Introduction

Suicide is an issue of immense public concern, as well as private torment, in contemporary Australia. Its prevalence has led to a growth in research and prevention initiatives with a number of social aspects having been identified as important, including age patterns, geographical location, marital status, race and, more recently, sexuality.2 However, despite these efforts, suicide is still curiously and ambivalently positioned in terms of gender. On the one hand, suicide is represented as a gender-neutral tragedy afflicting social groups in a series of cultural conditions. On the other hand, suicide is represented as a highly gendered activity with, for instance, methods of suicide being typified as masculine and feminine, the former being described as aggressive, the latter as passive.3 This contradictory and conflicted situation not only reinscribes the use of the gender binary, but also reinstates normative understandings of gendered violence. Such representations and commonsense understandings eschew the complex workings of gender and suicide, and in particular suicide as masculinised discourse.

In an attempt to articulate the problematic position of gender in self-destruction, what does the term 'masculinised' denote? Referred to as the 'Man of Reason' in western philosophy, this concept describes an exclusively gendered subject defined as male, invisible, rational, abstract, universal and objective, transcending time, nature and, in particular, the body.4 A classic example of suicide as a masculinised discourse in sociology is Emile Durkheim's Suicide: A Study in Sociology.5 Briefly, Durkheim employs masculine generic language to articulate suicide as a scientifically studied social phenomenon. This is tied to his use of the 'individual', which historically refers to men alone.6 Durkheim uses normative values to define suicide and proceeds to inscribe them upon women's and men's acts of self-destruction.7 In addition, Durkheim also erases female data half way through his work and critically evaluates those who pursued equality during his era, suggesting that instead, the traditional segregation of labour should protect the sexes from suicide.8 Although Durkheim acknowledges that marriage does not positively contribute towards women's suicide rates, he nevertheless concludes that something must be sacrificed for the good of society.9 In this case, men benefit from being married rather than divorced, hence women's needs are put aside, given that men are highly civilised social and moral beings as opposed to the rudimentary and biological passions of women and their bodies.10

Over one hundred years later, masculine ways of understanding the significance of gender in suicide persist. For example, some sociologists have been known to suggest that it is the socialisation of women into domestic roles that protects them from 'successful' suicide, even though the private sphere quite often tends to be the most dangerous place for women.11 In evaluating Durkheim's contribution to sociology, a recent edited collection entitled Durkheim's Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate also notes that there is a persistent silence about gender.12 So, in this instance at least, it seems that suicide is either gender-neutral and invisible or gendered in normative ways.

Backgrounded against the effects of Durkheim's interpretation of suicide, Judith Butler's work on performativity opens up a theoretical possibility for representing self-destruction. In an attempt to conceptualise suicide differently, this paper begins by briefly sketching Butler's theorisation of this concept and explores some of the critical insights generated as a result of her work that are of specific importance to an analysis of self-destruction. Following this, the paper then examines the ways in which suicide can be theorised as performative in the Australian context. Finally, and of equal importance, the paper explores how performativity can be used to subvert the masculinised construction of suicide. While proposing the adoption of another conceptual framework, this paper also considers the strategic usefulness of challenging normative ways of theorising suicide and gender.

Butler Theorises Performativity

In order to speak of suicide as performative, it is necessary to examine influence of Michel Foucault on Butler's work. Although Foucault's thought does not provide the entire basis for Butler's arguments, the concept of discourse is quite evident in performativity. According to Foucault, discourse refers to 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak'.13 The formation of the object, in this case suicide, stems from an interrelated connection between various institutions concerned with self-destruction and the individual at the centre of such attention. The legal, medical, psychiatric, social and statistical institutions and media bodies all influence how suicide is conceptualised and practiced in everyday contexts. Therefore, none of these institutions is separate from the act, but are part of interpreting and constituting its significance on a macro and micro level. For example, is it possible to think of suicide outside of the psychiatric explanation of depression? This way of understanding discourse is attributed to Foucault's concept of power as a positive and productive force of relations. Discourses do not act separately but, as Foucault suggests, they clash or complement one another.14 Discourses are also regulatory and repetitive where one practice reproduces another, although this may not necessarily be in a fixed pattern or exist in isolation.15 This, then, suggests that suicide can be analysed with the inclusion of various conditions that not only speak of the existence of death but also of its gendered position.

