Australian Feminist Studies

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THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE

Katrina Jaworski

To cite this article: Katrina Jaworski (2010) THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE, Australian Feminist
Studies, 25:63, 47-61, DOI: 10.1080/08164640903499752
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 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE1

Katrina Jaworski

In contemporary social and cultural contexts, suicide is understood as explicitly

individual and a deliberate choice and act. This article examines whether the intelligibility
of suicide can be thought outside the conditions through which knowledge is
constructed. Focusing on gender as one epistemological condition, I ask how gender
comes to reside in the material act of taking one’s own life. The aim is to demonstrate
analytically that the gendering of suicide, as a material act presumed to exist as neutral
and self-evident, is heavily dependent on, and related to, gender. By doing so, my
intention is to prize open the terms that articulate the intelligibility of gender in suicide to
expose any rifts, and to assess whether these can be used to interrogate the manner
through which suicide is gendered.
Selectively drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity as a heuristic tool, I argue
that understanding suicide as a neutral and self-evident act is a masculine and masculinist
effect that fails to sustain its discursive mode of production. Such an understanding is itself
an effect that conceals the discursive workings of suicide. Suicide is already gendered at the
moment of its configuration. I begin by outlining some of the predominant ways of
understanding gender in suicide. I then discuss elements of Butler’s work on performativity
and the relevant criticisms to situate my methodological use of the concept as a thinking
practice. Following this, I consider what happens when the gendering of suicide is read
analytically through performative and performativity. Finally, I pursue aspects of the
ontology of suicide to challenge the production and maintenance of some of the gendered
truths that dominate the way suicide is understood.

Suicide as a Deliberate Act

Suicide is understood commonly as an explicitly individual and private act.
Suicidology*the research field committed to the study of suicide*broadly encapsulates
suicide as the act of deliberately taking one’s own life that is voluntary, intended and self-
inflicted (Brown 2001; Holmes and Holmes 2005; O’Connor and Sheehy 2000). Such an
understanding suggests that the individual is responsible for engaging with the act as a
result of their intention to commit the act. Intentions are measured by whether an
outcome is attempted or completed (Andriessen 2006). Interpreting suicide and intentions
is influenced by gender. Statistical data, as one example, shows that more men than
women complete suicide, whereas more women than men attempt suicide (Fernquist
1999; Lester 1996; Steenkamp and Harrison 2000). Based on outcome, largely determined
by mortality rates, suicide is interpreted as a male and masculine phenomenon, where
men are seen as completers and women as attempters (Canetto 19921993, 1995, 1997;
Canetto and Lester 1998; Dahlen and Canetto 2002; Range and Leach 1998; Street and
Kromrey 1995). A range of actions, or in suicidology’s specific terms, self-destructive
behaviours, also informs the interpretation of men as completers and women as

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 63, March 2010

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/10/010047-15
– 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164640903499752
48 KATRINA JAWORSKI

attempters (Andriessen 2006). In part, this contributes to understanding two important

