Gender and Sexual Diversity and Suicide on Australian Screens: Culture, Representation, and Health Pedagogies
2021; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.13012
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Roles and Identity Studies
ResumoThe Journal of Popular CultureVolume 54, Issue 2 p. 365-387 Original Article Free Access Gender and Sexual Diversity and Suicide on Australian Screens: Culture, Representation, and Health Pedagogies Rob Cover, Corresponding Author rob.cover@uwa.edu.au Search for more papers by this author Rob Cover, Corresponding Author rob.cover@uwa.edu.au Search for more papers by this author First published: 13 April 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13012 This research was funded under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP180103321). The views expressed are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council. AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Despite an often-repeated cliché that gender and sexually diverse characters are relatively absent from film and television, Australian screen production has a very rich history of representing sexual and gender diversity: greater than nineteen wide-release films since 1993, including internationally recognized films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), The Sum of Us (1994), Head On (1998), and The Monkey's Mask (2000), portray gender and sexual diversity. Nine Australian films with LGBTQ, gender, and sexually diverse themes were released between 2013 and 2018, indicating an entrenchment of LGBTQ representation on Australian screens. Characters in major Australian television dramas and soap operas, such as Home and Away and Neighbours, have increased in regularity and complexity over the past two decades. Sexual stories, including narratives of minority sexual lives, have never, of course, been repressed or invisible, but according to Ken Plummer, they have long been central to contemporary Western culture (4). Stories representing gender and sexually diverse subjects depicting identity struggles and articulating minority health outcomes are a major and ongoing part of Australian creative production. What is significant in cultural analysis is not questions of visibility or invisibility but how the continuities and disruptions of depictions of gender and sexual minorities play a significant, pedagogical role in social participation, social harmony, acceptance, individual health and wellbeing, and community belonging (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide; Emergent Identities). Recent international, Anglophone screen representations of LGBTQ diverse characters and themes have broadly depicted both "struggle" and "happy endings," such as God's Own Country (UK, 2017), Alex Strangelove (US, 2018), Call Me by Your Name (US-Italy, 2017), and Love Simon (US, 2018). Collectively, these present a popular cultural depiction of nonheterosexual liveability, resilience, domestic happiness, and self-assurance in stable, liveable minority identities. However, recent Australian films with gender and sexually diverse themes and stories have not followed a similar "queer-positive" approach to narrative and characterization; six productions have depicted suicide as a significant element of nonheteronormative experience, with five of those six depicting either suicide attempts or completed suicides. This article discusses the over representation of suicidality in Australian popular culture, analyzing six recent texts to demonstrate that, while there are significant differences in how suicide causality is depicted, the consistency of a connection between sexually diverse young men and suicidality reinforces a cultural logic of suicide as a solution to adversity. Four films, Monster Pies (2013), Boys in the Trees (2016), Drown (2015), and one miniseries, The Slap (2015), present young gay men either attempting or completing suicide in the context of homophobic, discriminatory, or intolerant societies—arguably drawing on older discourses of both suicide risk and social belonging in mainstream contemporary Australian society. One film, Cut Snake, presents an altruistic suicide of a sexually diverse character, further reinforcing a connection between sexual diversity and unliveability. Conversely, the Australian miniseries Deep Water (2016) turns the "myth" of queer suicidality on its head by presenting a narrative in which both historical and recent deaths of gay men in Sydney that were declared suicides were in fact the work of a fictional serial killer driven by homophobia and propelled by Sydney's (actual) experience of significant gay bashing in the 1990s. There are, thus, two important aspects of the role of popular culture in communicating discourses of queer liveability and suicidality: One which reinforces the connection between young gay men and suicide as an "expected" outcome, typically by drawing on discourses that were current in the 1980s and 1990s but are less representable in contemporary Western culture both in Australia and internationally; and another which has used the popular form of the television miniseries to engage critically with the repetition of that cliché and the stereotype of gay suicidal men, relocating queer death within broader questions of sociality. What these together indicate about gender and sexually diverse subjectivity and suicidality has implications for minority audience mental health and wellbeing. While this is not to suggest in any respect that media depiction of suicidality is directly causal of suicide attempts or ideation, it is to account for the way in which popular culture plays a role in sustaining a social logic that has implications