In the presence of discourse, how does Butler theorise performativity? In the first chapter of Gender Trouble (GT), Butler critiques the compulsory construction of heterosexuality by focusing on the traditional sex/gender dichotomy where sex is biological and gender is cultural.16 In order to do this, Butler examines the notion of the body as prediscursive. This situates the sexed body as possessing ontological priority, meaning that it exists prior to gender and outside of culture. Situated within the liberal humanist concept of subjectivity, the subject is assumed to possess internalised attributes, which are then expressed through the body.17 In other words, the body is a vessel or a medium upon which culture can do its work.18 Butler scrutinises this issue in Simone de Beauvoir's statement, which declares that rather than being born a woman, one becomes one under the cultural compulsion to take on gender.19 Clearly, this compulsion does not stem from the sexed body. Instead, de Beauvoir insists that the body is a 'situation'.20 However, Butler contends that if the body is a 'situation', meaning that it is always under construction, then it is impossible to theorise the sexed body outside of culture.21 This is because the body is tied to gender in all situations and cannot meaningfully exist prior to gender.22 Sex cannot exist outside of discourse because it is already part of discourse.23 In some sense then, sex has been gender all along.24

Butler argues that gender must be seen as a mechanism through which sexed bodies are produced.25 That is, Butler is interested in how sex, through the apparatus of gender, is a discursive effect in such a way 'as to present itself precisely not as effect but as the cause of gender'.26 In GT, Butler qualifies this position by reconceptualising gender as performative, where it is 'always doing', although this does not indicate a subject who pre-exists the act.27 Put simply, the performative subject is not prediscursive but already part of the act or gesture. By this notion of 'doing', Butler contends that 'gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being'.28 Therefore, 'such acts, gestures, enactments … are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means'.29

This performativity, as acts and bodily gestures, takes place on the surface of the body where the principles of normative heterosexuality only partially apply, producing the subject as prediscursive. These acts can be seen as performative in the sense that the internal essence they claim to express is, in fact, the product of normative values invested upon the surface of the body. Hence performativity is not about the acts and gestures themselves, but about practices through which the acts and gestures form the objects of which they speak.

Butler stresses that it is important to understand performativity as distinct from performance.30 In Bodies That Matter (BTM), Butler attempts to address some of the misconceptions that arose from GT by distinguishing performance from performativity.31 She insists that gender is not about getting up in the morning and selecting it like a piece of clothing to be worn throughout the day. Such a notion would indicate the presence of a liberal subject who decides on their gender, without realising that gender has already been decided for them.32 In this work, Butler's focus shifts towards Derrida's reformulation of Austin's speech-act theory, with performativity re-worked 'as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names'.33 This means that, through reiteration, gendered practices repeat ritualised sets of norms to the point where they conceal the norms that are performed.34 In addition, performativity is citational, the act of repeating something that is already identifiable or coded.35 Gender is continually remade through repetition, echoing already existing discourses, although this is not necessarily a process of exact replication.36 Unlike her previous work, Butler argues that performative acts are also forms of 'authoritative speech', where utterances through their repetition perform certain actions that exercise power.37 Gender is not a matter of choice because, through reiteration, actions 'precede, constrain, and exceed the performer'.38 But what significance do Butler's theories of performativity have in relation to questions of gender in suicide? While the specific connections are made apparent in later sections of this paper, for now it can be said that Butler's work is crucial in discussing the ontology of the subject: performativity undermines the correspondence between the interior and exterior of the body. For example, the performance of drag plays with the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and what is being performed. This is because the supposed 'natural' identity of the performer does not necessarily match the signs displayed in the performance.39 By disrupting this connection, drag shows that gender is created through repeated social performances and that these performances are produced under the constraint to sustain the illusion of the body prior to discourse. By producing this disruption, performativity challenges the ontology of the body since through reiteration and citation, 'discourse has a history that not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages'.40 This questions the normativity of the prediscursive subject by showing that gender is a regularised and constrained compulsory practice made possible through already accepted social norms.41 Therefore, the strategic usefulness of this framework lies in its ability to interrogate and dismantle discourses that are legitimately manufactured to appear as natural forms of practice. In doing so, performativity reveals an undeniable failure to sustain what appears as a naturalised ideal.42 If such failure indicates lack of stability then it is possible to see gender as a multiple and temporal discursive practice within different cultural contexts.