facets of suicide: suicide methods and reasons.2
Traditionally, men prefer to use methods considered more lethal, such as firearms,
whereas women prefer to use methods considered less violent such as drug overdoses.
Methods such as firearms are considered not only more visually and physically violent, but
also male, masculine and active. Methods such as drug overdoses, however, are viewed as
female modes of engaging with suicide that are less visually and physically violent and lethal
as well as more feminine, reactive and passive. Where the former is viewed as serious and
wilful, the latter is viewed as reactive, manipulative and attention-seeking, configured by a
fear of bodily disfigurement (Brockington 2001; Canetto and Lester 1995; Canetto and
Sakinofsky 1998; Lewis, Atkinson, and Shovlin 19931994; Rich et al. 1992; Stack and
Wasserman 2009). The construction of this binary occurs despite the fact that there are other
gendered differences as well as similarities. For example, both men and women do choose
hanging as well as drug overdoses, and do not survive them (Range and Leach 1998).
Although I draw more attention to suicide methods rather than reasons for suicide
in the course of the analysis, it is nevertheless important to emphasise reasons for they,
too, configure gender in suicide. Women’s suicides are often interpreted through the lens
of relationship breakdown as a result of emotional turmoil. In contrast, men’s suicides are
read as signals of courage, pride and resistance against external circumstances such as
economic hardship, severe physical illness and social isolation (Canetto 19921993, 1997;
Lieberman 2003; Range and Leach 1998). It is assumed that men assert their independence
and physical prowess in crisis, but women internalise crisis by becoming depressed,
dependent and passive (Canetto and Lester 1998; Stephens 1995). This is despite the fact
that some studies demonstrate that male and female completed and attempted suicides
are often motivated by reasons outside traditional explanations. Women engage with
suicide due to sexual and emotional abuse, neglect and economic hardship. Likewise, men
engage with suicide as a result of emotional breakdowns and social isolation (Canetto
19921993; Dahlen and Canetto 2002). As Canetto assesses, researchers ‘find’ connections
between outcomes and reasons on the assumption that ‘the connection is there or
because they believe that a connection must be there’ (19921993, 8; original emphasis).
Critics such as Canetto and Lester argue that the problem is the repetitive emphasis on
differences to the point where they are ‘taken for universal truths’ (1998, 163), with little
thought given to how such truths emerge and become accepted.

Gender as Performative
In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler puts forward a claim that sex and gender
cannot be thought of in isolation as they mutually constitute one another. One way of
ensuring that sex and gender remain as separate is to conceptualise sex as prediscursive or
as ontologically given. Identifying it in the context of a ‘metaphysics of substance’, Butler
(1990, 10) suggests that ‘humanist conceptions of the subject tend to assume a
substantive person’ who possess a ‘pregendered substance or ‘‘core’’’, which remains
external to whatever the social and cultural context in which the person happens to exist
(Butler 1987, 1990). To explain how sex and gender mutually constitute one another,
Butler theorises gender as performative, where ‘gender is always a doing . . . performa-
tively constituted by the very ‘‘expressions’’ that are said to be its results’ (1990, 25).
Gender is constituted by various repeated acts that congeal over time to produce the
 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE 49

illusion of sex as the cause of gender (Butler 1990, 1993). Thus, the very idea of gender
taking on meaning occurs under the cultural compulsion to take on meaning, constituted
by processes and practices governed by social and cultural norms (Butler 1987, 1988, 1989,
1990, 2004). If one is compelled to take on gender, then it is impossible to theorise the
body without meaningful reference to cultural meanings (Butler 1990). Thus, the body is
‘irreducibly cultural and material at once’ (Butler 2004, 87).
In Bodies that Matter, Butler shifts towards Derrida’s reformulation of Austin’s speech
act theory. There, performativity, or the capacity for language to produce what it appears
to name or describe, is reworked ‘as the reiterative and citational practice by which
discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler 1993, 2). This means that, through
reiteration, gendered practices repeat ritualised sets of norms to the point where they
conceal the norms being performed (Butler 1993). It also means that sex takes hold of the
body through its citation as a norm, deriving ‘its power through the citation it compels’
(1993, 13). Gender is not then a matter of choice, because through reiteration, actions
‘precede, constrain, and exceed the performer’ (1993, 234). Thus, citation and reiteration
become mechanisms for the production and articulation of gender norms authorised by
already accepted norms, simultaneously regulating and constraining the performativity of
gender (Butler 1993). Importantly, citation and reiteration show that ‘discourse has a
history that not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages’ (Butler 1993, 227).
In Excitable Speech (1997), Butler further reworks performativity as citationality,
emphasising that naming, on the basis of Althusser’s linguistic notion of interpellation or
hailing, reiterates and cites the meanings through which subject positions are conferred.
For this to happen, however, a subject must recognise the position to which it is called
upon, meaning that interpellation needs authority in its address. The authority of the
address is possible, Butler argues, because ‘of the citational dimension of the speech act,
the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation’
(1997, 33). In this sense, naming is not singular. Nor does it derive from a prediscursive
agent (Butler 1997, 2004). Importantly, performativity continues to involve the body
because ‘speaking is a bodily act’ (Butler 2004, 172). Furthermore, in being addressed, ‘it is
not merely the body of the speaker that comes into play: it is the body of the addressee as
well’ (Butler 1997, 12).
In this article, Butler’s work on performativity frames my deployment of the term,
gendering. Gendering can be best described as the process of materialising, invoking or
hailing suicide. Gendering as materialisation enables the production of what comes to be
recognised as intelligible about suicide. Although this process stabilises over time to
produce and sustain various regulatory effects, it is also productive, in the sense that it
incites knowledge into existence, of which gender is a part (Butler 1993, 710). In this
sense, gendering is bound to the context in which subjects are constituted (Bell 1999, 164).
Importantly, as a process it is part of differentiating between subjects, where some are
rendered intelligible and others less so.

