Suicide holds an ambivalent position in contemporary social and cultural contexts. It questions what it means to live and die, yet provides no clear-cut answers about death or dying, life or living. This thesis explores some of the ways suicide has been understood and represented, to demonstrate that knowing suicide is dependent not only on what suicide means, but also on how meanings of suicide become part of knowledge. Knowing suicide is not a matter of responding to it as self-evident, transparent, neutral and obvious, but rather is implicated in social processes and norms central to how knowledge gains intelligibility. Guided by poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist and postfeminist philosophies, the thesis takes up gender and gendering as its central focus, to interrogate how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. Critically examining a wide variety of textual sources, it argues that suicide is principally rendered as a masculine, and even a masculinist, practice. Knowing suicide today is anchored in suicidology - the study of suicide - and maintained by institutional sites of practice including sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, each of which is analysed here. Suicide as masculine and masculinist practice is invoked through multiple, often-contradictory and inextricably linked readings of gender, even while claiming homogeneity. Its gendered foundations can however be made to appear gender-neutral, even when actually gender-saturated. The twin gender movements of neutrality and repleteness are in fact crucial to the knowing of suicide. The thesis establishes that knowing suicide can never occur outside discourse. Even more importantly, how suicide enters discourse cannot be thought outside gender. The body matters to the production of deeply problematic understandings of agency, intent and violence, on which the production of suicide as masculine and masculinist depends. It becomes clear that such dependence rests not only on gender, but also on race and sexuality, as conditions of its knowing. The thesis suggests that further attention be given to the production and maintenance of highly reductive and limiting homogenous truth claims in suicide - truth claims that validate and privilege some interpretations of suicide, at the expense of rendering others less legitimate and serious. If the processes and practices of interpreting suicide become a site of permanent debate, they are more likely to challenge the ways in which masculinist ways of knowing render, and limit, the intelligibility of suicide.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/284043 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Jaworski, Katrina |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | EN-AUS |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Katrina Jaworski 2007 |
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