palestinian–Israeli
conflict. I will then analyse one example of Indigenous suicide: the death of the
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s principal dancer.3 Finally, I will pay close attention to
what I personally find deeply distressing: queer youth suicide.
It is important to analyse newsprint media for one particular reason.
Unlike the institutional sites analysed across this book, newsprint media is not
concerned with the scientific study of suicide. Yet as a site of practice, it is still
a site of social and cultural legitimation of legal, medical and psy-knowledge’s
power. It is the cultural site of understanding what experts and non-experts
alike say about suicide. It is the fourth estate, playing a key role in representing
public opinion in a presumably democratic and undistorted manner (Schultz
2002). Thus, my goal in Chapter 7 is to show how, as the final area of analysis,
newsprint media becomes a site of re-inscription, demonstrating yet again that
the gender of suicide is masculine and masculinist.4 But before I go any further,
I want to flag a couple of points because they are relevant to this particular
chapter, and because they relate to the immediacy of suicide and its public
forms of representation and reception.
Publishing articles about suicide in newspapers is not a straightforward
process. The press is constrained by wider community unease about publishing
stories in relation to suicide. In most recent years, such unease generated
the publication of guidelines targeting media professionals by mental health
experts working in suicide prevention. A publication entitled Reporting Suicide
and Mental Illness is the most recent example in Australia (National Media and
Mental Health Group 2004). The production of these guidelines is informed
by concerns that publishing suicide-related stories will trigger a copycat effect,
thereby increasing the actual rates (Blood, Putnis, Pirkis, Payne and Francis 2001,
3 Out of respect for Indigenous death-related traditions and rituals, I will not
identify the dancer’s name throughout my analysis.
4 Newspapers are considered important because, unlike television, the press offers
a much deeper glimpse into the reality of death (Stack 2000: 963). Unlike a televized
report, a suicide story may be read repeatedly through a newspaper (in hardcopy or
electronically). In more recent times, Facebook has become an exception to the rule.
Facebook does not prohibit the publication of suicide-related stories. However, it offers
direct guidelines on how to publish information, as guided by the American Foundation
for Suicide Prevention (2011).
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Intriguing Events, Spectacular Deaths
Hassan 1995a, Martin 1998, Stack 2000).5 For researchers such as Stack (1987,
2000), Martin and Koo (1997) and Martin (1998) imitation is strongly associated
with the publication of celebrity suicides, especially since stories dealing with
famous deaths tend to be sensationalist and contain large amounts of detail.
The issue of publishing famous suicides continues to be the cause of much
attention as well as tension between media and mental health professionals,
as the latter group insists that running celebrity-related stories glamorizes and
normalizes suicide (Martin 1998, Pirkis et al. 2002, 2007).6 Despite this tension,
it is generally agreed that coverage of suicide should only occur with prevention
and education in mind (Pirkis et al. 2002).
Unlike the concept of naming, spectacle has not been used in earlier
analyses. Addressing the question of spectacle in the context of mass
communication, Debord contends that, instead of thinking about spectacle
as a compilation of images through which something spectacular emerges,
one should think of it as ‘a social relationship between people that is mediated
by images’ (1994: 12). The idea of something being a spectacle is not only
a matter of what is displayed as striking and spectacular. Values, norms and
assumptions simultaneously embody what is displayed, providing the basis
for cultural identification and consumption (Debord 1994, Kellner 2003).
Debord (1994: 15, 1998: 6–7) also writes that spectacle is conveyed as good or
‘positive’, urging consumers to accept passively what is on display, since display
is facilitated by transparency and openness.
Debord’s treatment of spectacle is important for several reasons. First,
spectacle is dependent on power relations, which are concentrated or diffused,
and working in accord. Where concentrated power is condensed into one
source, influencing everything that is represented, diffused power relies on
those who consume it, fabricating a sense of choice when in fact choice is
already limited (Debord 1994). Secondly, spectacle materializes through
repetition by which authority and truth are established, aided by different
5 In his quantitative review, Steven Stack (2000: 958) reports that some studies
indicate that, while there may not be an increase in suicide rates after a story is publicized,
individuals who would consider suicide regardless may simply copy the method used.
6 In reviewing the publication of suicide stories in the media, Pirkis et al. (2002:
190–95) conclude that, while the nature of reporting suicide in the Australian media
(newspapers, radio, television) does vary, certain themes can be identified. First, most
stories tend to be on completed suicides only. Secondly, the content often relates to
individual life experiences including mental illness, different policy initiatives and
general statistics about the rate of suicide. Thirdly, explicit language is generally avoided
in the headlines, graphic photographs are omitted and items in newspapers are not
found on the front page. Fourthly, a significant number of stories discuss the method
used by the individual in some detail. Fifthly, men, young people, people living in rural
areas, psychiatric patients and those held in custody tend to feature the most as those
groups are considered to be seriously at risk.
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discourses confirming the legitimacy of what is represented (Debord 1998).

Thirdly, spectacle appears unmediated, which conceals its modus operandi
(Debord 1994). Concealment works by privileging one idea over another,
helped by the passive acceptance of what is represented. In a nutshell, spectacle
is useful to the task of critically illuminating, in Debord’s (1994: 15) terms, the
methodological media landscape of suicide.
In wanting to know how the gender of suicide takes shape in newsprint
media, I pay attention to race and sexuality. I adopt Goldberg’s understanding of
race as a discursive object that ‘creates the conceptual conditions of possibility’
for racialized expressions (1993: 42). Race is a device used to explain differences
between people, one that is influenced by politics, history, time, space and social
values (Goldberg 1993, Said 1993, Omi and Winant 1986). In this sense, race is
the effect rather than the cause of naming something as raced and, as Ahmed
elaborates, race cannot be divorced from ‘the gendering and sexualizing of
bodies’ (2002: 47). In a similar vein, I deploy the concept of sexuality as a
discursively constituted, arbitrary and historical term that embodies a range
of bodily practices, desires, tastes and pleasures (Grosz 1994, 1995, Jagose
1996, Sedgwick 1991). Specifically, I use Foucault’s (1978) and Butler’s (1996)
understanding of sexuality, and see it as a practice that takes bodies as its objects
to produce them as sources of ‘natural’ and ‘inner’ truths.
‘Elegantly Wasted’: The Celebrity Deaths of Michael Hutchence and

Paula Yates7
Across the two-day period of 23–24 November 1997, various newspapers

across Australia reported the death of Michael Hutchence. On its front page,
The Sunday Age captured the death as follows:
Australian rock star Michael Hutchence was found dead in a plush hotel suite in Sydney
yesterday from an apparent suicide. He was 37. The INXS lead singer’s body was
7 Michael Hutchence gained his international celebrity status as a lead singer and
main lyricist of the Australian band INXS during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Paula
Yates made her name as a presenter of the UK pop music show The Tube during the early
1980s and as a co-presenter of the early 1990s Channel 4 show The Big Breakfast, where
she interviewed the famed and the famous on a bed, including Michael Hutchence (Levy
2000, Sawyer 1997). Yates’ celebrity status was also associated with her marriage to Sir
Bob Geldof, the lead singer of Boomtown Rats and the organizer of the infamous
1984 Live Aid charity concert (Herd 1997). In an article entitled ‘Elegantly wasted’, the
‘elegance’ associated with Hutchence’s death is captured as follows: ‘He was truly one
of Australia’s great rock’n’roll icons. As the sexy frontman to INXS, Michael Hutchence
seemingly had it all. Sadly, his amazing life has been tragically wasted’ (The Advertiser
1997: 19).
116
discovered amid a spray of prescription pills by a staff member in room 524 at the Ritz-
Carlton around midday. Police confirmed that they had taken a belt for forensic testing
amid reports the millionaire singer was hanging from a door. No note was found. A post-
mortem will be carried out tomorrow. (Goodsir, Hannan and Wilmoth 1997: 1)
The presence of the belt and the naked state of the body soon became the focus
of attention. The Sydney Morning Herald described the discovery of Hutchence
as ‘naked, with a belt tied around his neck and a variety of pills including the
anti-depressant drug Prozac in the room’ (Kennedy and Bearup 1997: 2). The
Advertiser followed suit with even more spectacular detail. Upon entering his
room, the hotel maid discovered
The body of a man was lying a heap … he was naked except for a belt around his neck.
He looked really skinny and I didn’t recognise him as Hutchence. There was a stench of
booze and smoke and the bed sheets had been ripped off the bed and strewn across the
floor. Empty glasses and pills littered the carpet and I noticed photos lying around him.
They were pictures of Paula Yates. (Quigley 1997: 21)
The self-closing device behind the main door in the entrance to the room, the
kneeling naked body, alcohol bottles and photographs of Paula Yates and infant
daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, soon became part of what one journalist
referred to a year later as ‘a grotesque puzzle’ (Rayment 1998a: R05).
Shock and surprise followed. While most grieving family members, close
friends and band members claimed that Hutchence was facing difficult issues in
his life, he was still happy, content and looking forward to performing on stage
again (Danielsen 1997, Kennedy and Bearup 1997, Meade and Thorp 1997,
St John 1997, Webb and Curtis 1997). He was about to embark on a national
twentieth anniversary tour with INXS. While record sales of the latest album,
Elegantly Wasted, were not as high as expected, they were not particularly low
(Meade and Thorp 1997). In other words, Hutchence showed no outward sign
that would forecast his death as ‘willed, deliberate, solitary’ (Danielsen 1997: 13).
While reasons began to unfold in the public eye, the question of whether
Hutchence ‘died performing bizarre sex acts’ was insistently raised and denied
(Meade and Thorp 1997: 1). Reports of early investigations by the police and
the coronial inquiry did not indicate suspicious circumstances. Autoerotic
asphyxiation was considered as one such circumstance (Dean 1998, Koha
1997, Overington 1998, Scott and Balogh 1998, The Advertiser 1999). Although
Hutchence’s heterosexual practices, often termed ‘appetites’, did receive a
significant amount of attention in later articles, the discussion of autoeroticism
never went beyond its brief mention. Commenting on Hutchence’s sexual
history two years later, The Australian defined autoerotic asphyxiation as ‘the
act of choking one’s self to the point of unconsciousness during masturbation’
117
(1999: 3). Hutchence’s death was named as choking in some earlier accounts,
described in the context of ‘kneeling down and taking the strain off the belt’
(Casey, Gelastopoulos and Ogg 1997: 3). Yet despite the potential of ‘choking’
to represent either autoeroticism or hanging – a potential that introduces
ambiguity – the coroner finally pronounced the act of choking a deliberate
intent to commit suicide (Scott and Balogh 1998).
The coroner’s verdict received detailed coverage. In ruling out any form
of sexual misadventure, the inquiry revealed that Hutchence was in a state
of severe depression as a result of custody battles between Paula Yates and
former partner, Bob Geldof, a state intensified by the presence of alcohol and a
variety of prescribed and non-prescribed drugs (Dean 1998, Overington 1998,
Scott and Balogh 1998, The Advertiser 1998b: 13). The inquiry also revealed
that Hutchence had been undergoing treatment for depression for at least two
years and consulted a doctor a month before his death (Debelle 1997, Scott and
Balogh 1998). In the minds of the wider public, Michael Hutchence not only
died naked with a belt around his neck, but also ‘alone, depressed and in an
alcohol and drug-induced haze’ (Overington 1998: 1). Titles such as ‘Last lonely
hours of a drugged and despairing idol’ encapsulated an enduring portrayal of
the suicide of Michael Hutchence (Overington 1998: 1).
Almost three years later, the media reported that Paula Yates had been
found dead in her London home (Kennedy, Bice and Gibbs 2000, McCabe
2000, Hilferty 2000, Walker 2000a). Prior to her death, however, Yates did not
disappear from the public eye. Periodically, different articles documented her
struggle with depression and its treatment, addiction to drugs and alcohol, suicidal
ideation, copycat suicide attempts, custody and financial court battles, attempts
to challenge the coronial verdict on Hutchence’s death, nervous breakdowns,
affairs with younger men, details of sexual preferences, parenthood, and her
expulsion from a psychiatric clinic for having sex with another patient on the
premises (Barnsley 1998, Flanagan 1998, Levy 2000, McCabe 2000, McDonald
and Yeaman 1999, Pinkney 1998, Rayment 1998b, Stanaway 1998, The Advertiser
1998a, 1998c, The Australian 1998, Walker 2000a, 2000b).
On 18 September 2000, The Sydney Morning Herald briefly reported on its front
page that ‘Paula Yates, the partner of the late INXS singer, Michael Hutchence,
was found dead in her London home yesterday … British media reports said
Yates had died of a drug overdose’ (Kennedy et al. 2000: 1). Other visual cues
included the deceased body in bed, the presence of heroin and cocaine, the lack
of a suicide note, and a distraught Tiger Lily who discovered Yates’s deceased
body (McCabe 2000, Morrison 2000, Walker 2000a, 2000b). Shock, surprise
and grief followed Yates’s death. Different individuals reported that she was
in fact ‘doing well’ (Walker 2000a, 2000b). Although Tiger Lily featured in the
coverage of Hutchence’s and Yates’s deaths, she was more visible in the latter.
Not only was she a solitary figure of sorrow who had lost her father, but she
118
was now a complete orphan, having also lost her mother (Herd 1997, Hilferty
2000, Kennedy et al. 2000).
The coronial inquiry into Yates’s death received limited attention in the
Australian press. Echoing initial speculations as to the nature of the death, in
an article entitled, ‘Yates killed by a drug overdose’, The Advertiser reported that
Coroner Paul Knapman dismissed speculation that Yates had taken her own life because
she was depressed since Hutchence hanged himself in 1997. He said Yates was an
inexperienced heroin user and had miscalculated the amount of the drug her body could
withstand. ‘The evidence does not point towards this being a deliberate act of suicide …
It seems most improbable that she would attempt to kill herself with her daughter in the
house. Her behavior was foolish and incautious.’ (2000: 32)
The following day, The Advertiser published the opinion of Hutchence’s mother,
Patricia Glassop, who stated that Yates was not an inexperienced heroin user
and that her death may in fact have been a suicide (Morrison 2000). Like
Hutchence, a degree of ambiguity was associated with how Yates died. Yet
despite the ambiguity, and regardless of the depressive state and prior drug use,
Yates’s death was not named a suicide. And unlike that of Hutchence, Yates’s
death was not marked by a glamorous and heroic sense of loneliness and a
depressive drug haze. Instead, her death was said to be a foolish accident carried
out by a foolish mother.
Character portrayals shaped how the deaths of Hutchence and Yates were
represented. Bestowed with the title ‘Mr Sexcess’ shortly before his death,
Hutchence was painted in one article as ‘rock’s incurable hellraiser, rabid dingo
and lucky man’ with a history of dating famous women (Sawyer 1997: A04).
This image did not alter during the period in which Hutchence’s death was
documented. Different articles described Hutchence as a sexually voracious,
wild, sometimes bad tempered, white rock idol with a particular appetite for
casual sex and drug use (Este 1997, Lynch 1999, Rayment 1998a, Stuart 1997).
At the same time, Hutchence was depicted as possessing an interior self,
described as intense, charismatic, recklessly charming, generous, thoughtful,
bright, articulate, passionate, fragile, sensitive, insecure – a hardworking,
struggling yet committed family man who had a lot to offer and who died far
too young (Lynch 1999, Meade and Thorp 1997, Rayment 1998a, 1998b, Sly
1997, The Advertiser 1997). In his mother’s words, he was ‘just an ordinary man’
despite his celebrity status in the media (Williams 2000: M03).
Yates’s ‘reputation’ was far less positive prior to her death. It was made
prominent by the controversial break-up with her partner Bob Geldof and
the ensuing custody/financial battles, which led to Yates being branded as ‘an
irresponsible mother … [who wore] shockingly short skirts and unsuitably high
heels’ (Herd 1997: 29). Shortly after Hutchence’s suicide, Yates was represented
119
as dignified, lonely, grieving, broken-hearted and despairing (Herd 1997, Lee