The Contentious Question of Agency

An intensely debated aspect of Butler’s work on performativity centres on the
question of agency. For feminist theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Butler’s notion of
performativity loses agency. The idea that there is no doer behind the deed is culturally
deterministic, with no room for conscious reflexivity (Allen 1998; Benhabib 1995; Brickell
50 KATRINA JAWORSKI

2005; Nelson 1999). McNay (2000) argues that while Butler is successful in establishing the
conditions of possibility for agency she fails to provide the tools for analysing agency in
specific historical contexts. Lovell extends McNay’s 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). This is because Butler overlooks specific historical
conditions that situate not only social transformations but also particular actions by
subjects themselves (Lovell 2003). Mills critically appraises agency differently, suggesting
instead that the problem in Butler’s work is not to do with agency per se ‘but rather that of
providing reasons to resist’ (2000, 276). In part, this stems from some conceptual
ambiguities and a tendency for abstraction as well as a pessimistic characterisation of the
subject in later works (Mills 2000).
In response to some of the critics, Butler contends that her work is a reformulation
and not a dismissal of agency. For Butler, the problem is not with the presence of agency
but rather with how it is theorised. Traditionally, agency is considered to be a property of
body, autonomously possessed by the subject. For Butler (1995), however, agency does
not stem from the subject but is the effect of socio-historical conditions and conventions.
If words can constitute action, it is ‘because they draw upon and reengage conventions
which have gained their power precisely through a sedimented iterability’ (Butler 1995, 134;
original emphasis). Agency is present, but its presence is located at the very moment of a
practice brought into being through performative actions (Butler 1992, 1993, 1995).
Consequently, the subject may choose something, but that very choosing is conditioned
by norms and assumptions. Thus, as Butler has rearticulated more recently, ‘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 (2004, 3) sees as an enabling rather than a
disabling agency, because recognition indicates the presence of a ‘reflective awareness’
(Butler 2000, 34).
Butler’s reformulation of performativity and agency is methodologically important in
that it pursues the conditions upon which agency is possible without taking such
conditions for granted. It also works towards questioning the autonomous and
instrumental position of the transcendental ‘I’, located at the heart of phallogocentric
mastery of the masculinist subject. Described as the Man of Reason in Western philosophy,
the masculinist subject position is an ideal or norm through which particular concepts are
organised. This can be summed as male, rational, instrumental, abstract, objective, neutral,
universal, European white, heterosexual, autonomous, transcending time, nature and in
particular the material body, yet retaining a measure of control over its senses (Butler 1990;
Harding 1987; Hekman 1990; Lloyd 1984, 1996). In other words, these are the conditions
through which something is articulated as masculinist, privileged by the humanist
conception of the subject whose prediscursive existence conceals the discursive modes of
operation, rendering them as neutral and self-evident. This is crucial for understanding
how gender, as one epistemological condition, comes to reside in suicide, which, as
I argue, produces suicide as masculine and masculinist.3