The Problematic Question of Agency

Although Butler's work in GT and BTM has been positively received in many theoretical circles, her contributions have also been criticised. For example, Hughes and Witz argue that Butler's theorisation denies the materiality of the body, whereas Hull questions whether Butler leaves any room for different levels of materiality.43 Critics such as Burkitt and Kerin suggest that Butler limits performativity to the horizon of language, where all matter is reduced to its linguistic and textual status.44 However, one of the most hotly debated aspects is the question of agency, since Butler critiques the humanist notion of the subject. Given its significant implications for analyses of suicide, the following brief discussion examines some of the major critical responses to 'agency' in Butler's work.

For feminist theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Butler's notion of performativity loses agency.45 The idea that there is no doer behind the deed is highly deterministic, with no room for conscious reflexivity or negotiation.46 However, while some may argue that performativity loses agency, Butler believes that her work gains it.47 For Butler, the problem is not so much with the presence of agency but, rather, how it is theorised. Traditionally, the subject is seen as the sovereign origin of intentions. For Butler, however, this intention does not stem from the subject but is the effect of socio-historical conditions.48 That is, when specific practices engage other practices or actions, they do so not because they represent the power of individual intentions, but because they draw upon and reinitialise meanings that have gained their effect through prior reiterative actions.49 But how is this possible? Butler suggests that it is impossible to sustain heterosexual ideals of identity, which means that at some point this will lead to disturbances and instabilities.50 This, in turn, creates spaces where meanings can be questioned and rearticulated. Consequently, agency is located in the very moment of the practice that is brought into being.

Reading Suicide through Performativity

In Australia, one of the most accepted ways of understanding suicide is through the definition provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which stems from legal frameworks.51 The ABS states that suicide is 'the act of voluntarily and deliberately taking one's own life'.52 This suggests that suicide is defined through the act, or that the act defines what is recognised as self-inflicted behaviour. Thus the individual alone chooses to carry out the act, which is further emphasised by the word 'taking' of life. This has two implications. First, suicide requires a vehicle. This vehicle is the body that constitutes the meaning of 'life'.53 The body must be there in order for suicide to happen, in order to provide a point of origin where one can deduce its existence and validity of intentions. Second, in determining the degree of intent, suicide as a matter of choice is constructed as prediscursive. That is, the intent to die interprets whether the act is 'serious' or a 'cry for attention' or, as articulated in research, 'non-passive' and 'passive'. Non-passive is associated with methods such as firearms, which, based on the degree of damage to the body, are considered as a serious intent to die. Passive methods, such as drug overdoses, are seen as attention-seeking exercises given that there is a high chance that a person will survive.54 Most recently, some literature has located such methods under the banner of self-harm rather than suicide.55 In defining suicide within such dichotomies, it can be argued that suicide is construed as 'self-evident', placing the body outside of discourse. This conceals the possibility that notions of choice and intent are already interpreted by normative gendered assumptions that stem from the institutional compulsion to look for the signs on the body. For example, it could be said that an interpretation of intent and choice is produced through medical practices such as autopsy. These can be seen as compulsive on the basis that without one, it is impossible to begin investigating suicide in Australia.56 Autopsies are incorporated into other practices such as coronial inquiries providing the basis upon which the body is used to determine suicide. In a sense, it seems that the body is an important element in sustaining the prediscursive position of intent through the focus on biological functionality, inertness and lack of vitality.57 Significantly, in these practices suicide is lodged in the body to locate it outside culture, outside gender. In reconceptualising suicide through the notion of performativity, it may be useful to consider that suicide is performative because it is always 'doing', whether this doing is performed by the individual or other institutional bodies of power, such as law, psychiatry, media and so on. Suicide represents a set of repeated bodily acts and gestures that, sustained over time, produce the effect of internal meaning of intent and choice to commit suicide. This takes place across the visceral surface of the body where suicide-as-gendered is simultaneously produced and concealed through different devices, such as normative meanings of gender binaries like male/female, masculine/feminine and non-passive/passive. Thus, suicide is performative in the sense that its production is sustained through specific discursive interpretations of corporeal signs and practices of power. Suicide becomes a temporal act, as 'doing' suggests that it is a practice always in the making.