and Webber 1997, Stanaway 1998). At the same time, Yates was depicted as
a surgically enhanced, cleavage heaving, besotted bride-to-be with a young
daughter to care for (Herd 1997). Such somewhat positive portrayals soon
shifted to more negative ones in which she was cited as a drunk, hysterical drama
queen who orchestrated her own misery (Herd 1997, Lynch 1999, Pinkney
1998, Walker 2000a). The coverage of a suicide attempt crystallized Yates as
irrational, silly, selfish, manipulative, psychologically wounded; a borderline
personality with ‘an “infantile need” for attention’, marked by her desire for
larger breasts (Levy 2000: 19).8 The suicide attempt was declared to be a staged
‘mock suicide in a “desperate cry for help”’ (Flanagan 1998: 9).
Motherhood was frequently discussed in relation to Yates’s life and death.
She was put across as an earthy and committed mother (Levy 2000, Walker
2000a, 2000b) – something that, as Jermyn argues in the context of celebrity
motherhood, ‘taps into and perpetuates those ubiquitous (and culturally
obligatory) discourses that position maternal love as all consuming’ (2008:
170). Unfortunately, Yates’s good mother image was soon overshadowed by
detailed attention to her sexual life. She was often described as a seducer plainly
obsessed with sex (Pinkney 1998, Levy 2000). Invoked as Hutchence’s lover
rather than partner, her image was morally encoded as a sinner despite the
tragedy of her death. Although remembered for being a warm and generous
community member, Yates was repeatedly hailed as a sexually irresponsible,
immature woman (Herd 1997, McCabe 2000, Levy 2000). As Levy claimed,
‘deep down she remained the same man-chasing girl, offering too much of
herself to compensate for being only passably pretty’ (2000: 19). What is
striking about the portrayal of Yates is that, while it shares similarities with that
of Hutchence, these issues received far more detailed attention. Being a parent
and having particular sexual preferences appear to have mattered more in the
case of Paula Yates.
How then are the deaths of Hutchence and Yates spectacles? I want to
suggest that both deaths need to be read in relation to one another because they
materialize through concentrated and diffused exercises of power at the same
time. The representation of Hutchence’s suicide was concentrated because
it was repetitively hailed to the point where very enduring features emerged.
The image of Hutchence kneeling down naked with the belt around his neck
was systematically invoked. The display of Yates as a concentrated spectacle
was not successful entirely because she disappeared almost completely from
newspaper pages once it was settled her death was an accidental overdose. At
the same time, a handful of articles hailed an enduring portrayal of Yates’s
8 The reference to a borderline personality with an infantile need for attention

came from a clinical psychologist who worked with Yates on a TV show (Herd 1997).
120
death. While Yates may have had good intentions, in the end, she was hailed as
a sinful, misguided woman – a far cry from the enduring naming of Hutchence
as a struggling hero.
Representations of Hutchence and Yates were simultaneously diffused.
Different articles offered a range of perspectives on their lives and deaths.
Despite being contradictory and dichotomous, a smorgasbord of knowledge
was offered, creating an impression that there were many sides to each story.
This display of knowledge was quite convincing, especially when similar themes
appeared with regularity, and especially when ‘confirmed’ as the representation
of a ‘complete’ truth by coronial inquiries. While individual readers might not
have been entirely convinced about the nature of each person’s death, in the
end what was displayed was transparent, obvious and truthful, even though
problematic interpretations of gender were present. These narratives implied
‘real’ tragedies that were already out there, brought to a reader’s attention to
inform the wider public.
I want to propose that, through the process of naming, the deaths of
Hutchence and Yates were not reproductions of what was obviously already
out there, but instead were spectacles saturated by gender norms. Despite
levels of doubt and ambiguity, Hutchence’s hanging materialized as a deliberate
act of self-destruction, whereas Yates’s overdose was a deadly accident. Put
differently, where Hutchence more or less did what he intended to do, Yates
did not. One could argue that this is the case because it is what their intentions
must have been, especially since Yates was displayed as lacking self-control
more than Hutchence. At the same time, ambiguity within each display of
death points towards a powerful context through which suicide is invoked
as active and passive, serious and attention-seeking, masculine and feminine,
inscribed on the fleshy surfaces of corporeal bodies, culturally read as male
and female. Hutchence and Yates may themselves be unable to respond to the
truths articulated about their deaths. Nevertheless, their deaths are still rendered
meaningful because of the authority vested in the expert discourses such as
coronial inquests and gender norms interpreting their deaths, which of course
cannot be read outside their celebrity status.
The gendering of Hutchence’s and Yates’s deaths was influenced by wider
understandings of parenthood. Although both were parents at the time of
their deaths, the physical presence of the daughter at the scene of Yates’s
death, unlike that of Hutchence, inscribed a very different intent. This, I am
arguing, was informed by already-gendered understandings of motherhood,
citing the deceased body of Yates as unwilling to die. Compounded by the
ambiguity associated with overdoses, motherhood rendered Yates as lacking
the desire to die – something that mattered less in the interpretation of
Hutchence as a father. Since Yates’s image was cited as irrational and unstable,
and her female body lacked any definite signs of physical violence, her death
121
did not express a serious desire to take her own life. Instead, her death was
coded as a passive and reactive ‘accident’. Yet, given the ambiguity associated
with drug overdoses, the outcome could only be probable. In some way, Yates’s
death was rendered as abject: it was not a suicide yet it could not be claimed as
an accident with absolute certainty.
Hanging, as an act of self-destruction, is generally not considered ambiguous.
In comparison with firearms, hanging does not inscribe extreme forms of
physical violence. At the same time, however, it is still viewed as serious and
intentional. Although Hutchence’s naked body was interpreted as a grotesque
puzzle, this puzzle was situated well away from the open, leaky, sexualized
feminine body (Ahmed 2002). Cited as the principal cause of Hutchence’s death,
the belt around his neck made his desire to suicide potentially ambiguous. This
was inscribed through his naked body found kneeling behind the door’s self-
closing device. By saying this, I am not suggesting the state of the body alone
was the source of the ambiguity. Rather, the ambiguity was shaped by what the
naked body can signify in the context of sexual desires and pleasures such as
erotic auto-asphyxiation. The point I am making is that Hutchence’s intentions
were opaque, yet they more or less remained unquestioned. Yates attempted
suicide in a similar manner in 1998 and was found almost unconscious (Flanagan
1998). And despite Yates sharing similarities with Hutchence’s suicide – namely,
depression, parenthood, no suicide note, consumption of high quantities of
drugs and alcohol – Hutchence’s intentions were not rendered opaque to the
same degree. Past suicide attempts only furthered the construction of the
accidental overdose marked by unclear intentions, carried out by an excessive,
attention-seeking, emotionally reactive woman and mother, incapable of coping
with the loss of her lover.
The gendering of Hutchence’s suicide was bound to his masculine identity.
Hutchence was hailed as the culturally celebrated, iconic Australian larrikin.
Primarily associated with heterosexual masculinity and male bodies, Rickard
(1998) suggests that the larrikin is marked by a flaunting sexuality, wittiness,
flair for physical and verbal violence, licence to exceed conventions, charisma,
roughness, romantic attachments to the working class and a commitment to
drinking alcohol in public spaces. In sum, he is a lovable rascal who is easily
forgiven – an everyday man whose masculinity masks inner fears and uncertainties
(Rickard 1998). Although Hutchence did not qualify as a working-class man,
different speech acts still hailed him as a larrikin. This status was furthered by
the culture of rock music which, as Evans (1998) argues, is intertwined with
particular forms of Australian masculinism. These include a contradictory mix
of aggression, toughness, sentimentality and vulnerability (Evans 1998). Thus,
the naming of Hutchence as recklessly charming, sexually voracious, wild and,
at the same time, as sensitive, fragile and insecure cited and reiterated historical
stereotypes about and assumptions of Australian masculinity. Furthermore,
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although Hutchence’s body remained especially present, the language that hailed
his suicide made his male and masculine body less obvious. The representation
of Hutchence as a larrikin was shaped by what Shilling (1993: 9) calls a bodily
‘absent presence’, through which his suicide acquired a predominantly cerebral
existence. In death, Hutchence became just an ordinary man, whose death
materialized as (specifically Australian) masculine and masculinist.
The gendering of Hutchence’s suicide was also encoded with racialized
meanings of whiteness, which do not reside outside the production of white
stardom (Redmond 2007). Whiteness as a norm is not easy to discern because,
as Dyer contends, ‘white people are not racially seen and named’ (1997: 1).
Being white does not need direct identification (Dyer 1997). Consequently, the
status of whiteness functions as a privileged norm, escaping the process of
racialization, whereby bodies become raced (Ahmed 2002, Frankenberg 1993).
Identified within the tradition of white rock music, modulated by Australia’s
class-based political struggle and its colonial white history, Hutchence’s gendered
body was racialized as implicitly white. Australia’s white colonial history was not
directly glossed in representing Hutchence’s suicide. Nevertheless, the success
of hailing Hutchence as a lovable rascal-hero with an ‘inner’ struggling self
depended on the Australian colonial sense of whiteness, one that generally
remains invisible because, as Dyer (1997) claims, whiteness transcends the
conditions of its materiality. How we come to understand Hutchence’s death is
conditioned by gendered and raced norms, and by masculinist ways of knowing
– yet never overtly so.
I want to return to the issue of erotic auto-asphyxiation to demonstrate my
argument about gender and Hutchence’s death further. Erotic auto-asphyxiation
introduces the presence of ‘transgressive’ sexual pleasures. The knowledge of
Hutchence engaging in such pleasures may be acceptable, as the larrikin brand
of white masculinity is infused with sexual wildness, and celebrities in general
are credited with certain sexual allowances (Turner, Bonner and Marshall 2000).
This, however, works only to some extent, especially since kinky sexual pleasures
are more closely aligned with racialized expressions of black sexuality, often
interpreted as excessive, transgressive, wild and marked by unrestrained eroticism
(Frankenberg 1993, hooks 2001, Stepan 1990). As Dyer (1997) points out,
uncontrollable heterosexual appetites, no matter how strong, are simply not very
white. Yet given its tabloid connections with homosexuality via English aristocratic
political figures, erotic auto-asphyxiation is simply not very heterosexual. Through
Hutchence’s choked naked body, kinky sexual pleasures and desires threatened to
take over the suicide. They conveyed a deeply unstable mix of uncontrolled, but
also unreciprocated, ‘black’ whiteness, and de-masculated masculinity. In a sense,
naming Hutchence’s death as a suicide minimized such discursive takeovers,
ensuring his status as a cultural icon and hero.
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Yates’s accidental death was also imbued with gender and race norms.
Shrouded in moral undertones, Yates was portrayed as a sinner. This portrayal
cited and reiterated normative assumptions about feminine emotionality,
sexuality and, as argued earlier, motherhood. Examining expressions of men’s
heterosexuality, Stephen (2002) contends the only terms available to describe
expressive practices by women are highly disparaging descriptors such as ‘tart’,
‘slag’ or ‘whore’. If a female celebrity is depicted outside what is considered
sexually appropriate – which does not include short skirts and high heels at
Yates’s age – her sexual expressions are deemed morally inappropriate (Redmond
2008). Yates herself could not escape the material conditions of her feminized
body, because language repetitively hailed her breasts, sexual practices and
emotional displays of grief and despair, all of which cemented her image as
a heart-broken irrational and disturbed seducer. This language, I am arguing,
was saturated by gendered understandings through which the overdose, as a
foolish act, was construed. Yates’s accidental overdose was abject, marked by
an inability to transcend the conditions of her gendered corporeal body – a
gendering enabled by masculinist conditions of knowing.
Yates was successfully hailed as a sinner because of racial interpretations
of white women. Discussing the relationship between whiteness and sexuality,
Dyer (1997) explains that Western heterosexuality constructs dichotomous
ideas of sex for men and women. Where white men are represented as having
powerful sex drives, white women are ‘not supposed to have such drives in the
first place’ (Dyer 1997: 28). Although white male and female sexuality is seen
as more ‘civilized’ than black sexuality, as Frankenberg (1993) points out, white
women are sexualized as pure, virginal and untainted (Ahmed 2002, Stephen
2002). I am arguing that this racialization of heterosexual desire is part of the
representation of Yates’s death. Yates’s desires are hailed as transgressive, located
outside the moral standards of white feminine heterosexuality constituted by a
female body as a pure vessel of reproduction – and outside the realms of what
it means to be an idealized female celebrity whose sexual desires, infused with
whiteness, ought to be kept under control (Redmond 2007). Yates’s whiteness,
however, was not rendered explicit. A level of colourless visibility discursively
concealed her whiteness. Its presence could be detected only because Yates
transgressed the boundaries of white heterosexual femininity: something that
reveals the concealed operation of idealized whiteness in media’s representation
of celebrity bodies (Geraghty 2007, Redmond 2007). While one may argue that
Yates was already transgressive and that the media was simply reporting on pre-
existing events, the very language used to name Yates’s identity conditioned her
death as failing to qualify the intelligibility of suicide.
My reading of Hutchence’s and Yates’s tragic deaths raises the following
questions. Can the female body ever be dead with the same level of intent as
the male body? Can suicidal intent of male bodies ever be read as opaque to
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the same degree as with female bodies? I raise these two questions because,
regardless of similar levels of ambiguity, Hutchence’s male, masculine, white,
heterosexual body was recognized differently in comparison to the abject,
otherized state of Yates’s female, feminine, white, heterosexual body. I also
raise these two questions because, while newsprint media representations
questioned whether his death occurred in relation to kinky sex, hers was a
case of whether she was capable of killing herself. While both deaths were
represented as wasted lives, Hutchence retained an element of glamour and
‘elegance’ not attributed to the death of Paula Yates. The former is serious
and active; the latter is reactive and passive – dichotomies that normalize and
reinforce suicide as masculine and masculinist.
My questions and arguments still leave me wondering. In Debord’s (1994)
terms, the spectacles of Hutchence and Yates express such a need to sleep – to
remain unquestioned – when it comes to gender. But why is this so when gender
is so obvious? Why does not anyone care whether or not the representations
are problematic? In light of these questions, I want to suggest that the diffused
effect of spectacle’s power reduces the need to question the gender-saturated,
contradictory readings of each death. Power diffuses the operation of gender
norms to the point where gendered and raced interpretations of suicide are
read as simple instances of death reported by newsprint media. Power may
also diffuse the operation of norms because gender and race, together with
normative assumptions about heterosexuality, condition each other to the point
where the need to question is constrained. Constraint, I want to suggest, is
necessary so that how gender norms work can be made invisible to maintain
the presumption that what is reported is self-evident and, in a sense, a given.
There are two problems with the way diffuse power enabled the gendering
of Hutchence’s and Yates’s deaths. The first is with the way the representation
of each death privileged what is male, masculine and active over what is female,
feminine and passive. The second is the way each case was represented as a
given – as self-evident and obvious even though it was heavily saturated by
gender. The problem with presuming the two spectacles as givens is that each
was exceeded by a history of representing celebrity deaths in the media, and of
the more prevalent gendered framework of understanding suicide. As Butler
(1997a: 29) maintains, naming something is possible because something else has
been named. And so, if the deaths were represented in particular ways, it was
because cultural norms visibly and invisibly rendered what was represented and
because the operation of cultural norms remained taken for granted.
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‘The Male Preserve of Martyrdom’: Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers
Despite increasingly good research on suicide bombing in recent years, I