for the wider discourses through which minority identity and belonging are performed and articulated. This article begins by contextualizing the analysis within a discussion of suicide depiction in (fictional) screen media, drawing on recent work in critical suicidology to demonstrate the significance of popular culture's role in sustaining suicidality in relation to minorities as a social logic. In six short analyses of the Australian films and series outlined above, I demonstrate some of the ways in which different perspectives on suicidality are communicated, with the final analysis on Deep Water arguing for its significance in disrupting the suicidal norms. The article ends with a conclusion discussing some of the continuities in relation to the depiction of hope and hopelessness in these texts and how the role of hopelessness has been perceived in broader theorization of queer suicidality. Queer Youth Suicide as Screen Pedagogy Suicide rates for young LGBTQ people are only marginally higher than for their heterosexual peers (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide), and while suicide attempt statistics are uncertain and incomplete, there is current scholarly disavowal of some of the more alarming statistics that have circulated in popular media since the mid-1990s, such as the claim that young gay men are three times more likely than their peers to suicide (Waidzunas). Nevertheless, there is a marginally greater likelihood that gender and sexually diverse youth are more at risk of suicide, and—from a critical suicidology perspective—that is at least partly due to a "suicide logic" circulating in contemporary culture, whereby suicide is popularly depicted as the logical approach to dealing with life stresses and adversities for vulnerable persons (Kral, "Suicide as Social Logic"). That logic is, arguably, strengthened by the repeated contemporary association of suicide and gender/sexual nonnormativity in screen media and popular culture. Recent work in critical suicide studies, which takes to task the more dominant medico-psychiatric approaches that individualize and pathologize suicidality, often without recourse to language, culture, media, or lived experience (White et al.), points to the need to return to social, cultural, and discursive settings as the milieu of cultural knowledge on suicidality. Michael Kral's recent work, for example, theorizes suicide not as an individual outcome of mental disorder but as conditioned by two factors: being perturbed or upset by some kind of adversity or distress that appears inescapable and, secondly, adopting the logic that suicide or self-lethality is the means by which to resolve that upset, adversity, or distress (Kral, Idea of Suicide). For Kral and other suicidologists who incorporate a cultural and critical approach to suicide causality (e.g., Niederkrotenthaler and Stack; Cover, Queer Youth Suicide, etc.), popular media can be an unwitting site presenting, circulating, and reinforcing the logic that suicide is the appropriate or best means to resolve psychological, social, or emotional pain. Arguably, in the case of gender and sexual minorities, the connection between suicide and minority identity depicted repetitively in popular media plays a potential role for some subjects, just as the popular media depiction of stories of resilience, overcoming adversity, pride, and normative belonging present a counter-logic to suicidality. Such an assertion is not, of course, to argue that popular cultural representation is causal of suicide as is sometimes implied in media effects theories or arguments about media-related suicide contagion (Blood and Pirkis), nor is it to ignore the fact that audiences have diverse ways of reading texts that depict suicide and self-harm. Rather, many audience members read critically, radically, and in ways which actively reject an overemphasis on the precarity of minority lives. Media effects models of screen impact, such as the hypodermic needle motif and behaviorist approaches, have long been discredited (Gauntlett). Such models assume an authoritative reading of popular culture and an individualized audience member in a linear framework of impact, incorporation, behavior, and outcome. Nevertheless, models that celebrate all engagement with popular culture as radically subversive also miss the opportunity to consider the role of popular screen entertainment in reinforcing a social logic of suicide for some subjects who may be more vulnerable than others. Indeed, Jane Pirkis and Warwick Blood's extensive analysis of a media causality belief revealed that fictional media portrayal of suicide does not have a linear causal relationship with actual suicide attempts or completions and is likely to have less of a causal relationship than media reporting of suicides of real-life persons and celebrities, but it nevertheless warrants caution when the idea is persistently repeated. The depiction of suicide in entertainment media is, then, significant for its pedagogical role in naturalizing the "idea" of suicidality among minorities through reinforcement and repetition. This is particularly the case for younger persons, given that such media are used as a resource by young people in the construction and performance of minority sexual and gender identities and in developing practices for coherent and intelligible social belonging (McKinnon). Media accounts dealing with minority sexualities and genders may indeed be more significant than other more formal resources, such as formal sex education in schools (Rasmussen et al.) or peer education in online settings (Clarke et al.; Clarke). Catherine Ashcraft has pointed out that popular culture is a site of