Suicide through Performativity

What happens when the idea of gender as performative is grafted to suicide? What
happens when suicide is read through performativity? And what possibilities can
performativity as a thinking practice offer towards challenging the ways that gender
 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE 51

norms suicide? I want to begin addressing these questions by considering the definition of
suicide as the act of deliberately taking one’s own life.4 This definition can be read as
performatively hailing suicide as a highly individual and private act. 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, recognised 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 a disembodied mind. Yet suicide is explicitly individual, not because a person is
automatically responsible but because they are hailed as being 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 doing, or taking of
life). What is made clear is that the intention behind such an activity must be deliberate in
order to have an outcome recognised as suicide.
For suicide to be hailed, however, it requires a vehicle or a medium. Although this
particular element is not named directly it is there in order for the taking of life to occur. It
is there even if the taking of life appears to be marked largely by what the disembodied
mind decides. In other words, the medium, or more specifically a body, is the reference
point through which the doing of suicide can be identified. It provides a point of origin as
the basis for determining the material, tangible existence of suicidal outcome. As a site of
activity to which suicide can be attributed, or a surface yielding its material signs, the body
appears to exist as neutral and self-evident. It is an inert material basis for the act of
suicide, divorced from discourse and culture. As such, the suicided body does not need
direct naming. The lack of naming, however, is itself important since even what is not
addressed directly still hails a particular bodily existence. Such existence can be summed
up as an absent presence.
The definition of suicide used here offers what can be referred to as conditions of
possibility upon which suicide is constituted. Such conditions materialise self-destruction
as an intentional and deliberate act of death, one that denotes a wholly contained, self-
evident phenomenon which can be distinguished and measured; a presupposition that
resides at the heart of producing suicide statistics. It can be argued that such conditions
constitute the existence of suicide as prediscursive, and outside the discursive context(s)
through which the definition is in fact generated, including coronial inquests and agencies
producing statistics (Hallam, Hockey, and Howarth 1999). That is, regardless of the
possibility that suicide cannot be disentangled easily from fields of study that produce
knowledge of it, suicide is named as having an a priori status. The individual is assumed to
be the origin of the intention to die, a reference point for the activities of a largely
disembodied mind filled with agency. While the naming of suicide requires a body, that
body also appears as ontologically secure. It is a neutral and self-evident biological absent
presence that yields the evidence of suicide. Yet despite the necessity of the body, it is as if
suicide transcends the body. Put simply, suicide is all in the mind.
I want to begin problematising the manner in which suicide is named by highlighting
how suicide, as a death act, is constituted in relation to life. The materialisation of suicide as
individual and intentional is dependent upon the fact that someone at some stage was
alive, not dead; and, as a result, was able to take their life. This may seem patently obvious,
requiring little or no acknowledgement. It is significant to underscore this particular
element, however, since it shows that life and living speak to, or are enmeshed with,
52 KATRINA JAWORSKI

suicide. In a sense, for suicide to be hailed as suicide, it must be recognised as being in

relation to something else. 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. Suicide is already relational. When hailed as a
deliberate taking of one’s life, suicide then enters the social contexts through which its
actuality is given meaning.
How, then, does suicide seem to have its a priori status? Suicide gains this status
because it is materialised by masculinist conditions of knowing, which privilege the mind
over the material body (despite the need for the body). On the basis of such conditions,
suicide is able to be constituted as neutral. Its agency thus seems marked by autonomy,
sustained by a humanist conception of the subject precisely because it appears as if the
act of suicide is able to transcend the material conditions that constitute the act. If
anything else matters*and here this refers to gender*it is only after the deliberate
choice, and the results of such choice, have materialised. Gender seems to have nothing to
do with what resides at the ‘core’ of suicide, despite the possibility that it is already there
at the moment at which suicide’s ontology solidifies. Thus, suicide as an ‘individual’ act of
death is rendered as masculinist, regardless of whether it is men or women who engage in
the act. Perhaps this is a tactic of power that establishes gender as outside of suicide; one
that remains largely invisible. It cannot be named if it is to sustain its operations.
Yet cracks do appear because this masterful autonomy of suicide is strangely
superseded by its own relationality to life. Paradoxically, what puts suicide at a safe
distance from the contexts in which it occurs, and what works towards securing its
autonomy, requires something outside autonomy. The way in which suicide is constituted
is built upon a contradiction. Hence, masculinist conditioning of autonomy cannot sustain
itself completely, and the production of suicide as ontologically secure can potentially fail.
Perhaps this is a tactic of power that foils a contradiction upon which the autonomy of
suicide is built, where the appearance of autonomy is in fact false in that it may not signify
fully what it claims. This requires further interrogation in the future.
One way to ‘surface’ the masculinity which ‘norms’ suicide is to examine how its
enactment is understood. How can suicide be read as a performative? It is useful to think
of suicide as a form of ‘doing’. Suicide has a performative representation; a set of repeated
bodily acts. These produce the effect of an internalised intent: the ‘choice’ to commit
suicide. To draw heavily from Butler, suicide can be read as constituted by the very
expressions that are set out as its results. Across the surfaces of the suicided body suicide-
as-gendered is produced, marked by the choice of techniques, in tandem with reasons for
the ‘choice’. Something is interpreted as male or female, masculine or feminine, shaping
what then counts as violent or less violent, active or passive. This something might have
something to do with what a person might deem as ‘appropriate’ as a result of having
lived in particular cultural and social contexts. Some research suggests that if women use
less violent methods it is because they are socialised in contexts that encourage them to
be less violent, or are more culturally familiar with the use of pills (Range and Leach 1998).
Likewise, if men are more violent in their methods, it is because dominant forms of
masculinity are continually articulated as more violent and aggressive, as somehow more
able to damage the body or carry out the act (Dahlen and Canetto 2002; Denning et al.
2000). ‘Men will make a list of things they can do to sort out their crisis’, outlines Krieg, ‘[a]t
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). The existence of suicide as an act and an activity is
 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE 53

