The Gender of Suicide

Knowledge Production, Theory and Suicidology

Katrina Jaworski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409441410
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317030812
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on diverse theoretical and textual sources, The Gender of Suicide presents a critical study of the ways in which contemporary society understands suicide, exploring suicide across a range of key expert bodies of knowledge. With attention to Durkheim's founding study of suicide, as well as discourses within sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, this book demonstrates that suicide cannot be understood without understanding how gender shapes it, and without giving explicit attention to the manner in which prevailing claims privilege some interpretations and experiences of suicide above others. Revealing the masculine and masculinist terms in which our current knowledge of suicide is constructed, The Gender of Suicide, explores the relationship between our grasp of suicide and problematic ideas connected to the body, agency, violence, race and sexuality. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and social theorists, as well as scholars of cultural studies, philosophy, law and psychology.

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 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 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 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.

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: 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 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 sho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Understanding Suicide through Gender: An Introduction
• 1 The Construction of Knowledge of Suicide and Gender in Suicidology
• 2 Performative Knowledge: Re-reading Gender in Suicide
• 3 Durkheim’s Social Recognition of Gender in Suicide
• 4 ‘Fact-Finding Exercises’: The Coroner, Suicide and Gender
• 5 ‘What it Means to See’: Reading Gender in Medical Examinations of Suicide
• 6 The Visibility of Difference: Gender and Suicide in Psy-Knowledge
• 7 Intriguing Events, Spectacular Deaths
• What Now? Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index