approach the topic with some trepidation. Suicide bombing occupies an uneasy
place in relation to suicide per se because it is simultaneously described as suicide,
murder and terrorist activity (Hacking 2008). It almost always involves the death
of more than one person in urban public spaces such as shopping malls, roads,
pedestrian streets, buses, bus stops, restaurants, cafes and holiday destinations.
It is not easy to imagine the slain bodies resulting from this form of death.
There is a level of horror and shock embodied in detailed visual descriptions
such as: ‘The bus seats were stained with blood and its floor peppered with the
organs of some of the dead’ (The Australian 2002h: 8). Language in Western
media captures the horror of suicide bombing through phrases such as ‘suicide
attacks’, ‘suicide killer’, ‘suicide madness’, ‘terrorist acts’, ‘death missions’, ‘ritual
of horror’, ‘human bombs’, ‘murderous acts of terror’ and ‘hate weapons’. Yet
despite the unease and horror, and perhaps because of it, suicide bombing
offers very important insights into understanding how gender norms work in
the gendering of suicide.
While I focus on the events of 2002 in the Palestinian/Israeli region, suicide
bombing does not occur in one region alone. Nor is its use always motivated by
the same reasons and carried out in the same manner (Rose 2004, Silke 2003,
Verancini 2002). Recently, a number of explanations have been put forward
to unpack the complexities of suicide bombing. Past research painted suicide
bombers as crazed, poor, brainwashed, drugged, religious zealots. More recent
analyses suggest most suicide bombers are well-educated, belong to middle-
class families, do not come from broken homes and are not mentally ill (Hassan
2001, 2004, Kushner 1996, Moghadam 2003, Pape 2005, Reuter 2004, Silke
2003, Tosini 2009, Townsend 2007). Although religion is viewed as influential,
it is also clear that suicide bombers come from both religious and secular
backgrounds (Hacking 2008, Hassan 2001, Kushner 1996, Moghadam 2003,
Pape 2005, Robson 2004). The majority of suicide bombers are either refugees
in their late teens or well-educated workers in their late 20s (Pape 2005, Silke
2003). And most of all, the majority are male (Naaman 2007, Hacking 2008). As
O’Loughlin points out, suicide bombing is ‘the male preserve of martyrdom’
(2004a: 9).9 So what happens when women enter this preserve?
In Australia, the year 2002 witnessed an extensive coverage of suicide
bombing in the context of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising. The year
9 For O’Loughlin (2004a), the small number of female suicide bombers constituted
a feminist invasion. He writes: ‘Whatever the motives of female suicide bombers, the
overwhelmingly male and Muslim Palestinian “street” seems to be overcoming its original
qualms about this feminist invasion of the male preserve of martyrdom’ (2004a: 9).
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began with the reporting of two suicide bombings, one of which was the first
female suicide bomber, identified as Wafa Idris, aged 27 (The Advertiser 2002c,
The Australian 2002e). Aside from the frequency and intensity of violence, Wafa
Idris made the second uprising different from the one during the early 1990s
(Atran 2003, Verancini 2002). Although Palestinian women were involved
previously, Idris was heralded as the first ‘successful’ female operative.10 Three
other female suicide bombers were reported during the same year: Dareen
Abu Aisheh (aged 21), Ayat Mohammed al-Akhras (aged 18) and Andaleeb
Taqataqah (aged 20) (Daraghmeh 2002, Goldenberg 2002a, 2002b, Hendawi
2002, La Guardia 2002, Myre 2002, The Australian 2002b, Walker 2002a).11 Two
other unidentified female bombers were reported as having backed out at the
last minute (Philps 2002, Rabinovich 2002c, The Weekend Australian 2002). Al-
Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a secular militant group linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah
movement which was said to accept women as potential martyrs, accepted
responsibility for all bombings (Rubenstein 2002).12 All of the bombings
were carried out in public locations: a shopping mall, an Israeli checkpoint, a
supermarket and a busy pedestrian street (Daraghmeh 2002, Hendawi 2002,
La Guardia 2002, Rubenstein 2002, The Advertiser 2002a, 2002e, The Australian
2002d, 2002e, Walker 2002a).
Officially identified as suicide bombers, all four women were visually
represented. Unlike the three women that followed, photos of Wafa Idris did
not depict her wearing a traditional Muslim headdress. Wafa Idris appeared
in three separate photographs: in her graduation outfit, with her mother,
and a small profile picture holding a baby nephew to her face (The Advertiser
2002c, The Australian 2002e, Wahdan 2002, Walker 2002a).13 The photographs
10 Yoni Fighel points out that ‘the current phenomenon of involving Palestinian
women in terrorist activity is not new. A prominent example is Atef Eleyan, a senior
Palestinian Islamic Jihad activist who planned to perpetrate a suicide attack using a car
bomb in Jerusalem in 1987. Atef was jailed in Israel for ten years and was released in
1997’ (2003: np). Systematic use of suicide bombing within the Palestine–Israel conflict
officially began in 1993 carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and
Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ). This was part of the first Palestinian intifada (1987–93).
In the first uprising, suicide bombers predominantly came from religious groups such
as Hamas, whereas they came from religious and secular-nationalist groups such as Al-
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the second uprising (Hassan 2004, Pape 2005).
11 At the Suicide Terrorism Conference in Washington DC Nasra Hassan (2004)
said eight women were involved as suicide bombers during the second intifada.
12 This was the case until 2004 when the religious militant organization Hamas
claimed responsibility for the then 21-year-old Reem Salah al-Rayashi (O’Loughlin
2004b, 2004c). Before her death, Reem Salah al-Rayashi claimed to be the first female
suicide bomber, given the more prominent social, political and religious status of Hamas.
13 Two years later, The Age Magazine printed a photograph of Israeli police
inspecting Idris’ body after the bombing (Victor 2004).
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displaying the other three women comprised profile-like shots only. The photo
captions described Dareen Abu Aisheh as ‘determined’ (Daraghmeh 2002: 29),
Aayat Mohammed al-Akhras as a ‘fanatic’ (La Guardia 2002: 13) and Andaleeb
Taqataqah as ‘destiny’ (Hendawi 2002). The media found it important to
identify individual faces when representing the four female bombers. Though
photographs in general were frequently used in reports covering suicide bombing,
depicting levels of physical property damage, the distress of those wounded
and Israeli army and paramedic personnel, the faces of the four bombers were
visually available. In other words, we not only knew what they did, we knew
what they looked like. While photographs of Palestinian male suicide bombers
were included throughout 2002, their use was not so systematic.14
Visual representations of the four Palestinian female bombers were often
accompanied by bodily descriptions and brief discussions of personal and
professional biographies. Some examples are as follows:
Wafa Idris was an attractive, auburn-haired graduate who had a loving family
and wore sleeveless dresses and make-up. She worked hard as a paramedic and
had no history of religious fanaticism … ‘She was not religious. She did not
pray and cover up. She was a merry person and had a strong character. She was
very active, but no one could ever believe that she would actually carry out a
bombing’ … Idris was not an obvious candidate to become a suicide bomber.
But it was her work as a volunteer paramedic for the Red Crescent emergency
medical service in the refugee camps of the West Bank that is the key to this
latest bloodshed … But there were doubts that she deliberately set off the 10kg
of explosive she was carrying. Israeli police said they were still investigating
whether her action had been intentional or whether the device had detonated
prematurely. (Walker 2002a: 7)15
On Wednesday night, the English literature student blew herself to pieces at
an Israeli checkpoint … A young, devout Muslim from a poor family, she fitted
in many ways the profile of the average suicide bomber, but women bombers
are rare … On the walls of the modest three-room house a poster showed
Dareen, brandishing a knife. Starring into the camera with a dull gaze and dark
rings under her eyes, she wore a shawl embroidered with the Palestinian flag and
the headscarf of the observant Muslim woman. (Daraghmeh 2002: 29)
14 Availability may have played a role in publishing the photographs of male

bombers. Articles reporting larger detonations were likely to include personal photos
of men (e.g., Gershberg 2002, Rabinovich 2002a, 2002b, 2002d, The Advertiser 2002d,
The Australian 2002c).
15 Reports were confused about Idris’s identity. A couple of articles reported a
different woman (The Advertiser 2002a, The Australian 2002f). Another article identified
the bomber as male (The Advertiser 2002e).
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A Palestinian girl, Aayat Mohammed al-Akhras, 18 … blew herself up at

the entrance to a supermarket in Jerusalem … since the government flooded the
city centre with police, the suicide bomber had to go to the suburbs to find her
target. (La Guardia 2002: 13)
She was up early on Friday, made him [father] tea and then slipped unnoticed
out of the modest family home in this West Bank village. In central Jerusalem
later in the day, Andaleeb – Arabic for nightingale – ended her life the way
dozens of other Palestinians had done before, she blew herself up … close
relatives painted a picture of a quiet and softly spoken woman who had not given
… the slightest hint about her intentions. But Andaleeb did not betray a hint of
weakness or lack of resolve in the video taken before Friday’s bombing … In the
shoddily made video, Andaleeb wore pants, a shirt and a sash … Her hair was
covered with the traditional chequered Palestinian keffiyah … ‘She was like any
other girl her age,’ said best friend and work colleague … ‘She spoke about love
and marriage …’ A school dropout, Andaleeb had supported her family from
a job at a Palestinian-owned textile factory … Baby-faced and petite, Andaleeb
… wore blue jeans and a matching chequered flannel shirt when she posed for a
photograph taken of her … two months ago. (Hendawi 2002: 8)
In providing these lengthy examples, I want to note that some representations

of male Palestinian bombers involved similar patterns. These, however, were
relatively brief (Immanuel 2002, Rabinovich 2002c, 2002d, The Age 2002, The
Australian 2002a, 2002c, 2002f). In one example Mohammed al-Ghul, aged
23, was described as ‘quiet, affable, popular, devout and studious – hardly the
stereotypical suicide bomber’ (The Australian 2002g: 7). The Age depicted him
as ‘a stocky young man wearing a baggy red shirt outside his trousers’ (Kifner
and Greenberg 2002: 1). Mohammed al-Ghul was also reported to have come
from an educated family background – a Masters student in Islamic law at the
time of his death (The Australian 2002g, Gershberg 2002). While photographs
accompanied descriptions of Mohammed al-Ghul, the focus on his physical
appearance was less intense. The focus was mostly on his personality instead.
Some articles raised questions concerning intent. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’s
claims of responsibility for sponsoring the operations mostly framed the intent
and motivations of the four women. In varying degrees, the bombers were
displayed as vessels for detonation to indicate intent. Reported as having said:
‘My body is a barrel of gunpowder that burns the enemy’ (Hendawi 2002: 8),
Andaleeb Taqataqah reinforced the more general view of bombers as primarily
bombs with ‘a human guidance system’ (Goldenberg 2002a: 13). Articles also
tried to unveil more personal, individual motivations. Wafa Idris’s actions were
scrutinized more intensely, especially because she was the first female suicide
bomber, and because most operations tended to involve elements of vengeance,
none of which applied to her case. Questions were raised as to whether her
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death was the result of the device detonating prematurely or whether she
was the person who was supposed to set it off (The Advertiser 2002a, The
Australian 2002e). In other words, the setting-off of the device directly on her
body qualified Idris’s intentions. Once it was established that Idris carried out
the act, some articles suggested that it was the continual sight of wounded
Palestinians and the personal injuries sustained in the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict that motivated her actions (Walker 2002a). Or, as Victor (2004: 26)
wrote while evaluating her death two years later, perhaps Idris’s actions were the
result of being divorced and sterile – a view that gained prominence post 2002,
explaining that Palestinian women committed suicide bombing because of the
social stigma of being unmarried and childless (O’Loughlin 2004a).
On the one hand, the four Palestinian female suicide bombers were
constituted as a series of spectacles corresponding to the larger picture of
suicide bombing, signified as dangerous and threatening. On the other hand, it
is difficult to say precisely what kind of spectacles the representations consisted
of in relation to the concentrated and diffused workings of power. Because
most of the women appeared in the newspapers once or twice, each spectacle
materialized as a fleeting, concentrated effect, offering selected elements for
interpretation. If diffused power was at work, its effect was extremely diffused,
especially because so little was offered and thus a sense of choice, no matter
how false, is limited. Maintaining a sense of choice in relation to what is
represented is unlikely given the highly politicized and condemned status of
suicide bombing in Western newsprint media.
Even though it is difficult to identify the concentrated and diffused effects
of power, the coverage of the four women was still a spectacular display of
death. What constituted the four deaths into spectacles was not only the context
in which the bombings were addressed. Nor was it the general frequency of
reporting suicide bombing in the Australian press in 2002. It was also not only,
as Rose highlights more generally, the horror stemming from the ‘unbearable
intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his
victims’ (2004: np).16 What also constituted the four deaths as spectacles was the
16 Interestingly, Hage argues that, given the daily conditions faced by Palestinian
people, conditions referred to as ‘social death’, suicide bombing becomes ‘a path that
leads to an imagined enjoyable symbolic life following the cessation of … physical life’
(2003: 134). Death means life – a life that does not lack ‘social meaningfulness and
self-fulfillment in an otherwise meaningless life’. In an interview with Solbach Butler
expresses a similar view in relation to female suicide bombers: ‘But if we think about
one such mourner, Antigone, we find that her sorrow is mixed with rage, and that it
leads her to break the law, assume a certain criminality in relation to an unjust law. It
is not too difficult, then, to understand how sorrow and rage might work together to
dispose a woman to become a suicide bomber, if she understands that the life she leads,
and the life that her people are leading, is already a non-life, a life that is as good as dead.
130
fact that the bombers were hailed female. Idris, Aisheh, al-Akhras and Taqataqah
were not any Palestinian suicide bombers. They were Palestinian female suicide
bombers. Being female is a spectacle precisely because it is different – something
that does not match a universalized understanding of what it means to be a
suicide bomber. Speech acts such as ‘woman suicide bomber’ (McGeough 2002:
11), ‘female suicide bomber’ (The Advertiser 2002a: 24, Walker 2002b: 9) and
‘Palestinian woman suicide bomber’ (The Advertiser 2002c: 29, The Australian
2002j: 9) display this gendered difference. Thus I am arguing the interpretation
of difference is not a self-evident matter of identifying someone as female or as
a woman. Rather, interpreting something as different is made possible because
suicide bombing is presumed to be a universally masculine activity carried out
by, and inscribed through, male bodies. Speech acts hailing the four women
point to the possibility that being male is a default mode of representing suicide
bombing in the Australian press – a mode that remains unnamed.
I want to unpack the claims I just made by having a look at what happens
when suicide bombers are not identified as female and women. Although
Wafa Idris’s attack was reported as one of the first suicide operations in the
second intifada, a few days earlier The Advertiser covered another incident in
Tel Aviv where ‘[a] suicide bomber blew himself up, wounding 24 bystanders
in a pedestrian mall’ (Keyser 2002: 45). Similar patterns occurred throughout
the year with phrases shifting between ‘Palestinian suicide bomber’ and ‘suicide
bomber’ (The Advertiser 2002f: 51, The Australian 2002f: 11, 2002h: 8, 2002i: 8,
Dunn 2002a: 1, 2002b: 9, 2002c: 1, 2002d: 1, 2002e: 10, 2002f: 9, Gershberg
2002: 7, Katzenell 2002: 23, Rabinovich 2002d: 1, Spetalnick 2002: 11). In
instances where details were sketchy, the male body was still made apparent
by attributing pronouns to the suicidal acts, as in ‘blew himself up’. My point
is that male suicide bombers are hailed as ‘suicide bombers’ instead of ‘male
suicide bombers’. Through language, it seems that being male is self-evident
and thus does not require direct naming. Hence, my argument is that, in the
context of suicide bombing, suicide materializes as masculine and masculinist
not only through what is different to the masculine norm but also as what is
not addressed directly. It is unnecessary to hail an act as a male suicide bombing
because being male is kneaded into understandings of the intelligibility of
suicide bombing to the extent where it does not require visible recognition.
And this, I want to suggest, is precisely how the operation of gendered norms
remains concealed. Difference appears as a mechanism to make sense of
something that, as Del Zotto (2002) and Naaman (2007) argue in relation to
combat and conflict, is outside masculinist interpretations of violence.
I think that suicide bombing is a social commentary on a social death that has already
taken place. This does not justify it’ (Solbach 2006: np).
131
Representations of the four women were simultaneously conditioned by race.