sustained through a nexus of discursively interpreted corporeal signs, configured by

gendered meanings and norms. When present, these materialise the deliberate taking of
one’s life.
My reading of suicide as performative should not be seen as an attempt to consider
self-destruction as a performance, originating from a subject who is the possessor of
intent. Rather, my intention is to consider the possibility of suicide as a reiterative and
citational practice, by which different norms concerning what it means to die through
suicide regulate the effects they name. In this sense, suicide can be read simultaneously as
a performative and as performativity, where different acts are incited by particular norms
that have the power to produce what they name. More specifically, these norms have the
power to compel the ‘citations’ through which suicide takes form. As one instance, how
does a man come to know he can succeed at killing himself? Is it because a particular
reason compels him so strongly? Is it because he knows or knew of someone else? Is it
because something cultural contours his version of being male and masculine that
somehow enables him to carry out the act?
Thinking of suicide through these questions allows us to consider the following
points. Firstly, it means that suicide is a ritualised, repeated set of (gendered) norms, yet
the workings of such norms are concealed behind intent. Secondly, suicide is citational,
made possible through whichever process of citing that which is identifiable within
existing historical conditions and patterns, and these are entwined with gender. When
suicide is made to appear self-evident, therefore, this is because the process of its
materialising as such draws on and reinitialises gendered norms and meanings that have
gained their power through prior actions of others. The process of gendering suicide may
happen in such a way that what is self-evident is constituted as if outside discourse, and
outside gender. What seems obvious, transparent and neutral is actually informed by
discursive operations of knowledge, dependent on masculinist norms to maintain
neutrality.
To explain my reading of suicide, let me consider ‘rituals’ that might condition
suicidal intent and outcome. For the sake of clarity, I will situate these rituals as a set of
interrelated ‘movie stills’. Bearing in mind that these rituals may or may not lead to
particular consequences, the taking of life may consist of: (a) thinking about suicide;
(b) imagining possible outcomes; (c) writing a note; (d) gaining access to specific means,
such as sharp instruments, a rope, a gun or pills; (e) estimating what will be lethal or
perhaps what is an ‘appropriate’ method; (f) planning the location of the act; (g)
performing the actual act, e.g. ingesting substances, pulling the trigger of a firearm; and
(h) awaiting the loss of consciousness if it has not immediately taken place, providing that
nothing else has intervened. These specific gestures produce death, however, by
deploying differently gendered meaningful actions. What it means to take one’s own
life, and what violence means, are each positioned alongside the selected gesture, one
which may or may not be informed by fear of disfigurement (as one instance). In other
words, suicide materialises 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 when they materialise.
Suicide as performative does not rest with the individual alone, because the way
that the body may be engaged with different acts and gestures exceeds the moment(s) in
which self-destruction is recognised. Whether someone lives or dies, different discursive
sites such as law, medicine or psy-knowledge interpret self-destructive acts on a broader
54 KATRINA JAWORSKI