This, however, should not be interpreted as a performance stemming from the liberal subject as the origin of choice and intent. Suicide is not a single or deliberate act; it is a reiterative and citational practice by which different discourses produce the effects they name. First, this means that suicide is a ritualised repeated set of norms to the point where the workings of such norms are concealed behind the cloak of intent as 'self-evident' on the body. Second, suicide is citational, as the act repeats something that is already identifiable through historical conditions. That is, in part, it is continually remade through gendered repetitions, echoing actions already in existence. This is a result of the act drawing upon and reinitialising meanings that have gained power through prior reiterative actions. This not only offers a possibility to view the act as multiple, but also a potential theoretical space within which one can expose and dismantle governing normative assumptions about the body, gender and self-destruction. This reconceptualisation becomes a site of critical intervention in the discursive production of gender in suicide.

How then is suicide performative? From an individual perspective, suicide is an act on the basis of various 'rituals'. These rituals may consist of:

a) thinking about suicide;
b) imagining what may or may not happen as a result;
c) writing a note;
d) gaining access to means, such as pills or a gun;
e) planning where this should take place;
f) estimating what will be lethal in methods such as overdoses;
g) ingesting the actual substance or pulling the gun's trigger; and
h) waiting for unconsciousness to take place if it has not already taken place.

Without these rituals, suicide cannot be named as performative because it is the specific gestures that produce self-death. It is through these acts that suicide is inscribed upon the body, whether on its surface through wounds, punctures, or markings, or perhaps through notes, legal verdicts, psychological reports and/or the narratives of others. Consequently, suicide is relational and embedded in meanings that interpret the body as well as its state once the markings are inscribed. This production is highly gendered, because meanings differ according to whether the body is female or male; the body of one who commits suicide is a site of gendered inscriptions.58

To expand, these acts or gestures are also performative because they are repetitive. Through repetition, suicide can be seen to be a re-enactment and a re-experience of meanings already established to signify self-destruction. Suicide is produced and reinforced via re-enactment because it cites what is already culturally established as gendered meanings of suicide. These reiterations must take place over time and must echo previous repetitions. In this sense, the act of committing suicide is not novel, nor are the intentions original, because suicide has a discursive history of repetition that conditions what takes place within a particular gesture. One way of examining this is to look at Australian trends in methods of completed suicide. Suicide takes place in a ritualised fashion leading to patterns made evident through the institutional production of statistics. In this instance, during the period between 1979 and 1998, the most common method was hanging (25%), followed by firearms (23%), car exhaust (19%) and substance overdoses (18%).59 The trends, however, change and fluctuate over time. The ABS reports that while firearm use was at its peak during late 1970s, hanging appears to have taken this position over twenty years later.60 In regards to gender, there are also unmistakable patterns. While hanging is equally popular with both sexes, more women than men committed suicide through poisoning; however, more men committed suicide by employing firearms.61 Clearly, completed suicide is ritualised through historical patterns that are also gendered.

