THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Vicki Crowley for the generous, wise and critically engaged ways in which she responded to my thinking and writing on suicide. I would also like to thank my reviewers for their thought-provoking comments and questions. Notes 1. I have already engaged with reading suicide as performative elsewhere (see Jaworski 2003 Jaworski Katrina 2003 Suicide and gender: Reading suicide through Butler's notion of performativity Journal of Australian Studies 76 137 46 [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). This article develops further work. 2. I do not have the space here to elaborate on suicidal and self-harming behaviours specifically, but see Jaworski (2005 Jaworski Katrina 2005 (Un)desirable acts of death: Gendered truths in the cultural production of suicide In Corporeal inscriptions: Representations of the body in cultural and literary texts and practices Edyta Lorek-Jezinska Katarzyna Wieckowska Torun Nicolaus Copernicus University Press [Google Scholar]). 3. By saying this, I must stress that my argument is only a beginning to deconstructing a relationship between discourses on suicide and suicidal subjectivity for the purposes of understanding and problematising the gendering of suicide. Thus, what I consider here is limited in that it does not provide a more nuanced examination of particular discursive representations. I address some examples of discursive representations elsewhere (Jaworski 2008 Jaworski Katrina 2008 ‘Elegantly wasted’: The celebrity deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22 6 777 91 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 4. In this article I do not have room to discuss suicide as anything but an act that is private. I consider it as otherwise in my forthcoming work (Jaworski forthcoming 2010 Jaworski Katrina Forthcoming 2010 ‘The male preserve of martyrdom’: Palestinian female suicide bombers in Australian newsprint media Feminist Media Studies 10 2 [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]).