Knowledge is made for cutting – An introduction

This special issue of Social Epistemology represents a departure point from the traditional field of suicidology. Unlike its predecessor, critical suicidology, or more recently, critical suicide studies, consider the scientific framework of research too narrow and argue against universalizing assumptions and applications of ideas about suicide, which often centre on Western notions of psychopathology, and individualist accounts of suicidal agency and subjectivity. Instead, critical suicidology advocates for researching suicide and suicide prevention from a contextualist, historical, subjective, political, cultural, linguistic and social perspectives. Arguably, critical suicidology has been in the making since the 1980s, as a handful of researchers persistently raised concerns about the way suicidology generated knowledge about suicide and suicide prevention. Perhaps then it is not surprising that critical suicidology, as an intellectual movement, came together in March 2016 at its very first conference, “Suicidology’s Cultural Turn and Beyond”. Articles in this issue have been developed from some of the papers presented at the conference. They represent a series of epistemological interventions into the way suicide and suicide prevention have been understood in different contexts, be it in relation to history, theory, knowledge production, ethics and the way suicide is represented publicly and personally

What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?2/ LGBTQ+ necropolitics

This is part 2 of 6 of the dossier What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology, gender studies, and LGBT+ studies and tackle questions such as: how can queer death studies problematise heteronormative/cisnormative constructions of dying, death, and mourning? How can queer death studies approach the post-mortem manipulation of transgender identities? How can this discipline change the current cultural perception of the link between queerness and suicide?The present article includes the following contributions: – Alasuutari, V., Queering the heteronormative and cisnormative lifeworld of death; – Whitestone S., Queering as identity preservation: transgender identity after death; – Goret Hansen L., When i talk about queer death, I talk about trans-necropolitics and suicide prevention; – Jaworski K., Notes towards rethinking the agency of queer youth suicide; – Doletskaya O., Queer death and victimhood in Russia: ‘westernised queer activism’; – Zubillaga-Pow J., Lesbian Liebestod: sapphic suicide in chinese society.</p

Towards an understanding of loneliness among Australian men: Gender cultures, embodied expression and the social bases of belonging

Recent quantitative investigations consistently single out considerable gender variations in the experience of loneliness in Australia, and in particular how men are especially prone to protracted and serious episodes of loneliness. In 2017 the Director of Lifeline implicated loneliness as a significant factor in suicide among Australian men - currently three times the rate of suicide among women. Compared to women men also struggle to talk about loneliness or seek help from a range of informal and professional sources. We know very little about men\u27s experience of loneliness or why they are so susceptible to it currently and research is urgently needed in order to design specific interventions for them. To date, psychology has dominated the theoretical research on loneliness but in this article we argue that sociology has a key role to play in broadening out the theoretical terrain of this understanding so as to create culturally informed interventions. Most researchers agree that loneliness occurs when belongingess needs remain unmet, yet it is also acknowledged that such needs are culturally specific and changing. We need to understand how loneliness and gender cultures configure for men; how they are located in different ethnic, class and age cohort cultures as well as the changing social/economic/spatial/public/institutional bases for belonging across Australia. Theoretical enquiry must encompass the broader social structural narratives (Bauman, Giddens and Sennett) and link these to the changing nature of belonging in everyday life - across the public sphere, the domestic sphere, work, in kinship systems, housing and settlement patterns, associational life, in embodied relationships and online