The four women were rendered visible not only because they were recognized
as female suicide bombers; they were visible because they were interpreted as
Palestinian female suicide bombers. Through interpellation as a social process
by which individuals are called to subject positions, being hailed through
the national identity of Palestinian was crucial to the way the female suicide
bombers were represented. The interpretation of Palestinian and female, I am
arguing, took shape in interrelated ways. The bodies of the four bombers, read
as ‘Palestinian’ and ‘female’, were dwelled upon, as were their biographies, to
interpret their motivations to carry out suicide bombing. Such an individualistic
reading was rendered through the use of photographs and written statements
(Hacking 2008, Naaman 2007).
Specifically, the female bodies of the suicide bombers were made
visible, inscribed by markers such as hair colour, body type/shape and facial
characteristics. As Brunner explains, ‘an abstract image of the Arab woman
[is] being brought into discussion … the concept of beauty plays an important
role’ (2005: 41). Marriage and the capacity to have children also mattered. These
citations were linked to an essentialized, unified, racialized, feminized gender
and sexuality that is constrained, tradition bound, family orientated, poor and
victimized (Katrak 2006, Mohanty 1991, 2002, Rajan 2011). What is significant
about Idris, Aisheh, Taqataqah and to some extent al-Akhras is that their acts
of suicide bombing, objectified as dangerous spectacles, were inescapably
bound to their raced and gendered bodies (Brunner 2005, 2007, Naaman 2007,
Rajan 2011). Put together, their acts of suicide could not transcend the material
conditions of their simultaneously raced and gendered bodies. Palestinian
female suicide bombing is a masculine and masculinist spectacle.
The interpretation of the four suicide bombers highlights the issue of
agency and intent in suicide. The bodies of the women appeared to be
expendable and passive because of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’s claims of
responsibility for sponsoring most of the operations. They may have actively
carried out the operations, but their wills and desires were displaced. As vessels,
the intentions were not theirs alone. Their intentions, rather, were made reactive
rather than active. Idris carried out the act because of divorce and sterility.
Aisheh and Taqataqah were determined, yet at the same time displayed an
element of uncontrollable danger about their intentions, fuelled by religious
commitments. Both carried out the acts, yet both were somewhat dispossessed
of the capacity to choose. While very little was revealed about al-Akhras, being
18 reduced her to the status of girlhood, innocence and virginity. In some
sense, then, the representation of each suicide bomber differed, and the overall
spectacle of Palestinian female suicide bombers was diffused. At the same
time, the intentions of each suicide bomber were enduringly represented as
reactive rather than active. As Brunner sums up, ‘it seems as if it was too hard
132
to consider women as fully aware and proud of their acts, which was not the
case with young men’ (2005: 43). Regardless of being hailed as already dead,
and regardless of the level of physical, visible violence that suicide bombing
produces, their wilfulness remained somewhat passive; their aims rested outside
the masculinist configurations of masterful agency.
The representation of the Palestinian female suicide bombers echoes issues
I raised earlier in this chapter: only particular bodies, more often male than
female, are likely to be interpreted as truly capable of carrying out the act
of suicide. There is an implicit assumption that there is something internal
to female bodies that keeps women from being taken seriously and thereby
seriously wanting to suicide. When they do in fact suicide, their intentions are
not quite at the same level as those inscribed on male and masculine bodies.
This, I want to make clear, is not only about men and women per se. Nor is it
about the possibility that a male body will never be scrutinized. Rather, the way
the four women were represented points to the gendered interpretive processes
of shaping how we come to understand the intelligibility of suicide. Sadly, as
explicitly suggested in relation to Idris’s actions, sorrow and rage arising out
of having to live in a conflict zone were not enough for her as a woman to
carry out the act. Palestinian women – as wives and mothers or future wives
and mothers, as givers rather than takers of life – are not fully capable of
intentionally choosing suicide bombing. And because of these elements, their
intentions must be scrutinized and rendered opaque. Being female and feminine
and a raced Other means their intentions do not qualify as clear enough. This is
what happens when women enter the male preserve of martyrdom.
If, as an example, Palestinian female suicide bombers cannot be considered
as truly suicidal, this not only highlights the enormous power of default modes
of representing knowledge, but also the power to sustain universal truth claims.
But there are weaknesses. On the one hand, the reading of Palestinian female
suicide bombers leaves an impression that newsprint media are simply reporting
on events taking place in a given conflict zone. What newsprint media report
is more or less self-evident and transparent not only because it is presumably
a neutral medium of communication that has little to do with what it reports,
but also because suicide bombing has a prediscursive existence shaped by the
context in which it occurs. This context appears to have very little to do with
the West. The trouble is that, even when suicide bombing does occur in a
specific context, the actual representation of the bombing is not shaped by that
context alone. This is because, as Said writes: ‘In any instance of at least written
language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a
representation’ connected to ways of representing something as ‘visible, clear,
“there” in discourse about it’ (2000: 88, original emphasis). Thus, if particular
truths are produced about Palestinian female suicide bombing, it is because of
the deployment of gendered and raced norms in Western media as a site of
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representation. What is displayed as truth is not self-evident. Instead, the given

is normed by gender, articulated and conditioned by race.
But there is more. If suicide is convincingly represented as masculine and
masculinist, it is because it is interpreted not through something self-evident
and transparent, but rather through something that is imbued by gender.
Furthermore, if suicide is convincingly represented as masculine and masculinist,
it is also because what is neutral and/or self-evident is never outside gender. In
this sense then, making differences between men and women visible is bound
to the manner in which gender norms operate in knowing suicide. Making
differences visible also depends on qualifying some experiences as self-evident
and transparent, and others as less so. This, I think, shows that universal givens
about suicide can be sustained, providing an economy of meanings continually
shapes them as givens. And if this is the case, then perhaps suicide as a universal
masculine activity is not a given at all.
‘Death of a Muse’: The Bangarra Dancer
The coverage of the Bangarra dancer’s suicide began on 16 July 2002. While
the articles varied in their lengths across the four newspapers, all portrayed the
death as very sudden (The Advertiser 2002b, Albert 2002b, 2002d, Crampton
2002, Sykes 2002, Verghis 2002b). Being the only newspaper to report the
death on the front page, The Australian captured the level of shock in the
following manner:
Russell Page seemed to have the world at his feet. As the star male dancer of the nation’s
top indigenous dance company, the 34-year-old was popular and widely respected in the
arts community. Yet friends and relatives were reeling with shock yesterday after hearing
Page had committed suicide in Sydney on Sunday night, the day after Bangarra Dance
Theatre completed its successful Sydney season of Walkabout, for which Page was singled
out in glowing reviews. (Albert 2002d: 1)
Immediately focusing on why the dancer took his life, relatives and friends were
reported as unable to offer explanations, especially because he did not leave any
clues behind (Albert 2002a, 2002b, 2002d, Coslovich 2002, Sykes 2002). One
journalist summed it up: ‘It defied logic that the dancer would leave a joyous
wrap party for Bangarra’s latest show, Walkabout, in which he starred, to go
home and commit suicide’ (Verghis 2002a: 8).
The actual method of suicide was not mentioned in the initial newspaper
coverage. The passing of the dancer was hailed through words and phrases
such as ‘death’, ‘took his life’, ‘died suddenly’, ‘died at a relative’s house’, ‘passed
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away’, ‘committed suicide’, ‘suicide’ and ‘dance with death’.17 The initial hailing
of suicide by way of reference to the method was also omitted in the obituary
written by a member of the local Indigenous community, Cathy Craigie, who
knew the dancer well (Craigie 2002: 13). The word ‘suicide’ appeared only once
in the title of the first front-page article published in The Australian (Albert
2002d). The Australian was also the only newspaper to report the suicide method
six days later. The suicide was cited as a hanging (Albert 2002c).
The dancer’s background and professional achievements were made evident
in various articles. He was identified as a descendent of the Nunukul people
and the Munaldjali clan of the Yugambeh tribe (Albert 2002d, Sykes 2002).
Portrayed as a culturally influential Indigenous leader and cultural custodian,
the dancer was described as having grown up in a poor urban public housing
area and as being the youngest member in a family of 12 children (Albert
2002c, 2003b, Coslovich 2002, Sykes 2002, Verghis 2002a). His dance career
began with training at the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development
Association College. Shortly afterwards, he became the principal dancer at the
Bangarra Dance Theatre, starring in a number of highly successful national
and international productions over a period of 11 years (The Advertiser 2002b,
Albert 2002a, 2002b, Coslovich 2002, Verghis 2002b). He was also part of One
Extra Dance Company and the Australian Dance Theatre, the ceremonies of
the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Tubowgue and the Olympic Arts Festival, as well
as a range of films (The Advertiser 2002b, Albert 2002b, Craigie 2002, Verghis
2002b). While he did not achieve academically, he was one of the most talented,
uniquely compelling dancers Australia had ever produced (Coslovich 2002,
Crampton 2002, Verghis 2002a).18 To his brother Stephen Page, the dancer was
‘his muse’ (Albert 2002c: 5).19
The Bangarra dancer was canvassed as a warm, genuine and generally
happy man who loved life; a practical joker, daredevil and trickster who made
those around him laugh (Albert 2002d, Verghis 2002a). He was portrayed as a
passionate family man; a father of three children who was planning a future
with his then current partner (Albert 2002a, 2002c, 2002d, Verghis 2002b).
Even though he was happy in the new relationship, the dancer was depicted
as worried about not seeing his children often enough (Albert 2002d). He
17 See for instance: The Advertiser (2002b: 12), Albert (2002a: 4, 2002b: 3, 2002d:
1–2, 2003a: 3), Coslovich (2002: 16), Crampton (2002: 6), Sykes (2002: 28), Verghis
(2002a: 8, 2002b: 12), Wilson (2002: 5).
18 The dancer was also praised for having a promising football career before
pursuing dance (Albert 2002b, Craigie 2002, Verghis 2002a).
19 In some Aboriginal cultures, muse means having a familiar spirit that inspires
those recognized as having an artistic specialization, particularly song-men and song-
women (Muecke 1992).
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was disturbed by his parents’ marriage breakdown, was experiencing financial

difficulties and appeared to be drinking alcohol more frequently (Albert 2002c).
One article highlighted the pressure of living up to everyone’s expectations as
a result of having come from a well-known Indigenous family (Albert 2002c).
The dancer’s body was a key feature in the coverage of his death. He had an
intense physicality (Verghis 2002b), webbed feet (Verghis 2002a), and a velvety
softness (Crampton 2002) He was serene, fine, graceful and elastic (Craigie
2002, Verghis 2002a). Jill Sykes, The Sydney Morning Herald’s dance critic, summed
up most of his ‘trademarks’ as follows:
Watching him on those now distant occasions when he was doing traditional dances, it
was interesting to observe his groundedness yet lightness, as though he hovered between
footprints on the stage, his body so alert and mobile like an animal with only keen senses
to keep it alive. Somehow he imbued his contemporary dance with this same buoyancy
and intensity. It was never mere movement; however good that may be to look at he
always invested his actions with meaning that conveyed a purpose in what he was doing
and gripped the audience’s attention. (2002: 28)
This passage speaks to many facets of the dancer’s talent more broadly, and his
moving body in particular. Indeed, his moving body marked the suicide, with titles
such as ‘Friends and family left to grieve over dance with death’ (Albert 2002c: 5).
It is difficult to speak of the Bangarra dancer’s suicide as a spectacle because
the coverage of his death was scant and short-lived. The short duration appears
to be connected with efforts to discourage other deaths from occurring,
particularly since the rate of Indigenous male suicide is very high (ABS 2004).20
What is represented may also be part of newsprint media’s effort to publish
stories concerning Indigenous deaths in a more culturally appropriate manner,
providing some details and omitting others.21
Yet the representation of the suicide was not completely devoid of
ingredients essential to the making of a spectacle. The suicide of the dancer
20 One article pays attention to suicide prevention in relation to the high rate of
Aboriginal suicide (Albert 2002c).
21 Since 2000, some media guides have provided guidelines to ensure Indigenous
deaths are reported in a more culturally sensitive manner. For example, the All-Media
Guide to Fair and Cross-Cultural Reporting outlines that reporting should be carried out
in consultation with the local community and with awareness that communities are
diverse. This involves following particular protocols and including community views
and perceptions rather than the opinion of outside experts only (Stockwell and Scott
2000). More recently, a federally funded guide entitled Reporting for Indigenous Australians
insists that ‘journalists wishing to report on Indigenous suicide … should be Indigenous
themselves or at least be educated about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural
issues’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2005: np).
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was enunciated repetitively through his ‘dazzling talent’ in relation to his