While statistics may generally indicate that there is an institutionally produced pattern in which suicide is a repeated ritual on an individual and collective scale, this does not explain how suicide is citational where each act draws upon other previously existing meanings. However, some possibilities can be considered. First, there is a large amount of research that maintains that suicide differs on the basis of gender. For example, some studies report that women tend to avoid violent methods, such as guns, because these physically disfigure the exterior of the face, chest and abdomen.62 In contrast, most male suicides are considered violent because of an apparent lack of concern about disfigurement, interpreted on the basis of rates of firearm usage. This points to certain meanings about gender that are linked to the way femininities and masculinities are articulated and that these meanings somehow translate the way individuals view the violence that becomes inscribed upon their bodies. In other words, individuals kill themselves because they draw upon meanings that condition the act in the given moment. So, if a woman is afraid of the sight of blood and perhaps considers that it is inappropriate to be violent in particular ways, it is more likely that she may re-enact a method that does not directly tamper with the surface of the body. Suicide is produced as gendered because the inscriptions are already interpreted through gender.

But suicide as performative does not end here. Whether an individual is successful or not, in most cases they are more likely to engage with an institution that continues to reinitialise meanings about gender, whether this be the hospital or the coroner's court. In this sense, one could argue that suicide is never a completed act, whether successful or not, because it continues to be interpreted and reinterpreted past the individual. For example, statistics show that there is always a reference point, a point that brings suicide out to the surface repeatedly. This reference point reinitialises meanings about gender where, for example, female suicide is referred to as emotionally passive on the basis of lower rates supposedly produced through 'non-violent' methods. In instances such as coronial inquiries, suicide continues to be reinitialised and cited when a coroner releases findings. For example: 'I, the said Coroner, do find that [name], aged 26 years, late of [address], died at the Lyell McEwin Hospital on the 30th day of June, 1997 as a result of neck compression due to hanging'.63 Linking this to Butler's work in BTM, the coroner authorises and installs suicide because he or she cites the law that is applied to name which act constitutes self-destruction.64 The act of citing the law is also 'doing', where suicide is not directly named but deferred through reference to the state of the biological body.

If suicide can be theorised as performative, what happens to agency? As discussed earlier, agency is translated through individual choice that forms the basis upon which intent is interpreted. Initially, one could ask: if the subject is not the wilful source of choice, then how can we have suicide? The problem, however, is not so much with the presence of agency but with how it is interpreted. It can be argued that in suicide intent does not necessarily stem from the subject as the origin of the act. Rather, the intent to suicide is the effect of socio-historical conditions and constraints. Put simply, one practice of suicide engages another because the act draws upon meanings that have already gained their significance through previous actions. If, for example, suicide is still considered taboo, it is not because the individual is solely aware that it is a taboo but because certain practices have been installed to reproduce it as such. Early accounts of responses towards suicide show that as a forbidden act, it was instilled through public bodily punishment of the deceased body.65 What this means is that the individual is not the sole origin of intent, as the intention to choose is relational and generated through past and present practices. Agency is possible at the very moment of citing a gesture (for example, swallowing tablets or slashing wrists); the act reiterates previous meanings, such as the degree of bodily disfigurement interpreted through gendered meanings or the images of what might happen after (for example, how the corpse will look at the funeral and how people will respond). Or, in the case of coroners, the power of citing suicide does not derive from their own authority or intention to name but, instead, from the citation of inquest law which produces the intention to name suicide.

