Heidi Kosonen
M.A., Ph.D. student in Art History,
Department of Art and Culture Studies
University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
E-mail:
[email protected]
"Suicide, Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Cinema"
Contemporary cinema abounds with representations of suicide. As has been argued, this abundance rather makes suicide a "necromantic" spectacle (Aaron 2014; Black 1991) rather than facilitates its study as a complex social phenomenon. Moreover, it seems suicide, the paragon of "bad death," is often wielded as a didactic narrative instrument of retribution. Suicidality tends to presented as a sign of deviance – and of effeminacy. The cinematic depictions feature several historical constructions that posit suicide into states of "otherness:" madness, youth, female gender and deviant sexualities (Brown 2001; Kosonen 2015; Nead 1988). In my presentation I focus on the historically constructed "effeminacy" of egoistic suicide: I deconstruct the cinematic conventions that punish particularly deviant women and homosexual men with suicide and connect this to the socio-cultural structure of the taboo. As I argue: As suicide is used to defile the 'other,' the link to otherness marks suicide with the stigma of taboo.
References
Aaron, Michele 2014. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography & I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Black, Joel 1991. Aesthetics of Murder. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University.
Brown, Ron M. 2001. The Art of Suicide. London: Reaktion.
Kosonen, Heidi 2015. The Death of the Others and the Taboo: Suicide Represented. Thanatos [vol. 4 1/2015], s. 25–56.
Nead, Lynda 1988. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