level via practices such as legal verdicts, autopsy reports, psychiatric assessments and the
narratives of others (Lieberman 2003). Is it possible to engage with a particular method
without any prior knowledge of such a method; knowledge which may be shaped by
concepts generated in law, psychiatry or the media? For instance, while newsprint media
are limited in their coverage of suicide, something about the method, or the reasons for
suicide, is still published and therefore available for re-interpretation (Pirkis et al. 2007).
Gendered representations of the deaths of celebrities Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates
are some examples (Jaworski 2008). The point I am making is that if different acts, their
intentions and outcomes are interpreted as either serious or as seeking attention, this
interpretation itself is possible because of the reiterative and citational power of particular
gendered norms of violence, which are already invested with gender.
If suicide is performative through ritualised bodily acts and gestures that speak of
gender, it is also because they are repetitive. Through repetition, suicide can be seen to be
a re-enactment and a re-experience of meanings already established as signifying self-
destruction. Suicide is produced via re-enactment in that it cites what is already culturally
established as suicide, accessible to the individual engaging with the act (Jaworski 2005).
In this sense, the act of committing suicide itself is not novel; and neither are its intentions
original, because suicide has a discursive history that conditions the meaning of a
particular bodily gesture. One way of considering the performative repetitiveness of
gender in suicide is to look at Australian trends in methods of completed suicides as one
example. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (1994, 9) notes that during the period
between 1971 and 1998, the most common method was hanging, followed by firearms,
car exhaust 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 dominate more recently, since both
men and women tend to select hanging more frequently. However, where males engage
in car exhaust poisoning and firearms following hanging, drug overdoses and car exhaust
poisoning dominate female methods of suicide. Drug overdoses are least popular
amongst men, firearms with women*an echo from the past where more women
committed suicide through poisoning and more men committed suicide by employing
firearms (ABS 1994, 910; 2004, 13). While statistical representations themselves shift,
reading completed suicides against the backdrop of historical patterns shows that
something about the act is ritualised and repetitive enough to produce trends in which
gender plays a part.
Although statistics indicate that there is an already gendered pattern of suicide, this
does not explain how suicide is citational, and how each bodily act draws upon other
previously existing bodily acts including their gendered meanings. To read suicide as
citational, we need to consider particular facets 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 less
masculine or ‘unmasculine’. Surviving suicide is actually viewed as a sign of a ‘failed’ act
and so of ‘failed’ masculinity, one seemingly aligned with femininity (Canetto 19921993,
1995; White and Stillion 1988). Such patterns and themes show that the translation of
violence into enactments of suicide can be configured by meanings signifying masculinity
and femininity, shaping what is inscribed on bodies, and by bodies read as male and
 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE 55

female. This suggests that, in order to kill oneself, a person must draw upon previous
meanings of suicide that condition their act. In this way, meanings of gender become
available, when individuals select an action shaped by the en-gendered discursivity of
particular methods.
What, then, might we say of agency? At first glance, it seems that if suicide loses its
prediscursive status, the intent to suicide is also lost. Given some of the problematic
assumptions made about suicide, this could have serious implications for further silencing
the struggles of those acts already deemed as not quite legitimate and valid, and therefore
outside of what comes to count as serious. From the outset, however, the issue here has
not been whether there is agency or intent in suicide. The problem is to do with how
intent is interpreted as a result of a particular economy of meanings that conditions some
acts as full of intent and others as lacking intent, on the basis of what is interpreted as
visible and therefore serious bodily violence. The problem of how agency is interpreted
matters because suicide as self-evident and neutral is produced on an assumption that
agency, through the lens of intent, is obvious and transparent. Little attention is given to
the possibility that norms precede and exceed acts of suicide, and thus agency too might
be conditioned in ways that are not always obvious and transparent, without necessarily
lacking the intention to die.
If norms precede and exceed acts of suicide, it seems that to have agency in suicide
is to be caught in a paradox. Yet to argue in support of intent as completely autonomous
is to ignore that the freedom to do something also depends on social norms. These
condition, as well as limit, human action on the basis of what social and cultural contexts
offer. Perhaps it might be more useful, then, to consider that suicide as an individual act
cannot be divorced from the specific contexts and the norms that operate in such contexts. In
other words, agency in suicide is relational. This does not mean that a person cannot
engage with the act, 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 via repetitive conditions. If intent is understood as self-evident and neutral, this
may indeed be an effect of power working to conceal gender as one epistemological
condition of knowing suicide. For as, Butler maintains, ‘[t]he power of discourse to
materialize its effects is thus constant with the power of discourse to circumscribe the
domain of intelligibility’ (1993, 187). Hailing something as male and female, masculine and
feminine, active and passive, may not be a matter of describing what something is but
rather is an effect of power that works towards concealing the operations of norms that
privilege experiences of suicide that meet the criteria of masculinist standards of intent.