So can suicide as performative be subversive? Can it be used as a strategy to dispel normative assumptions that govern the interpretation of intent? This paper contends that this suggestion is plausible on the basis of the current meanings of gender incorporated into the interpretations of methods of suicide. These meanings consist of two binary concepts: passive and non-passive. To reiterate, passive consists of drug overdoses or other methods that limit the possibility of survival, and, in most cases, leave minimum bodily 'mess' because they do not openly dismember the body. These are often associated with women and femininity in particular, reflecting supposedly non-aggressive and non-violent meanings. Passivity is viewed as manipulative — seeking attention and crying out for help. Non-passivity is articulated through firearms; a method that clearly involves serious intent, not only because of the masculinised aggression and violence of the act, but also on the basis of what is displayed on the surface of the body. Given that this comes with a history of viewing suicide as masculinised behaviour, such assumptions and their mechanisms of productions are left unchallenged.66

Considering the surface of the body as a site of performativity is potentially subversive, since the notion of seeking 'attention' through the gesture of swallowing tablets is also displayed in non-passive methods. This attention is portrayed through what is inscribed upon the body. For example, in terms of a gunshot wound, bodily disfiguration represents attention through its physical visibility. Bodily disfiguration generates fluids such as blood, which require attention, not only because the 'mess' needs to be cleaned up from the scene but because the body must also, somehow, be arranged in order to generate some recognition of the person. Thus, at the moment of disfigurement, gendered meanings which surround violent suicide are suddenly aligned alongside so-called 'passive' suicides. Although present in different ways, 'attention' nevertheless blurs the distinction sustained by binary meanings.

Despite this, such possibilities remain hidden under the rubric of passivity and non-passivity. Absences of certain meanings on the body are used to separate suicide into problematic gendered categories, particularly if the individual survives. But if suicide is indeed performative, does it necessarily mean that the surface will always represent the interior? Is it possible that methods such as overdoses are more serious than previously thought? What is and is not inscribed on the surface of the body in suicide may, in fact, be an illusion obscuring what is inside — acts, which supposedly demonstrate passivity, may be just as serious as non-passivity, particularly if they go unrecognised.

This leads me to a number of questions, such as, what if the supposedly passive methods are in fact disturbances in the overall masculinised framework of suicide? And, since there is a persistence to locate suicide within the binary grouping of feminine and masculine, is it possible that this tendency reveals regulatory ideals that govern the way gender is articulated in suicide? For example, why is it that dominant discourses such as psychiatry, law and sociology consistently stick to this understanding of suicide? Perhaps methods such as overdosing may actually challenge existing categorisations of suicide. Whether such a challenge is successful or not, such methods may in fact be spaces of resistance. However, this is a question that lies beyond the scope of this paper.