identity as an Aboriginal man (Coslovich 2002: 16). This, I am arguing, was a
raced, concentrated effect of power through which his death was made evident
in the press. By saying this, I am not suggesting that his talent for dance or his
raced identity should have been avoided. Rather, the two aspects were made
visible, then continually invoked. My issue is not about his racial and cultural
identity. Instead, it is with how his identity was made present. The dancer was
represented by virtue of his difference, where Aboriginality was made explicit,
something that does not apply to European Australians (Moreton-Robinson
2004). We cannot think of the Bangarra dancer’s suicide outside his talent
for dance or his raced identity – the latter in particular made invisible in the
examples of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. What is named as visible
in suicide is ‘not a simple seeing, an act of direct perception, but the racial
production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means
to “see”’ (Butler 1993b: 16).
Although the dancer’s suicide was predominantly shaped by his identity as
an Indigenous man and as a dancer, this seemingly concentrated effect was
diffused. Even though the death appeared situated in the wider context of
Aboriginal suicide, what was put on display was hailed in highly individualistic
terms. The dancer was represented as being able to rise above his impoverished
upbringing. This, I am arguing, taps into a widespread, implicitly white, cultural
fantasy that anyone can ‘overcome’ the limits of class and race (Gale 2000,
Havea 2002, Moreton-Robinson 2004, Wadham 2004). The racialized nature
of this fantasy appears to have been discursively concealed by emphasis on
talent and success. That is, while some raced elements were made visible,
others were concealed. This represented suicide as masculinist because the
white status of the masculinist subject ideal was discursively diffused through
the raced status of whiteness.
What happened to gender? So far race matters more than gender in the
naming of the dancer’s suicide. I want to suggest, however, that gender does
matter in ways more significant than they may initially appear. For example, The
Australian cited the dancer as having broken through a stereotype levelled at
male dancers, one that was identified with boosting Indigenous culture (Albert
2002b). While little else was said, I am left with the impression that this may
have something to do with the normative performance of the male gender in the
context of race. My impression is confirmed by an article published in The Age
that highlighted how the dancer broke down stereotypes associated with men
on stage because of his mesmerizing physical appearance and athleticism. In so
doing, he legitimized dance as a career pathway for Aboriginal men (Coslovich
2002). In light of this, I am suggesting that gendered antecedents see dance as a
feminine activity. According to Gilbert such meanings are shaped by implicitly
and explicitly raced interpretations of Aboriginal dance as a female and feminine
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activity, blind to the idea that dance can ‘restore masculine identity through its
links with ritual and male initiation ceremonies’ (1995: 343). Gendered meanings
associated with rituals were not made clear in the articles, other than stating that
dance was part of the dancer’s very being (Albert 2002b). Nevertheless, I want
to suggest that race alone does not condition the representation of suicide, as
gender is part of gendering this particular representation of suicide.
Gender is made present by naming the Bangarra dancer as having had
a ‘larrikin streak’ as a result of his recklessness as a young child (Coslovich
2002: 16). Although this looks like a mere description of his childhood, such a
statement cites racialized gendered norms. To a degree, the dancer qualified as a
larrikin given that he was a daredevil who came from a working-class, poverty-
stricken background. His status as a joker and entertainer, and his increased
drinking towards the end of his life, added to his larrikinism. Yet the hailing
spoke only of a ‘streak’, which is almost but not quite a larrikin. Aside from the
possibility that he may not have responded to such an interpellation if alive,
could he only have a streak because his raced male body did not qualify him
as a ‘real’ larrikin? By posing this question, I am not suggesting that he should
have been depicted as a larrikin, especially because his brother, Stephen Page,
said that ‘Russell had a lot of problems with Western macho energy. It pissed
him off … He had no ego about it. He was always trying to defeat it’ (quoted
in Mordue 2003: 5). Rather, my point is that raced gender norms, imbued by
masculinist ways of knowing, conditioned the representation of the dancer
with mainstreamed masculinity.
The gendering of the Bangarra dancer’s suicide was thus bound to the
materiality of his corporeal body. To say the dancer’s suicide was entwined
with his body seems obvious, especially for a profession that demands highly
visual bodily practices. Yet the significance of the dancer’s body in the
context of suicide is not merely about him having been a dancer. Rather, his
Aboriginal male body was visibly at the centre of representing the suicide, to
the point where it was impossible to think of the suicide outside the body.
Put differently, the raced and gendered body was not hailed here as an absent
presence. This body was not invisible; it could not transcend its corporeality
(Gilbert 1995, Gilroy 1997). This means the dancer’s suicide was implicitly
informed by masculinist conditions of knowing for only certain kinds of
bodies – male and white – can transcend the material conditions of the body.
While transcending bodily conditions may have been possible for the Bangarra
dancer, given the high cultural status of the arts and of celebrity performers,
this was suspended by the raced status of his male body – a bodily status that
signalled difference in suicide.
Difference represented the dancer’s suicide as contradictory. His body was
active, exuding power and expressiveness; qualities of transcendent masculinity.
Yet he was a dancer who cut his successful career short. He was a father who
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left a family behind. This suggests a reduction of powerful male agency. Being
bound to the (inescapably raced) material body tends to invalidate masculine
suicidal agency. This, however, was not the case here. The dancer’s death was
displayed as an active choice to take his own life. The raced body invokes gender
norms that, according to Burt (1995), interpret the male body as instrumental
and in control. Suicide as a fully intended outcome still belongs to male bodies,
even when some bodies may not entirely meet the normative criteria of the
masculinist subject ideal. It is as if male bodies are internally capable of serious
intentions in suicide. The material act of suicide is still allocated agency, even
when many of the prevailing notions are lacking, and the body in particular
does not meet the criteria of transcendent or paradigmatic masculinity.
The interpretation of hanging cannot be ignored in the context of what
I have argued thus far. Hanging is commonly used by Australian Aboriginal
men as a suicide method (Elliot-Farrelly 2004, Tatz 2001). As I argued at
the beginning of this book, the use of hanging by Aboriginal men is always
treated as a self-evident statement of intent even in, and perhaps because of,
those cases in which allegations of police complicity are present. Here too,
hanging was treated as a self-evident statement of serious suicidal intent, as
though nothing more needed to be said. While the lack of scrutiny may be
attributed to trying to maintain a sense of privacy, this treats gender as a subset
in the gendering of suicide. As Beavers (1997) suggests, the problems black
men face are always in relation to race alone. Does this lack of scrutiny here
underscore suicide as universally masculine and done by male bodies? Does the
lack of scrutiny silently underscore a default mode of representing suicide as a
universal male and masculine given? Does the lack of scrutiny somehow protect
a masculinist economy of meanings, made part of knowing the struggling
Aboriginal masculine male body of the Bangarra dancer?
My questions lead me to conclude that the masculine and masculinist
spectacle of the Bangarra dancer’s suicide neutralizes and conceals the operation
of gender norms and power in three interrelated ways. First, what was displayed
sustained an impression that what was named was everything there was to
name. Secondly, raced norms conditioned the spectacle to the point where
race appeared to be all that mattered. Thirdly, the representation of the dancer
seemingly by virtue of his raced difference neutralized not so much his own
subjective position but instead the gendered meanings that rendered his suicide
intelligible. In this way, the visibility of difference appears to have concealed
the discursive workings of knowledge through which suicide is valorized as a
universal, masculine given.
If the visibility of difference becomes a mechanism for concealing the
discursive mechanics of understanding suicide, this creates a dilemma for the
maintenance of universal givens. In one sense, the production of spectacles in
newsprint media relies on creating an impression that something exists by virtue
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of its existence. However, if something is rendered visible at the expense of

concealing something else, this then suggests that what appears as self-evident
and obvious is not self-evident and obvious. If race is rendered more visible
at the expense of gender, then what emerges as raced and gendered in suicide
is not because it already exists ‘out there’. In this sense, the discursivity of the
Bangarra dancer’s suicide exceeded the naming of the death in newsprint media.
As I have explained earlier, such ‘excess’ undermines the notion that something
exists as self-evident because what is self-evident is dependent on gendered and
raced norms that are part of a particular context – one that is forgotten when it
comes to making sense of gendered and raced differences in suicide.
Ghostly Appearances: Queer Youth Suicide
Sexuality is not entirely new to what I have argued through this chapter. Even
though I have focused on race, sexuality played a part in the spectacles analysed
thus far. In the case of Hutchence and Yates, knowledge concerning sexual
desires, corporeal surfaces of bodies, reproduction and parenting were all made
present in the gendered and raced representations. Sexuality was entwined
with gender, creating a sense of tension and frisson at the scene of death.
Sexuality also informed the representations of the Palestinian female suicide
bombers, through the focus on feminine qualities, motherhood and family life,
framed around the mysterious, passive, raced heterosexuality of Middle Eastern
women. While the importance of family and children was part of representing
the Bangarra dancer, the sexual dimension was also articulated through the
physical surfaces of his body, surfaces said to glisten with power, intense
physicality and velvety softness. And so sexuality is part of the conditions of
articulating the gender of suicide. In a sense, gendering as a process of making
suicide intelligible is always in some way about sexualities.
It is with this frame of thinking that I approach the newsprint representations
of queer youth suicide. Here the focus rests on sexuality more than race. My
focus, however, should not be equated automatically with homosexuality
alone. As I am about to show, we need to pay attention to heterosexuality
and heteronormativity to understand suicide. Heteronormativity is more than
prejudice against queer sexualities. Heteronormativity is about norms governing
the production of knowledge that inform how cultural practices are interpreted
and understood on a day-to-day basis. In doing so, heteronormativity establishes
certain ways of being and knowing as dominant, and others as marginal and
outside it as the norm (Jackson 2003, Jagose 1996). Heteronormativity produces
heterosexuality not only as the ideal, coherent and privileged sexuality, but also
as unmarked and invisible. It is marked only through its conferred compulsory
status as ‘natural’ and as ‘internal’ (Berlant and Warner 2003, Butler 1990, Fuss
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1991). As a result, heterosexuality becomes normative, which is a problem

because it appears as if it belongs to heterosexuals alone (Butler 2004a).
It is difficult to chart representations of queer youth suicide in the selected
Australian newspapers. Between 1999 and 2012, for example, The Australian
published 12, The Sydney Morning Herald four, The Age two and The Advertiser two
articles dealing with queer youth suicide. Some stories focused on queer youth
suicide, while others acknowledged it in the wider context of either male youth
suicide or youth suicide. While I cannot claim that it is completely absent, overall
representation of this topic is scarce, appearing intermittently, gaining enough
attention for debate and concern before disappearing yet again. In comparison
to the spectacles I analysed previously, this constitutes queer youth suicide as a
series of ghostly appearances. Such appearances may have a shadowy existence;
yet at the same time their shadows, as I will now demonstrate, are part of
the gender of suicide in very profound ways. To overlook queer youth suicide
simply because its representation is minimal is to overlook an important aspect
of the gendering of suicide.
The ghost-like appearance of queer youth suicide began in The Australian
with the coverage of the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne George
Pell’s rejection of claims suggesting that homophobia in the Catholic school
system is responsible for queer youth suicides. Instead, he argued in support of
discouraging homosexuality among school students as a means of reducing its
incidence, and therefore preventing suicide. With this he declared homosexuality
to be a ‘greater health hazard than smoking’ (Towers 1999b: 3). The article then
went on to report that: ‘When asked what kind of health hazard homosexuals
posed, Dr Pell replied: “Haven’t you heard about the spread of AIDS?”’ (Towers
1999b: 3). Pell’s comments on youth suicide did not disappear for too long
because within the same year he was reported offering support for a religious
organization aimed at ‘healing’ homosexuality. But for gay, lesbian and AIDS
activists, this approach was ‘a “recipe” for youth suicide’ (Towers 1999a: 5). From
an institutionally based public religious perspective, homosexuality was framed
as an illness that needs a cure – an illness that increases the risk of, and even
causes, youth suicide (Towers 1999a). Religious tensions surfaced again many
years later when Rintoul reported on the manager of a Christian Brethren youth
camp refusing to take a booking from a suicide prevention group for young gay
people, fearing that by doing so the organization ‘would promote a homosexual
lifestyle as a normal and natural choice for children’ (Rintoul 2010: 7).
Other articles in The Australian named less controversial views. In a piece
entitled ‘Healthcare out of the closet’, Reiner indicated that ‘gay and lesbian
people have a higher incidence of depression and youth suicide attempts,
as well as drug and alcohol dependency’ (2000: W06). As a result, queer
communities have additional health requirements in comparison with the
general (read: heterosexual) population. Articles focusing on queer youth
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suicide more specifically reported that research points to sexuality as being a