Questioning the Passive and the Active in Suicide

There are a number of presuppositions with regard to understanding some acts of
suicide as ‘serious’ and others as ‘attention-seeking’. What is deemed as serious is
associated commonly with the male body and masculinity, whereas what is attention-
seeking is repeatedly attributed to the female body and femininity, fused with methods
such as firearms or drug overdoses. Passive methods such as drug overdoses lack a certain
amount of bodily ‘mess’ because they do not openly dismember the body. It is the lack of
visible violence that is most likely to be seen as passive and non-aggressive, as seeking
attention in order to manipulate, to cry out for help with something else other than
suicide in mind. This is in stark contrast to active methods such as guns, with their use
56 KATRINA JAWORSKI

seen as decisive, violent, aggressive and masculine. Intentions to die are serious because
the outcomes are most 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 and
horrifying, no longer contained but open and leaky.
But what if what is visually ‘messy’ can in some way be about attention as well? For
example, in terms of the gunshot wound, bodily disfiguration represents some kind 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 generate some recognition of the
person. Thus, at the moment of disfigurement, gendered meanings that surround ‘active’
suicides become realigned with ‘passive’ suicides. Attention, as something compulsively
inherent in passive methods, may also be already present in active methods.
The distinction between the two is not entirely clear. Some degree of ambiguity persists.
This asks us to reconsider what it means to interpret bodily inscriptions. Can their
interpretation ever be taken as obvious and self-evident, particularly when read 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? What becomes silenced in deaths resulting from methods that indeed are visually
‘messy’? What and whose corporeal vulnerabilities are shielded and exposed? And for the
sake of maintaining what, and in whose interest?
The possible collapse of the distinction between active and passive suicide indicates
that the actual terms active and passive are implicated in each other. This, however, does
not seem to apply to both of the terms equally. In a sense, passivity in suicide comes to
occupy the position of the ‘other’, bound to femininity and the body. Paradoxically, active
acts sustain the effect of transcending the body, regardless of the possibility that it might
be otherwise. Such an effect appears very necessary in order to sustain activity as
masculine and masculinist, embodied by the disembodied mind, with the body acting as
its absent present medium. For as Butler writes:

[m]asculine 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)

The binary organisation of suicide as active and passive, as masculine and feminine,
indicates the workings of the masculinist subject position, disavowing the relationality of
gender. This leads me to ask the following questions. What if the supposedly passive
methods are, in fact, disturbances in the overall masculinised framework producing suicide
as masculinist? What if the intelligibility of activity as masculine is possible only because
others are rendered more feminine and, simultaneously, as abject and as lacking the will to
die by suicide? What if its conceptual success is possible only because something is
constituted as outside its clearly demarcated boundary? If passive acts are deemed as
failures, are they failures because the outcome is not ‘completed’, or does their ‘failure’
actually reveal the reiteration of forcible gender norms inscribed through the body, norms
that are required to sustain the livelihood of the masculinist subject position in suicide? Is
passivity, then, in some way a limit of the discursive workings of gender? Moreover, what if
failure in this instance indicates that what is displayed on the surface of the body may not
 THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE 57

always be self-evident? By posing the last question in particular my intent is to beckon us