Conclusion

In exploring the problematic position of gender in suicide in Australia, this paper represents a critical engagement with the discursive production of self-destruction as masculinised discourse. While reconceptualising suicide as performative could be seen as an ambitious task, one still has to ask why it is important to scrutinise the way in which self-death is addressed. In other words, why does suicide as performative matter? Initially it could be suggested that performativity is significant because it offers an opportunity to depart from the Durkheimian biased treatment of gender in suicide. More importantly, however, Butler's work offers a conceptual space where it is possible to interrogate the ways in which normative meanings of gender are reinscribed within a dichotomous framework of understanding suicide. This refers to the construction of suicide as passive and non-passive, where the use of the gender binary plays an important part in interpreting the validity and seriousness of suicidal intent. In speaking about suicide as representing a set of repeated bodily acts, gestures and rituals that reiterate and cite different meanings inscribed upon the visceral surface of the body, it seems that the very meanings incorporated into conceptualising self-destruction fail to sustain the economy of dichotomous distinctions. Yet, despite the paradox revealed through the notion of 'attention', it is perplexing to see that dominant discourses persist in locating suicide in this framework. Understanding suicide as performative is therefore a crucial reconceptualisation, because it demonstrates a necessity to question and examine homogenous practices of discourse and their normative uses of gender.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual TASA 2001 Conference (The Australian Sociological Association), University of Sydney, 13-15th December 2001. I would like to thank Dr Vicki Crowley for her invaluable comments, suggestions and editorial advice.
2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 'Suicide in Australia' in J Healey (ed), Suicide and Self Harm, Issues in Society Volume 166, The Spinney Press, 2002, p 2.
3 M Boor, 'Methods of suicide and implications for suicide prevention', Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol 37, no 1, 1981, pp 70-75; S S Canetto, 'She died for love and he for glory: Gender myths of suicidal behaviour', Omega, vol 26, no 1, 1992-93, pp 1-17; K Hawton, 'Sex and suicide: Gender differences in suicidal behaviour', British Journal of Psychiatry, vol 177, 2000, pp 484-5.
4 S J Hekman, Gender and Knowledge: Elements of Postmodern Feminism, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp 33-4; G Lloyd, The Man of Reason: 'Male' and 'Female' in Western Philosophy, Methuen & Co, London, 1884, p ix.
5 E Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951.
6 J WScott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p 7.
7 J M Lehmann, Durkheim and Women, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1994, pp 36-38.
8 Durkheim, op cit, p 386.
9 ibid, p 272.
10 ibid, p 215.
11 M Stewart, 'Gender and suicide prevention', Let's Live: Suicide Prevention Australia Newsletter, vol 4, no 3, 1996, p 13.
12 W S F Pickering and G Walford (eds), Durkheim's Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate, Routledge, New York, 2000.
13 M Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistok Publications Limited, London, 1972, p 49.
14 M Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, Penguin Books, London, 1978, pp 101-2.
15 Foucault, op cit, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 47.
16 J Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, pp 1-34. Referring in part to the work of Adrienne Rich, compulsory heterosexuality indicates a normative form of sexuality socially and politically articulated to explain the connection between the stable body and its culturally binary expression of gender (p 151).
17 J Butler, 'Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault' in S Benhabib and D Cornell (eds), Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp 128-42; S K White, 'As the world turns: Ontology and politics in Judith Butler', Polity, vol 22, no 2, 1999, pp 155-77.
18 Butler, op cit, Gender Trouble, pp 8, 20.
19 S de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p 301. 20 ibid, p 38.
21 Butler, op cit, Gender Trouble, p 8.
22 ibid.
23 Laclau and Mouffe concentrate on this issue arguing that whether or not subjects exist outside of discourse, they are already constituted within discourse. E Laclau and C Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London, 1985, p 108.
24 Butler op cit, Gender Trouble, pp 7-8.
25 ibid.
26 S Standford, 'Contingent ontologies: Sex, gender and 'woman' in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler', Radical Philosophy, vol 97, 1999, p 20.
27 Butler, op cit, Gender Trouble, p 25.
28 ibid, p 33.
29 ibid, p 136.
30 J Butler, 'Gender as performance: An interview with Judith Butler', (Interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal), Radical Philosophy, vol 67, 1994, p 33.
31 J Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', Routledge, New York, 1993, p x.