factor contributing to 30 per cent of youth suicides, with 60 per cent of gay and
lesbian young people seriously contemplating or attempting suicide (Callaghan
2000, Lawnham 2000, Robinson 2004, Sinnerton 2011). The school system
was said to be a nightmare that contributes to these numbers, a crucible of
homophobia in which gay and lesbian youth experience harassment and violence.
Coming out of the closest is a significant issue fraught with difficulties, risks
and anxiety (Sinnerton 2011). In general the needs and experiences of queer
youth remained largely ignored with invisibility and lack of initiative proving to
be the biggest dilemmas (Callaghan 2000, Robinson 2004). This is particularly
the case in regional or rural areas in Australia (Callaghan 2000). Homophobia
remains shrouded in silence (Robinson 2004, Sinnerton 2011).
In a letter to the editor and three articles, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)
offered a similar daunting picture. In the letter entitled, ‘Is it better to be dead than
gay?’ the author, who is also a researcher, pointed out that gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender young people account for approximately 30 per cent of all
youth suicide and are three times as likely to engage with suicide in comparison
to straight youth. In ‘wrestling with their sexuality’, queer young people are
subjected to a variety of conflicts and violence that can lead to ‘low self-esteem,
increased levels of drug abuse, depression and homelessness all contributing
to suicidal tendencies’ (Landstrom 2001: 19). A similarly daunting picture was
emphasized a year earlier in an article where homophobia was positioned as a
health issue. Dr Kerryn Phelps, president of the Australian Medical Association
of New South Wales at the time, argued that ‘Homophobia is a virulent and
dangerous disease. If you have any doubt that homophobia is a health issue,
then consider that verbal harassment, physical violence, and the fear of family
and peer rejection are significant contributors to youth depression and suicide’
(2000: 17). For Phelps (2000), education is a significant measure in dealing with
homophobia and should be supported by the teaching and medical professions.
Homosexuality is not the problem; it is homophobia.
Education returned to the spotlight many years later and this time in The
Age. Education was emphasized as a means of preventing youth suicide (Saltau
2000). Higher incidences in rural areas were acknowledged in the context of
creating better support services for gay and lesbian youth. But unlike other
newspapers, The Age published articles critical of suicide prevention initiatives.
In 2009, the focus was on beyondblue, Australia’s national, independent, not-
for-profit organization working to address issues associated with depression
and anxiety. In a piece titled ‘Gays “ignored” by beyondblue’, Stark (2009) wrote
that the organization has repeatedly knocked back funding requests to support
depressed young people struggling with their sexuality. Once again high suicide
rates were acknowledged, as were homophobic bullying and anxiety about
coming out. One year later, Stark (2010) reminded the readers about the high
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prevalence of queer youth suicide, and that the fear of coming out needs
attention in suicide prevention programmes. Beyondblue was still at the centre
of critical attention. In 2008, the organization commissioned research that
found that 31 per cent of gay people suffer from anxiety and depression, and 17
per cent of young lesbian women attempt suicide in comparison to 2 per cent of
straight young women. Despite this, beyondblue did not include this research in
their treatment guidelines for doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists assessing
13–24 year old clients even though sexual abuse, family and school conflict,
class and ethnicity were included. For Lynne Hillier – a key research leader in
the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society – this is ‘incredibly
neglectful’ (Stark 2010: 5). Beyondblue rejected the accusation, with its chief
executive, Leonie Young, saying that treatment guidelines ‘focused on the best
ways to treat depression, rather than risk factors for the illness’ (Stark 2010: 5).
Education was not the only focus of criticism in The Age. In 2011, the
Australian Football League entered the spotlight, with Lane’s (2011) article
implying that educating footballers about homosexuality, homophobia and
high rates of queer youth suicide has minimal impact when views such as
‘stay in the closet’ are publicly expressed in the media. This was despite the
fact that the AFL assembled a steering committee to explore ways football
could tackle homophobia.
The Advertiser steered clear of any debates about education programmes,
organizations delivering them or sport for that matter. Kelton (1999) discussed
queer youth suicide in the larger context of male youth suicide, making
references to research conducted at that time. Kelton (1999) focused on
ideation and attempts, relating problems to lack of parental support, violence
and abuse as well as ‘precocious sexual identity development’ (Kelton 1999:
45). In the context of young men making allowances for gay bashing, another
article emphasized that young gay men are ‘six times more likely to attempt
suicide than heterosexuals’ (Kendall 2001: 14). Incorporating the voices of
activists and different support groups, the article accentuated that education
about homosexuality is crucial.
How can such a small number of newspaper articles representing queer
youth suicide constitute a spectacle? That something is on display is obvious –
for no matter how small an audience. It makes an appearance by being hailed
into existence. But as I said earlier, this appearance consists of no more than
flashpoints that do not solidify into something more enduring. The spectacle of
queer youth suicide is like a ghost – a shadow. As a result, it is difficult to work out
whether the spectacle is concentrated or diffused. It is difficult to speak of how
power works, even if what is generated in the first place is through power. What
the shadows do suggest, however, is that suicide occurs because of sexuality
coded as homosexuality, whether from a homophobic or anti-homophobic
stance. Yet sexuality was named as its cause by being represented as a condition
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predisposing youth to suicide. It becomes part of making sense of not only why
queer youth suicide, but what the intelligibility of queer youth suicide is.
As shadowy as it might seem, I am arguing that queer youth suicide is a
concentrated spectacle. Indeed, what was offered was minimal, in regard not
only to what was on display, but to how it was displayed. Statistics account for its
horrendous existence, yet this was precisely where most articles stopped. Only
a handful of articles went beyond reporting queer youth suicide as a matter of
fact, showcasing what it means to be young, queer and bullied at school and
some of the well-intentioned suicide prevention efforts. One could argue that
the spectacle was diffused through differing stances, whether they were situated
in homophobic or anti-homophobic views. This, however, is hard to sustain.
Not enough was offered to produce the sense that what was presented was on
the basis of diverse views. If we take a bird’s eye view of 20 articles across 13
years, then it is fair to say that queer youth suicide is largely shrouded in silence
in the public eye. This, I am suggesting, is a concentrated effect of power.
Given the manner in which silence materializes, perhaps what is at stake
is not whether queer youth suicide is a spectacle on the basis of its shadowy
presence, but whether it is a spectacle in relation to its shadowy absence. The
spectacle is constituted by what is not there. Its power resides in absence. Butler
suggests that ‘one can be interpellated, put in place, given a place through
silence, through not being addressed’ (1997a: 27). Queer youth suicide is hailed
through its absence; its lack of context. In being hailed as both a presence and
an absence, queer youth suicide’s ghost-like materiality comes into being. As a
ghost, it is both there yet not there. To be unable to say anything overt about it is
the point. Silence emerges by means of the power of language to name. Queer
youth suicide is a diffused production that attains a concentrated ghostly effect.
Despite the effects of power, and perhaps because of them, it is clear
that queer youth suicide is a significant issue through health and education
discourses, under the equity rubric. It appears as something that is appalling and
unacceptable, given the proportion of gay and lesbian young people attempting,
and dying of, suicide. Via religious proclamations, it becomes spectacle through
such interventions as Pell’s words that declare homosexuality an illness that
should be ‘cured’ as a means of preventing suicide. This is an ‘illness’ constituted
against a supposed ‘wellness’ of heterosexuality and its normative requirements
in young people’s sexual identity development. But addressing the pervasive
effects of homophobia and providing more support for queer youth in schools
is also a form of addressing the problem. Age relations, however, play a
significant role. This is because young bodies are hailed, bodies that struggle with
coming out and the consequences that might follow – unless of course this has
already taken place. Although popular discourses concerning youth assume that
it is a time for stresses and upheavals, in the context of homophobia this is a
different kind of upheaval. It is not simply a matter of young people working
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out who they are in order to be part of ‘mainstream’ society. In working out
who they are, queer youth face challenges on the basis of norms that situate
their lives outside the heteronormative conditions that shape what it means to
exist in a social world (Cover 2012).
To offer a more in-depth reading of queer youth suicide, I want to focus on
who is hailed through the words of Dr Pell and Dr Phelps, two public figures of
authority who represent entirely different opinions, discourses and communities.
At the outset, I want to stress that, while each figure is responsible for what they
say, they themselves are not the originators of what they articulate about queer
youth suicide. Each figure invokes accepted or established views and values,
and assumptions that sustain such views. Although such views require each to
be there to enact them, what is named does not begin or end with the one who
speaks. What each speaker does is cite prior speech acts through reiteration.
As a result, ‘The speaker assumes responsibility precisely through the citational
character of speech. The speaker renews the linguistic tokens of a community,
reissuing and reinvigorating such speech. Responsibility is thus linked with
speech as repetition, not as origination’ (Butler 1997a: 39).
Linked with questions of autonomy and agency, these points are significant
as they relate to how speech acts invoke knowledge about suicide, and to the
assumptions and meanings cited and reiterated in the course of producing
masculinist views of suicide.
When Dr Pell stated that homosexuality is riskier than smoking,
homosexuality appeared as pathological through the citational power of
language. The citation, I want to suggest, is problematically interlinked with
homosexuality as the cause of AIDS, and as the cause of death, which, in this
instance, is suicide. The connection between death in a more general sense,
and homosexuality in particular, is nothing new. As Dollimore (1998), Edelman
(2004) and Cover (2012) explain, this particular connection is framed as sinful,
fatalistic, suicidal or murderous, with homosexuality and death made to imply
each other. In this sense ‘homosexuality is seen as death-driven, death-desiring
and thereby death-dealing’ (Dollimore 1998: xi), constructing the homosexual
subject as ‘a bearer of death’ (Butler 1996: 61). Shrouded in religious and moral
discourse, this connection between homosexuality and death materialized in
Pell’s statement. In being called upon as a condition of knowledge in newsprint
media, sexuality through the lens of homosexuality has a causative relationship
with youth suicide. Young people themselves are then seen as the bearers of its
mark, through which death is inscribed. In saying this, I must stress that when
Pell declared homosexuality to be a health hazard, the declaration itself was
performative; not homosexuality and whether it literally causes suicide. The
speech act cited a sexual norm, one that was concealed at the same time. Never
receiving direct mention, this norm, I am arguing, was heteronormativity. It
does not need to be named in a direct manner yet, at the same time, its power
145
is conveyed through speech acts. In Berlant and Warner’s terms, it ‘is something
that cannot speak its name, though its signature is everywhere’ (2003: 171).
From a very different position and understanding, Dr Phelps argued that
homophobia and not homosexuality is the pathology. Situated within the
medical context of address, homophobia was cited as an illness, a condition that
predisposes young people to suicide, and therefore names suicide. The problem
does not lie with young people themselves but rather with society at large that
‘must take responsibility for the diseases in our midst’ (Phelps 2000: 17). Without
denying the value of Phelps’s criticism, which can be seen as working against
the heterosexist paternalism reiterated by and through emphasis such as Pell’s,
homosexuality was still connected to suicide. By saying this, I am not denying
that homophobia seriously impairs the everyday living of many young people.
My point is that, through suicide, sexuality remains bound to queer youth and
the anti-homophobic stance does not necessarily rescue it from the confines
of a pathology. In the process, heteronormativity continues to organize what is
known about suicide and queer youth suicide in particular.
There is yet another effect that deserves attention. Language reiterates the
link between queer sexualities and damage and injury. This connection is obvious
in Leonie Young’s statement which implies that sexuality is a risk factor for
youth suicide. Addressing injury and risk in the context of schooling, Harwood
(2004) notes that it is not unusual to hear that being young and gay can be
confusing whereupon such confusion is often associated with depression, drug
and alcohol dependency and suicide. Harwood argues that this ‘truth telling
appears to remain largely unproblematized, regardless of who is doing the
telling’ (2004: 468). As such, sexuality never emerges from pleasure, but instead
through ‘the regulation of woundedness’ (Harwood 2004: 472). In the context
of newsprint media examples, it seems that sexuality draws suicide and, in doing
so, presents queerness as wounded and damaged. It is as if being young and
queer will lead someone to an early grave. Not only does this not address the
norms that regulate knowledge about suicide, but it also ignores the fact that, as
Dorais (2004: 83) points out, there are queer young people who for one reason
or another do not suicide. As provocative as it is, my suggestion is that the focus
on sexualities is normalized in queer youth suicide. Anti-homophobic stances
may inadvertently end up reinforcing an essentialized connection between
homosexuality and death. And in doing so, heterosexual social norms are not
problematized effectively enough.
Curiously newsprint media representations of suicide about heterosexual
youth do not pay attention to sexuality. Put simply, heterosexuality and its norms
do not appear to play a role in the deaths of straight youth. In fact, it remains
silently assumed without ever needing to be named directly and straight youth
are never bound to their sexuality as such. One can convincingly argue that
they do not experience the kinds of violence queer youth do on the basis of
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their sexual orientation. However, something else is at stake here. In my mind,

