Hi all! After a weeks break, the Gender, Media and Cultural Studies Seminar Series returns on Wednesday, August 27, 3-4pm, in Arts 1.33 (CHE Seminar Room), and will be presented by Associate Professor Rob Cover. Suicides of the Marginalised - Asylum Seekers, Indigenous and Queer Youth: Cultural Approaches to Relationality, Mobility and Liveable Lives Suicides among marginalised groups are one of the few occasions in which self-harm and suicide are framed as having cultural, social, environmental, historical or structural causes. Narratives of suicide causality are overwhelmingly dominated in suicidology, psychology and public discourse by frames in which suicide is the extension of genetic and mental disorders, individualised psychic pain and internal, individualised pathologies. Recent developments in cultural approaches to suicide challenge medico-psychological models that individualise suicide by pointing to social and environment causes. In public sphere discourse, suicides of ‘marginalised’ groups such as asylum seekers, Indigenous persons and queer/LGBT youth are ‘authorised’ to be discussed from social perspectives, informing opportunities to re-think suicidality, identity and liveability. This paper examines some of the ways in which suicides of marginalised persons are articulated through frameworks of social causality with the aim of demonstrating how cultural approaches to relationality, aspiration and mobility can provide frameworks for thinking through the distinctions and inequitable distribution of belonging, identity and futurity as conditions for liveability. It is argued that suicide can be understood in the context of the performativity of a gap between self-perception of oneself as an aspiring and aspiration subject and the self-perception of one’s capacity or incapacity to be included in community by beginning to re-focus suicidality on a more complex sociality that is figured through mobility and relationality. It is by turning away from medico-psychiatric models’ monolithic depiction of individualised intervention towards an alternative politics of acceptance or hospitality as the means by which to produce the kinds of socialities, relationalities and liveabilities that foster resilience against suicidality. As always, be there or be square!
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 01:03:49 +0000
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