32 ibid.
33 ibid, p 2.
34 ibid, p 12.
35 ibid, p 13.
36 ibid, pp 226-7.
37 ibid, p 227.
38 ibid, p 234.
39 L Nelson, 'Bodies (and spaces) do matter: The limits of performativity', Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol 6, no 4, 1999, pp 331-53. In the context of drag kings, Judith Halberstam speaks of the notion as 'a female (usually) who dresses up in recognisably male costume and performs theatrically in that costume'. See J Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998, p 232.
40 Butler, op cit, Bodies That Matter, p 227.
41 ibid, p 231.
42 ibid, p 237.
43 A Hughes and A Witz, 'Feminism and the matter of bodies: From de Beauvoir to Butler', Body & Society, vol 3, no 1, 1997, pp 47-60; C L Hull, 'The need in thinking: Materiality in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler', Radical Philosophy, vol 84, 1997, pp 22-35.
44 I Burkitt, 'Sexuality and gender identity: From a discursive to a relational analysis', Sociological Review, vol 46, no 3, 1998, pp 483-504; J Kerin, 'The matter at hand: Butler, ontology and the natural sciences', Australian Feminist Studies, vol 14, no 29, 1999, pp 91-104.
45 S Benhabib, 'Subjectivity, histography, and politics: Reflections on the “feminism/postmodernism exchange''' in S Benhabib, J Butler, D Cornell and N Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, Routledge, New York, 1995, pp 107-25.
46 A Allen, 'Power Trouble: Performativity as critical theory', Constellations, vol 5, no 4, 1998, pp 456-471; Benhabib, loc cit; Nelson, op cit, p 340.
47 F Webster, 'The politics of sex and gender: Benhabib and Butler debate subjectivity', Hypatia, vol 15, no 1, 2000, pp 1-23.
48 J Butler, 'For a careful reading' in S Benhabib, J Butler, D Cornell and N Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, Routledge, New York, 1995, pp 127-47.
49 J Butler, 'Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of 'postmodernity'' in J Butler and J W Scott (eds), Feminists Theorise the Political, Routledge, New York, 1992, pp 3-21.
50 Butler, op. cit., Bodies That Matter, pp 234, 237.
51 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Suicides 1921-1998, AGPS, Canberra, 2000, p 3.
52 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Suicides, Australia 1982-1992, AGPS, Canberra, 1994, p 1. It is interesting to note that six years later ABS, ibid., defines suicide as 'the deliberate taking of one's life'.
53 E Hallam, J Hockey and G Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1999, pp 71-3.
54 H I Kushner, 'Women and suicidal behaviour: Epidemiology, gender and lethality in historical perspective' in S S Canetto and D Lester (eds), Women and Suicidal Behaviour, Springer Publishing Company, New York, 1995, pp 11-34; C J Sanborn, 'Gender socialisation and suicide: American Association of Suiciodology presidential address, 1989', Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour, vol 20, no 2, 1990, pp 148-55.
55 Mental Health Association (Qld) Inc, 'What is Self Harm?' in J Healey (ed), Suicide and Self Harm, Issues in Society, vol 166, The Spinney Press, 2002, p 32.
56 D Ranson, 'The autopsy' in H Selby (ed), The Inquest Handbook, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 1998, pp 107-21.
57 M Shildrick and J Price, 'Introduction' in M Shildrick and J Price (eds), Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/logical Body, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1998, pp 1-17.
58 E Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp 138-59.
59 ABS, op cit, Suicides 1921-1998, p 9.
60 ibid.
61 ibid, pp 9-10.
62 R V Clarke and D Lester, Suicide: Closing the Exits, Springer Verlag, New York, 1989, p 89; D G Denning, Y Conwell, D King and C Cox, 'Method choice, intent, and gender in completed suicides', Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour, vol 30, no 3, 2000, pp 282-88; Kushner, op cit, p 15; A R Rich, J Kirkpatrick-Smith, R L Bonner and F Jans, 'Gender differences in the psychological correlates of suicidal ideation among adolescents', Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour, vol 22, no 3, 1992, pp 364-73.
63 Finding of Inquest No. 10 (Unreported, Coroner's Court of South Australia, WC Chivell, 16 June 2000) in http://www.courts.sa.gov.au/courts/coroner/findings/findings_2000/wanganeen.finding. htm at 6 August 2001 (Copy on file with author), 2000, p 1. At present, South Australia is in a very unique position of providing public access to coronial findings. Although summaries of findings are available to the public, the information nevertheless remains personally and culturally sensitive and thus the names have been marked out in the context of this paper.
64 Butler, op cit, Bodies That Matter, pp 107, 225.
65 Z G Cahn, Suicide in French Thought: From Montesquieu to Cioran, Peter Lang, New York, 1998, p 8.
66 M J Edwards and R R Holden, 'Coping, meaning in life, and suicidal manifestations: Examining gender differences', Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol 57, no 12, 2001, pp 1517-34.

Originally published in Kelly McWilliam, Peta Stephenson, Graham Thompson (eds), Voicing Dissent: Journal of Australian Studies no 76, St Lucia, UQP, 2003.