heterosexuality becomes the default mode of representation. Its power lies in
its capacity to retain an invisible presence that in fact is a privilege precisely
because it escapes direct scrutiny. This re-emphasizes the need to question
what kind of norms regulate the discursive production of suicide. It does not
exclude questioning the effects these norms have upon the daily lives of queer
young people. But it does include a focus on their modes of operation within the
production of suicide and its sites of knowing.
Once again gender seems to have nothing to do in my examination of
the gendering of queer youth suicide. Whether problematic or not, it has
everything to do with sexuality and homosexuality in particular. It is tempting
to assume that gender and sexuality are in fact separate issues. Even if gender
is part of queer youth suicide, it deserves attention on its own. But just like
with the previous vignettes, and for a large part of this book, I am not going
to be tempted by the possibility that gender does not matter. Butler argues that
‘The regulation of gender has always been part of the work of heterosexist
normativity and to insist upon a radical separation of gender and sexuality is
to miss the opportunity to analyse that particular operation of homophonic
power’ (2004a: 186).
To follow Butler’s line of thinking, to separate sexuality from gender in queer
youth suicide and in suicide itself may in fact reinforce problematic forms of
reasoning that are part of the discursive production of suicide as masculinist.
But what if sexuality is the instrument through which the gendering of suicide
takes place? In standing out as a visible marker of queer youth suicide, the focus
on sexuality can be the effect of the masculinist subject in the gendering of
suicide, particularly as this subject is privileged as heterosexual. That is, queer
youth suicide is gendered by appearing as bound to homosexuality for the
purposes of sustaining a disavowal between sexuality and gender. This ignores
two important factors. First, homophobia itself is fused with gender where its
effects are dependent on how masculinities and femininities of queer youth are
interpreted. Secondly, if homosexuality is what marks queer youth suicide, its
visibility is still dependent on gender as part of its conditions of articulation.
My argument is that this disavowal is a form of concealment in the masculinist
economy of meanings that produce knowledge about suicide.
What is striking about representation of queer youth suicide is that it
appears either under the rubric of youth suicide or male youth suicide. What is
also striking is that it appears under the banner of suicide ideation and attempts.
Although queer youth are said to constitute a large proportion of youth suicides
in general, attention to suicide attempts is pronounced in what is really a small
number of articles. This attention is particularly directed at young gay men who
are said to think or engage with suicide between three to six times more often
than heterosexual men (Kelton 1999, Kendall 2001). Hence when specified
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directly, queer youth suicide is a spectacle through young gay male bodies
only. One could argue that this is a factual matter. More young gay men than
young lesbian women attempt suicide. However, this does not do away with the
gendered effects produced within specific examples, particularly when those
examples are already very few.
Given the link between young gay men and suicide ideation/attempts,
what does this mean for the gendering of suicide? Of course it is difficult
to say anything that has a sense of solidity in the face of so little. Yet given
the universalization of the male body and particular readings of masculine
violence in suicide, what happens when that body is attempting, and not going
through with, the act of suicide? What happens when that body is not silently
heterosexual but instead made visible as gay? Given that speech acts continue
to involve the body whether they appear as stemming from an embodied or
disembodied mind, what does this do to agency in queer youth suicide? What
does it enact through naming, given that agency in suicide is constructed as
phallogocentric mastery? It might be the case that, as Kelton (1999) suggested,
this is a way of coping with significant lack of parental support, levels of violence
and abuse as well as early sexual development. But if this is a way of coping,
why is it not articulated as reactive ‘attention seeking’? My understanding is that
this is an effect of power bound to morphology where attempts nevertheless
remain constituted by male bodies. But as earlier analyses have shown, it seems
that particular kinds of male bodies qualify as fully agentic. If this is the case,
should this not frame young gay male suicide attempts as abject, the other
of the other within the masculinist economy of meanings? Do gay man lack
agency because of their homosexuality? And if this is the case, does it not make
their sexuality incoherent within a framework that dictates sexuality through
heterosexual social norms?
All of these questions raise a number of concerns about the gendering of
suicide. Suicide attempts in the lives of young gay men may be a reflection of
what it means to live, cope and not cope in a largely heteronormative world.
From a different and a more problematic angle, it may also mean that they are
after all not masculine enough. Their bodies become visible markers of failure
as a result of certain speech acts. Even more harshly: ‘If he cannot kill himself
what sort of a man is he?’ In being considered as abject, their acts can be read as
passive and feminine. Even if they are the effect of gendered assumptions, these
still remain unquestioned. I would argue that this is part of producing queer
youth suicide as a ghostly spectacle where gender is part of its shadows. The
gendering effect might be tied not only to what is represented but also to what
is not. When something is made abject, it is produced as incoherent, as existing
beyond reach, beyond the grasp of intelligibility. Abjection might in fact be part
of sustaining suicide as a masculinist practice within queer youth suicide. What
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this implies is that particular ways of interpreting gender are required for an act
to gain its recognition as a masculine and masculinist practice.
If there is hope in unravelling the effect of power in the gendering of queer
youth suicide, then what or where are the fault lines? What my analysis has
shown is that what is performative through language is not devoid of social
and cultural values and norms. Again, this is not so much a matter of whether
newsprint media is or is not neutral but instead whether what is made available
is far from being self-evident and simply ‘out there’. In appearing as evident and
neutral, these claims need an avenue of power for them to make sense – for
suicide to make sense in the first place.
Yet what is represented is possible because it comes with a sense of history,
a history that connects homosexuality with death. To a degree, this connection
is re-enacted in newsprint media. This may happen both in homophobic
and anti-homophobic approaches to understanding queer youth suicide. In
this sense, the gendering of suicide is yet again made dependent on aspects
outside its own boundaries of articulation. As a result, what appears as ghostly
exceeds itself and this excess points to the cultural forces in the fashioning
of ghostly spectacles. If the production of suicide as masculinist is made to
appear ontologically secure, the security depends on excess. This excess, I think,
presents a possibility of failure – what we come to know with certainty is in fact
uncertain. Knowledge of suicide does not always ‘work’.
Perhaps what queer youth suicide in newsprint media shows is that its
existence, however precarious, is the limit of the masculinist production of
suicide. This does not mean that limits remain unregulated by norms that
govern what is and is not intelligible, what is acceptable as knowledge. Limits
themselves have conditions of intelligibility imposed on them by truth-telling
mechanisms in the course of being produced as limits. As such, dominant
universalized truths are at risk of becoming undone. Perhaps the reason why
some truths in suicide are produced as ghostly is to limit their threat as already
limiting. This is because, as Butler claims, ‘it is this otherness by which the
speakable is instituted, that haunts its boundaries, and that threatens to enter the
speakable through substitutions that cannot always be detected’ (2004a: 191).
As a gendered media spectacle, queer youth suicide passes like a shadow. Yet
as a shadow it is still there, pointing to the ever complex gendering of suicide
as masculine and masculinist. This kind of ‘haunting’, I think, is needed to
engage critically with the heteronormative norms regulating the representation
of queer youth suicide. Excess points to failure but it also points to future
analytical possibilities. It is part of not only what it means to see but also what
remains to be seen.
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Conclusion
I have repeatedly reconfirmed several issues I have argued throughout the book.
It is clear that, even in the examples of Australian newsprint media, the rendering
of male, female, masculine, feminine, active and passive matters – this process
of interpretation produces dichotomous and contradictory differences in the
knowing of suicide. More often than not, what is male, masculine and active
is privileged over what is female, feminine and passive. More often than not,
what is rendered female, feminine and/or passive is seen as different and not
self-evidently, ‘truly’ and ‘internally’ capable of intent. This is despite the fact
that the intelligibility of suicide is bound to not only what appears legitimate,
but also what appears illegitimate, as seen in relation to Paula Yates, Palestinian
female suicide bombers and queer youth suicide. This is despite the fact that,
in most instances, those who are represented cannot respond to what is said
of them, and instead they are spoken of, and for, by others who interpret their
once living bodies.
But, as convincing as this might be, it is still not the full story about the
gender of suicide. Why gender matters is because of race and sexuality. In
this sense, invoking suicide as masculine and masculinist not only consists of
privileging what is male, masculine, rational, neutral and disembodied, but also
what is white and heterosexual. This, however, works providing all of the criteria
are more or less met. As seen in the representation of the Bangarra dancer and
queer youth suicide, gender matters less when whiteness and heterosexuality are
not part of the picture. Instead, suicide is only about race or sexuality, as if either
of the two have no relationship with gender.
I have two problems with what has been reconfirmed. First, spectacles in
newsprint media are spectacular and intriguing to a point where little room
is offered for doubt, making allowances only for the confirmation of what
presumably already exists. Secondly, while spectacles appear as concentrated
and diffused, offering a smorgasbord of knowledge, this smorgasbord is in fact
homogenous. The problem with these two points, I think, is quite profound.
The operation of gender norms in the representation of suicide appears to go
unnoticed. Furthermore, despite the limits and cracks in how spectacles come
to be, suicide is reinforced as a self-evident universal given – a default mode of
representation whose conditions of knowledge do not require a direct address.
This is a privilege through which dominant and homogenous ways of knowing
suicide attain their power of conviction.
But not everything is entirely convincing. While masculinist ways of
knowing suicide work towards establishing enduring truth claims, how they
‘work’ is heterogeneous. This is not only because what is masculinist depends
on more than one condition of knowing. How suicide comes into being is
heterogeneous because what is configured as masculine and masculinist relies
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on what is rendered visible and invisible. If the masculinist subject ideal

becomes part of the default mode of knowing suicide, it is because it ‘works’
on multiple levels that enable rather than disable the twin gender movements
of neutrality and repleteness. And if this knowing retains particular aspects of
suicide as universal givens, it is because it is implicated in particular contexts
and sites of knowing. Thus the task of undoing universal givens must always
return to particular contexts and sites of practice for it is there that theory
and ideas matter.
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What Now? Concluding Remarks
i began my analytical labours by considering whether suicidology generates its

own afterlife of words: a body of knowledge that speaks of and for the dead and
for those who survive suicide attempts. This body is not inert matter because, as
i have demonstrated, it does things: it generates a plethora of ideas, assumptions,
meanings and explanations. what do they amount to? They show that suicide
as a material act of dying can never occur outside discourse, but instead is
caught in the webs of context, history and culture. without these we cannot
think of suicide, let alone make sense of it. To return to my metaphor, i might
have needed the ingredients on my chopping board, but it was the chopping
board that was important all along to what i could and could not do, and, to
extend this further, what suicidology can and cannot say of suicide. Gender is
a pivotal part of this enterprise. The intelligibility of suicide cannot be thought
outside gender. as i have shown, the way we think about suicide is dependent
on gendering as a process of giving form to meanings of suicide. This confirms
that suicide is neither self-evident nor obvious (as scientific models would have
us think), but rather conditioned by specific value assumptions and norms so
that the gender of suicide turns out to be masculine and masculinist.
Like a mathematician working on a blackboard, in the course of writing this
book i became too focused on trying to ‘solve’ the puzzle of gender in suicide.
for me, the question of gender was a problem. i wanted to understand how
this problem worked and what i could do about it. i was not naïve enough to
think that i could solve it for i am not a thinker who thinks theory will provide
immediate ‘solutions’. That would be too easy. There is nothing easy about
theory let alone a complex and distressing phenomenon like suicide. Yet by
puzzling over gender, i have offered one history of ideas about suicide. This
is a bold statement to make, for what i have offered was not generated by the
painstaking labours of a historian even though much of what i did do was in
fact painstaking. nevertheless, i want to suggest that there is a history, and this
history is based on suicidology’s capacity to generate ideas – to build the building
blocks for a theory even though such theory, i think, cannot be constructed by
using suicidology’s own tools of research and analysis. it has to come from
somewhere else, from outside its intellectual domain. here, it came from post-
structuralism, postmodernism, feminism, post-feminism and to a lesser extent
postcolonialism. These are very strange bedfellows for suicidology to contend
with. for me, they offered the tools to see and think of the gender of suicide
differently, and to imagine the idea of critical suicidology as a future possibility.
So what theory did I offer? If we look back on the scope of my analysis,

it is clear that the character of suicide is very much performative, generated
by the performativity of context. This performativity is anchored in, and
sustained by, powerful bodies of knowledge and sites of practice – sociology,
law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media. Although by no means
exhaustive, these sites are very important to the gendering of suicide because of
their institutional, privileged positions of power, and their capacity to breathe
life into universalized and homogenous truth claims about suicide. Such truth
claims are both saturated by gender and devoid of gender. The combination of
the two is crucial to epitomizing the masculinist subject ideal as the benchmark
to knowing the intelligibility of suicide. What is both frustrating and fascinating
at the same time about the generation of truth claims is that they rely on
multiple processes and practices of interpreting gender. Such interpretations
are not only dichotomous and repetitive, but also flawed, contradictory, visible
and invisible and inextricably linked. While the effect of suicide as masculine
and masculinist is homogenous, gendering as a process of constituting suicide
is heterogeneous. Hence, the performativity of suicide is heterogeneous.
What can be said of this performativity? The performativity of suicide shows
that gender is one pivotal condition of knowledge of suicide. Gender makes
suicide intelligible even when it occurs in the context of race and sexuality.
It also shows that knowledge production is positive rather than negative and
repressive. My contention is that how sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge
and newsprint media embrace the task of representing and interpreting
suicide occurs within gendered frameworks. This is not only important to
understanding suicide per se. It is central to the task of challenging securely
established presuppositions – presuppositions that have the power to recognize,
qualify and privilege only some experiences of suicide and disqualify those that
do not appeal to the masculinist subject as the epistemological benchmark for
interpreting suicide. Recognizing that power relations incite the production of
knowledge is important especially since, as a benchmark, the masculinist subject
becomes part of the default mode of representation – a mode premised as the
way of knowing suicide.
My emphasis on power relations suggests that, in contrast to Foucault’s
argument that ‘death is power’s limit’ (1978: 138), power is still at work in the
constitution of suicide. As Butler contends, ‘in the maintenance of death and
of the dying, power is still at work and … death is and has its own discursive
industry’ (1996: 71). Here, suicide does have a discursive industry – a rich
industry generated by the interests, activities and work of researchers, as
well as of practitioners from various backgrounds and contexts. If universal
and homogenous truth claims emerge and are successfully maintained in
understanding suicide, it is because the production of such truths is dependent
on a discursive industry, anchored in multiple sites of practice. This of course
154
does not mean that suicidology is exhaustive. Nor does it mean that only
sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media are capable
of contributing to the knowing of suicide. It is clear that, while each site of
knowledge has its own discursive strategies, each still contributes to generating
homogenous truth claims about gender in suicide.
It is necessary then to recognize that what is deemed universal about suicide
is only universal to the extent that homogenous ways of knowing suicide are
retained. It is necessary to acknowledge that universal givens in suicide appear as
such precisely because of the conditions of practice through which they emerge,
and to which they are bound. I am not suggesting that we should suspend
efforts to understand suicide, or debate whether suicide exists at all. To do so
would be stupid and unethical. Instead, my suggestion is that we recognize that
the processes and practices of interpreting and engendering suicide must become a site
of permanent debate, especially since the masculine and masculinist effects are
overwhelmingly reductive and limiting. This does not mean we are to dispense
with trying to come up with coherent ways of analysing suicide. Rather, it
means we adopt a critical attitude to the very thing on which understanding
suicide depends. This attitude is ethical.
Undoubtedly, the body is vital to the way suicidal intent and outcome are
identified, verified, documented and qualified. The body matters deeply in
relation to understanding motives for, and methods of, suicide. Why the body
comes to matter is not simply because its visceral surfaces are visually available
for inspection. Rather, the body matters because of what it means to interpret
the inscriptions it bears. This is entwined with gender to the point where it is
difficult to tell the body and gender apart. What it means to interpret is always
part of social norms and processes on which the knowing of suicide depends.
My investigation of various rifts and limits in the production of suicide as
masculine and masculinist clearly illustrated this to be the case. This is especially
important in identifying the problematic ways in which suicide is interpreted
and, in particular, for the interpretation of agency and intent.
The practices of interpreting the body in suicide are constituted through
the male body as the only one ‘truly’ and ‘fully’ capable of implementing
suicidal intent. It is as if the male body is internally active and able to go through
seriously with the intention to take one’s own life, while the female body is
internally passive and therefore unable to do so. If an instance arises where
the female body is said to signal some level of suicidal intent, the intent is
repeatedly rendered opaque – especially if it does not qualify as violent. When
the female body does signal violent intentions, it is because it reacted, rather
than acted. In being reactive, the female body is interpreted as vulnerable, weak
and fragile, and in turn abject. Yet the male body also risks being interpreted
as abject, and in turn can also be seen as fragile, weak and vulnerable. We must
consider whether the gendered effects of knowledge protect the vulnerability
155
of the male body. We must also consider whether or not gendered effects also
shelter the workings of gender norms so that they continue to shape suicide
so problematically. By stressing these points, I am not insisting that male and
female bodies should never be recognized as fragile and vulnerable. What I am
insisting on is that we should take note of one vulnerability protecting another
vulnerability, especially if protecting means privileging, excluding, marginalizing
and silencing experiences that do not meet the criteria of serious suicide.
The manner in which the body matters tells us that the problem with
knowing suicide is not about the male body and masculinity per se. The problem
lies with the economy of meanings, norms and values that continually privilege
what comes to be recognized as male and masculine. Therefore, knowing
suicide through gender is not about what men and women do and do not do.
Rather, it is entwined with the manner – namely, gendering as a process of
materialization – through which men’s and women’s experiences are rendered
intelligible. This, I believe, is yet another reason why it has been crucial to track
down inconsistencies in the way that gender makes sense in suicide.
In light of this, my work demands that we give serious attention not only
to what we know of suicide but also to how we know what we know of suicide.
How do we do this? How do we approach what looks like a forceful, reductive
and limiting interpretation of suicide? My conclusion and suggestion is that
we continue posing difficult questions, especially when there is a steadfast
refusal and/or avoidance. Posing questions may not necessarily prevent suicide
immediately. But posing questions is at least a beginning. And beginnings, while
at times tenuous and uncertain, can still offer hope for change, even if imagining
change is difficult in the present.
At the beginning of this book, I wondered whether analysing gender could
change how we know suicide. To some extent, I think I have answered this
question. I have shown that the task of posing questions should never be taken
for granted, no matter how simple, obvious and self-evident the questions
may initially appear. Posing questions is significant because we, the living, can
maintain a signifying dialectic relationship with those who are no longer alive
as well as with those who continue to live. Such a signifying relationship is
vital, as it may offer an opportunity to recognize and acknowledge a communion
between life and death – a connection that is not only significant in relation
to what it means to die through suicide, but also, importantly, in relation to
what it means to live alongside suicide. And it may also open up other ways
of living that may indeed contribute to changing lives in which suicide seems
the necessary resolution.
Most certainly we must act. We, the living, must reconsider the terms made
part of our efforts of making sense of suicide. We must recognize difference
more readily, instead of seeing it as pathological when it refuses to fit into what
we understand about suicide more broadly. We must continue to interrogate
156
the way discourses of suicide are yet, on their own, to achieve their aim of
preventing suicide. It is the very conditions of production that continue to
demand a more gender-aware and gender-compassionate attention, especially
if we are to avoid the limitations of our current practice – limitations that
surely we cannot afford to ignore. If we ignore them, if we do not pay
attention, then who will?
157
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Index
abjection 5, 60–61, 90–93, 122, 125, Berlant, Lauren 146