to recognise that perhaps passive acts may be just as serious as active acts, especially
when it means hearing someone who wants and needs to be heard, and in the end, who
wants to live.
The profound and forcible reiteration of gender norms in the gendering of suicide
can also be examined in relation to my previous discussion about men surviving suicide.
As Canetto’s (1995) research indicates, surviving suicide for some men is interpreted as
‘unmasculine’. Selecting firearms is considered as something not only more masculine but
also as something that will prevent the reading of (failed) suicide as lacking masculinity. It
seems, then, that surviving suicide, at least for some men, is unbearable because it risks
suffering an almost unthinkable loss. This fear of losing one’s masculinity, of being
emasculated through survival, is related to being read as feminine, which in turn becomes
a sign of abjection. On some level, then, death appears to be preferred over life, not only
because it might bring resolution or relief to unhappy circumstances but because it will
not dissolve the normative performance of the male gender. In Butler’s terms, there is a
‘threat of a collapse of the masculine into the abjected feminine’ (1993, 205). This abjected
feminine, it seems, erodes agency in relation to surviving acts of suicide. In this instance,
something about masculinity is enmeshed with suicide, a masculinist form of punishment
instituted within gender norms that secure ‘the conditions of intelligibility by which life
becomes livable, by which life also becomes condemned and foreclosed’ (Butler 2000, 23).
In this sense, survival appears to be rendered as feminine and death as masculine, the stuff
‘real’ men know how to do since, as Secomb evaluates, ‘socio-historically it is men who
tend to stake their lives’ (1999, 122). Even though this staking appears seemingly neutral,
nevertheless it can be read as masculinist, for it seems that survival also threatens the
transcendent active autonomy of intent, restricting the reading of suicide as relational and
as already caught within, and not outside of, life and living.

Conclusion
By strategically deploying Butler’s notion of performativity as a thinking practice,
I have sought to open up the terms through which gender resides in the constitution of
suicide. It turns out that gender cannot be recast outside the boundaries of what comes to
count as suicide. It turns out that what is deemed self-evident and neutral in suicide is
implicated in social norms saturated by gender on a relational basis. The emphasis on
suicide as relational, however, has not been about trying to determine whether suicide
exists a priori. Instead, my aim has been to draw attention to the need to recognise the
antecedents and probabilities that discursively configure suicide’s ontological security
through which its activities are privileged as masculine and masculinist. Still further, my
aim has been to show how such antecedents are an effect of power, seeking to mask its
operations by claiming suicide as self-evident and neutral. I have argued that such an
installation actually fails to sustain its own epistemological conditioning, revealing rifts
that expose rather than conceal the manner through which gender norms suicide. The
exposure of such rifts has been crucial because they have offered an opportunity to raise
questions and to problematise the production of suicide as masculine and masculinist.
Recognising the intelligibility of suicide as relational is crucial for interrogating the
interpretation of some acts as serious, valid and legitimate and others as abject scripts that
fail to be serious enough. This is because questioning the manner intent is hailed is
58 KATRINA JAWORSKI

important. It is important not only for honouring the struggles of those who die. It is also
essential for those who, while they conclude that life is not worth living, in the end
continue living and, paradoxically, discover something about life by engaging with death.
It also holds meaning for those who engage with suicide over and over again, only to have
their struggles finally gain some recognition when it is already too late. As a result, how
gender comes to matter in suicide should be a site of permanent contestation because,
without it, some experiences and their divergent diversity will remain silenced for ever.

NOTES
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.
1. I have already engaged with reading suicide as performative elsewhere (see Jaworski
2003). 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).
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).
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).

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Katrina Jaworski has recently completed her doctoral dissertation, ‘The Gender of Suicide’,
at the University of South Australia, for which she was awarded the Ian Davey
Research Thesis Prize for the most outstanding thesis in 2007. She currently works as
a Research Fellow at the School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia. Her
primary research interests include suicide in particular, and death and dying more
broadly, as well as gender, bodies and health. To date she has published in a number
of books and journals. A chapter on suicide, gender and medical knowledge in
Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work (Ashgate, forthcoming/
December 2009) is one recent example.