148 Berman, alan 47
active vs passive 4–5, 32, 43–5, 76, beyondblue 142–3
91–2, 101, 104–5, 107, 125, bodies 155
148 and the coroner’s gaze 64–7, 76
men’s suicide as active 27, 53, 61, deceased 82–3, 87, 89–91
103 degrading the suicided body
women’s suicide as passive 25, 16–18, 66–7
102, 110, 132–3 indigenous 29–30, 136–9
agency 5–6, 27, 37–8, 40, 43, 53, 59, in law 71
66–7, 76, 101–3, 132–3, 139, men’s 3, 27, 60, 66–7, 71, 91–3,
148 103, 136–8, 148, 155
ahmed, Sara 116 as neutral 27, 39–40, 79–81, 89,
aisheh, dareen abu 127–8, 131–2 110
al-akhras, ayat Mohammed 127, transcended 53, 58
129, 131–2 women’s 25, 27, 30, 57, 132, 155
al-aqsa Martyrs Brigade 127, 129, Brown, rhonda 31
132 Brown, ron 4, 16
althusser, Louis 37, 74–5 Brunner, claudia 132–3
aristotle 18 Burt, ramsay 139
attempted suicide 5, 21–4, 26, 29, Burton, J.d.K. 70
31–2, 45, 53, 102, 109, 120, Busfield, Joan 98–9
122, 141, 143, 147–8 Butler, Judith 3–4, 6, 34, 35–8, 40,
attention seeking 43–4, 102, 108, 44, 52, 74–6, 104, 109–10, 116,
148 125, 144, 147, 149, 154
augustine, St 18–19
austin, J.L. 36 cahn, Zilla 19
autoerotic asphyxiation 117–18, canetto, Silvia 21–4, 27–8, 32, 45,
122–3 102–3, 107, 109
autonomy 27, 40, 71–2, 88–9, 101, capacity 52–4, 67
103 cartwright 1998 89
autopsies, see post-mortem cato, Jennifer 32
examinations celebrity suicides 115, 116–25
chambers, douglas 70
Baird, Mercy 29 cheah, Pheng 71
Beavers, herman 139 christianity 16, 18–19, 141, 144
Benhabib, Seyla 37 cleary, anne 23
The Gender of suicide
colonization 29–30, 123 fatherhood 119, 121, 135, 138
Cooper, Trudi 31–2 Fedden, Robin 16
coroners 63, 67, 71–5 Fee, Dwight 98
Coroner’s Court 64–5, 72 feminism 8, 109–11
Cover, Rob 32, 145 social learning model 109–10
Craigie, Cathy 135 Fenaughty, John 32
critique 10–11 Foucault, Michel 2, 6–11, 65, 69, 73,
80–81, 91, 99, 104, 107, 116,
Davies, Margaret 70 154
Davis, Colin 5, 14 Frankenberg, Ruth 124
D’Augelli, Anthony 32 Freckelton, Ian 63, 71
Debord, Guy 115–16, 125 Freud, Sigmund 26, 100–103
Del Zotto, Augusta 131
depression 20–21, 26, 28, 31, 95–101, Gatens, Moira 71
106, 118, 141–3, 146 Gibbs, Raymond 104
and gender 99–101, 106–7 Gibson, Paul 32
Derrida, Jacques 36 Gilbert, Helen 137–8
desire 100–105, 123–4 Gill, Phillip 70
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Goldberg, David 116
Mental Disorders 20, 96–8, Goldney, Robert 47
106 Gresham, Geoffrey 81–3
Dijck, Jose van 89 guns 23, 25, 42–3, 76, 83–5, 90,
disfigurement 25, 42–4, 65, 92, 102–4 92–3
Dollimore, Jonathan 145 Gramsci, Antonio 8
Dorais, Michel 146 Grosz, Elizabeth 9, 71, 74, 91, 101,
Douglas, Jack 28 108
drug overdoses 24, 42–3, 76, 87,
92–3, 107–8, 118–22, 124 hailing 37, 39, 75
Durkheim, Emile 21–2, 28, 47–62, Halberstam, Judith 6
109 Hall, Stuart 82
family and divorce 49, 51, 55–7 Halperin, David 1–2
gender inequality 49–51, 53, 56–8 hanging 18, 29–30, 42, 68–9, 73, 83,
men’s suicide 50–51, 58 86, 91, 118, 121–2, 135, 139
rationality 50, 53–4, 56, 59 Harré, Niki 32
suicide as social 51–4, 59 Harwood, Valerie 146
women’s suicide 55–6 Hassan, Riaz 20
Dyer, Richard 123–4 Healy, Justin 107–8
Heard, Kenneth 24
Edelman, Lee 145 heteronormativity 140–41, 144–9
Edwards, Susan 70 Higonnet, Margaret 27
Elliot-Farrelly, Terri 29 Hillier, Lynne 143
Emslie, Michael 31–2 history
Esquirol, Jean-Etienne 22 legal 64–7
Evans, Jessica 82, 88 of suicidology 16–19, 153
Evans, Raymond 122 Hjelmeland, Heidi 20
194
INDEX
Holmes, Ronald 79 Lloyd, Genevieve 19
Holmes, Stephen 79 Lovell, Terry 37
Huebl, Joan 19 Lupton, Deborah 89
Hunter, Ernest 29, 71
Hunter, Rosemary 71 Macdonald, Ronald 31–2
Hutchence, Michael 116–23, 125, Martin, Graham 115
137, 140 McIntosh, John 23
Mack, Kathy 71
Idris, Wafa 127, 129–33 McNay, Lois 37
Indigenous suicide 28–9, 134–40 Marks, Alan 17
inquests 66–8, 70, 72–6, 117–19, Marshall, Barbara 51, 58–60
121 masculinity 6, 27, 32, 122–3
intent 17, 19–21, 28, 39–41, 70, 72, media 113–43, 149–50
104–5, 110, 121 guidelines on reporting suicide
and lethality/violence 27, 43, 113–14
102–3, 108 medicine 68–9, 79–91, 106
men’s 3, 26, 139, 155 mental illness 49, 69, 95–9, 105; see
women’s 30, 26, 30, 109, 124, also depression
129–30, 132–3, 150 methods of suicide 5, 20, 23–5,
interpellation 74–5, 132, 144 29–31, 40, 42–4, 59–61, 74,
Irigaray, Luce 103 76, 102, 109, 134–5
Isacsson, Goran 97 Mills, Catherine 37
mind–body dualism 18–19, 27, 40,
Jermyn, Deborah 120 44, 50, 58, 63, 68, 70–73, 89,
101
Kelton, G. 143, 148 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 82
Knizek, Birthe 20 Moi, Toril 103
knowledge–power nexus 6, 8–10, 81, Moles, Robert 68
154 Moscicki, Eve 21
Koo, Lisa 115 motherhood 119–23
Kral, Michael 24 motives 20, 25, 28, 31, 67, 132
Kristeva, Julia 90 Murphy, George 105
Kromrey, Jeffrey 23 Murray, Alexander 64–6
Kushner, Howard 22, 53, 57–8
Naaman, Dorit 131
Lane, Samantha 143 Naffine, Ngaire 68, 70–72
law 17, 63–75 Neeley, Steven 65
Leach, Mark 23, 109 Neuringer, Charles 24, 26, 105
Lehmann, Jennifer 49 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36
lesbian suicide 30–32, 143, 148
Lester, David 21, 109 O’Donovan, Katherine 70
lethality 20, 24–5, 27, 88–9, 92 O’Shanick, Gregory 25
Lettieri, Dan 24 Owens, Rosemary 70, 72
Levinas, Emmanual 14
Levy, G. 120 Palestine 126–33
195
The Gender of suicide
performativity 35–42, 45, 74–5, 145, Seabourne, Gwen 64, 67
149, 154 Secomb, Linnell 41, 45
Pederson, Jean Elisabeth 49 self-harm 31, 89, 107–8
Pell, George 141, 144–6 sexuality 30–33, 116, 140–49
Peterson, Linda 25 black 123–4
Peterson, McKim 25 and death 145–6, 149
Phelps, Kerryn 142, 145–6 of heterosexual men 122–3
photography 82–91, 127–8 of heterosexual women 124
Pickering, W.S.F. 49 Shildrick, Margrit 89, 91
Pitts, Victoria 108 Shilling, Chris 123
Plato 18–19 Smith, Dorothy 105
postcolonialism 8–9 sociology 47–8
postmodernism 8 speech acts 36–7, 74–6, 145–6, 148
post-mortem examinations 68–9, 79, Spivak, Gayatri 9
81–3, 87–9 Stack, Steven 115
post-structuralism 8 Stark, Jill 142
Potter, Lloyd 24–5 statistics 21–3, 29–30, 33, 47, 52, 55,
Price, Janet 89 61
Probyn, Elspeth 9 Stephen, Kylie 124
psy-knowledge 22, 69, 72, 95–9, 109 Sterk, Claire 53, 57–8
Stillion, Judith 23
queer youth suicide 30–33, 140–49 Stoppard, Janet 99
Street, Sue 23
race 28–30, 116, 132–4, 136–40 suicide
whiteness 123–4, 137 author’s experiences 1–2
Range, Lillian 23, 109 as citational 42
Ranson, David 68 as an individual act 39–41
rationality 10, 19, 48, 50, 53–5, 57, as masculine 5–6, 10–11, 15–16,
59–61, 71–3, 98 21–8, 34, 35, 44, 56, 61, 72–3,
Reiner, V. 141 108, 131–4, 137, 139, 153–5
Reser, Joseph 29 as performative 40–42, 59
Reser, Paul 29 as relational 43, 45–6
Rich, Charles 97 sanctions against 16–18, 64–7
Richards, Ian 113 as self-evident and neutral 15–16,
Rickard, John 122 22–3, 25, 34, 40, 43, 70–74,
Rintoul, Stuart 141 150
Rosen, Paul 24 as a spectacle 113, 115–16, 120–21,
125, 130–32, 136, 139–41,
Said, Edward 8–9, 133 143–4, 148–50
Sakinofsky, Isaac 27–8, 107 suicide bombing 126–34, 140
Sanborn, Charlotte 25–6 suicide prevention 4, 31–2, 45,
Santos, John 23 105–8, 141–4, 156–7
Schioldann, Johan 47 suicidology 4, 10, 15–21, 27, 34, 47,
Schneidman, Edwin 4, 20, 95 109, 153, 155
Seabourne, Alice 64, 67 Swahn, Monica 24–5
196
INDEX
Swann, Alan 25 violence 5, 20, 27, 65, 109, 127, 131,
Sykes, Jill 136 133, 146, 148; see also lethality
and intent 42–3, 102–3, 108, 155
Tagg, John 82
Taqataqah, Andaleeb 127, 129, 131–2 Warner, Michael 146
Tatz, Colin 29 White, Hedy 23
theory 3–4, 7, 153–4 Williams, Simon 91
Thornton, Margaret 73, 76 Wirth-Cauchon, Janet 105
truth claims 6, 10 Witz, Anne 58, 60
Turner, Franklin 81
Yates, Paula 117–22, 124–5, 137, 140
Victor, B. 130 Young, Leonie 143, 146
197

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The Gender of Suicide

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 9781409441410 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

understanding Suicide through Gender: an introduction 1

1 The construction of Knowledge of Suicide and

2 Performative Knowledge: re-reading Gender in Suicide 35

3 durkheim’s Social recognition of Gender in Suicide 47

4 ‘fact-finding exercises’: The coroner, Suicide and Gender 63

5 ‘what it Means to See’: reading Gender in Medical

6 The Visibility of difference: Gender and Suicide

7 intriguing events, Spectacular deaths 113

what now? concluding remarks 153

5.1 and 5.2 wound caused by a discharge of a 12-bore shotgun.

5.3 and 5.4 Abrasion of the thumb due to recoil of the

5.5 Showing the noose which has dropped away from

5.6 Blood removed from the right iliac vein with a

It is roughly three o’clock in the morning. The world is asleep. Suddenly,

This is a confronting memory to recount, tell and write. It conveys a disturbing

limitations, onto some major organizing structure of social meaning or some

I invite my readers to consider that my writing is bound to suicide. This creates

The Problem and the Argument

Suicide is a constant presence in contemporary western societies. It sits painfully

Key Themes and Issues

frame our understandings of violence. I look at notions of agency, materialized

analytical concept, my task is not about debating or determining the facticity,

Never consent to be completely comfortable with your own certainties. Never

Foucault’s point shows just how crucial it is to work towards opening a

an intellectual ‘involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability’

1 I am not novel in my use of discourse, knowledge, truth and power to analyse

Some Risky Business

As strange as it might first sound, what I offer here is ethical. In an essay

Scope and organization

Located in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, gender studies and

If knowledge is constructed, and if construction as such is not neutral and

If we think through the ideas offered above, suicide can be understood as

something about masculinities and femininities – an understanding influenced by

Traces of the Past

Sometimes the remains of suicide committers were disbursed in order to make

Contemporary Conceptualizations of Suicide in Suicidology

Based on methods and mortality outcomes, suicide is defined today as an

Explanations of what motivates someone to suicide frame it as truly

322). It is clear that methods of suicide, in the context of depression, are

Framing Suicide as a Male Phenomenon

Much of what is said of gender in suicidology belongs to disciplines such as

male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is

Readings of Race and Sexuality in Suicide

In Australia, the use of the terms ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Indigenous’ and ‘suicide’ is

1 I use ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ interchangeably. In so doing, I do not presume

I revisited: generally, a concern by women about younger girls, and dismissal,

39). Specifically, Emslie (1996) argues that suicide prevention programmes do

to suggest that questioning ideas is crucial to rethinking how we respond to

Butler Theorizes Gender as Performative

The Question of Agency

of intentions. Agency is considered to be a property of a body, a possession

when words engage actions or constitute themselves a kind of action, they do

Suicide through Performativity

What happens when suicide is read through performativity? What strategies

2 Legally established as Australia’s central statistical authority, the ABS provides

Hence, whether different acts, their intentions and outcomes are

Contentious Distinctions: ‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ in Suicide

To begin understanding and unpacking how gender plays a part in the

List of Figures vii

understanding Suicide through Gender: an introduction 1

2 Performative Knowledge: re-reading Gender in Suicide 35

3 durkheim’s Social recognition of Gender in Suicide 47

4 ‘fact-finding exercises’: The coroner, Suicide and Gender 63

7 intriguing events, Spectacular deaths 113

what now? concluding remarks 153