struggle in which adolescent sexual identities can either be reinscribed or transformed (Ashcraft 38), and certainly the reinforcement of suicide as a logic for young people experiencing adversity is one possibility; while—as we see in the analysis of Deep Water—popular screen media also has the potential to subvert and critique embedded discourses and social logics. The "matrix" of media discourses available to a nonnormative subject may therefore be highly empowering for some young people and vulnerabilizing for others, depending in part on how the discourse is read and how those discourses are incorporated into the everyday sense of selfhood of the subject (Gill). There is no exact enumeration of the number of international films with gender and sexually diverse characters, themes, or content that feature suicide, although one available statistic notes that between 1961 and 1976, thirteen of thirty-one English-language international films with major homosexual characters featured suicide—approximately 40 percent (Gross 28). Subsequent films depicting LGBTQ characters from the 1970s to the present are unlikely to be nearly as high, although there is a continued persistence of suicide of gender and sexually diverse characters, and it is rarely a surprise when it is part of the narrative (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide). It is more surprising, however, that the majority of creative screen texts in Australia over the past decade include depictions of suicide as a major narrative point. Such on-screen representation sometimes has value in drawing political and public attention to the unique stresses experienced by gender/sexual minorities that may lead to experiencing lives that are unliveable (Howes 800). However, it also tends to draw upon and further reinforce older filmic stereotypes of vulnerable, frail, and suicidal young nonheterosexual persons (Dyer), readable as a logic by those who may not necessarily have had access to the resources through which to engage critically with such clichés. Given the capacity of entertainment media to reinforce social stereotypes of minorities for both young minorities and to provide a cultural pedagogy (Giroux) for the broader population of their peers, suicidality of gender and sexually diverse subjects is culturally embedded as a fictive norm, remaining current as it further informs subsequent creative texts that seek "realistic" representation of minorities (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide). It is notable that most of the films discussed here repeat stereotypes from the 1990s and earlier; others, however, may continue a link between suicide and sexual nonnormativity but actively subvert those clichés by presenting alternative frameworks of causality. This "presence" of suicidality in Australian films contrasts significantly with the representation of gender and sexually diverse subjects in international screen media—most representations of melancholic, unstable, or suicidal young LGBTQ persons are found only rarely in British and North American texts subsequent to the mid-1990s renaissance that reframed LGBTQ screen characters as positive and resilient (Cover, "First Contact"). The next sections address, in turn, how each of six texts actively frame a connection between minority (male) sexual identity, utilizing discourses of homophobia, bullying and hopelessness as causal motifs of queer youth suicide in Monster Pies, Boys in the Trees, and The Slap; of internalized homophobia in Drown; and then two texts which address queer suicidality from more critical perspectives: Cut Snake and Deep Water. Important, here, is to understand that significance not through the individualized textuality of each text (McKinnon 11), but through making sense of the cultural context of the appearance of suicidality in texts about and directed toward gender and sexual minorities. Monster Pies Monster Pies (2013, directed and written by Lee Galea) is an Australian feature film about two boys coming to realize their nonnormative (gay) sexualities. Significant here is that the film presents the suicide of a school-aged, gay-identifying young man as the denouement of a narrative focused on two boys realizing their mutual attraction. Suicide is articulated through a causality motif of isolation resulting from discrimination, actively reinforcing a discourse that articulates gay men as radically separated from social belonging among mainstream peers in a way which is no longer as easily represented in contemporary Western or Australian culture. The film's narrative builds upon a number of stereotypes that circulate in mass culture about nonnormative and diverse sexual identities that are part of the broader social or cultural memory (Weeks 1-2). Sets of narratives that circulate through popular texts become part of the milieu of cultural knowledge (Saxey), or what can be described as social logic, about the lives of minorities, bringing together different aspects of commonality (discovering one's sense of identity difference, experiencing sexual or romantic attraction) with less common experiences, attitudes, and events (experiencing family violence, self-harm, suicidality). In line with older discursive frameworks of suicidality, Monster Pies repeats an older representation in which isolation causes suicide, particularly among sexually diverse subjects (Gibson). This theme follows a framework Emile Durkheim laid out in the late nineteenth century in which he described suicides caused by excessive individuation and nonintegration into society (221). While Durkheim's framings of suicide are no longer useful in addressing, preventing, or intervening in contemporary suicidality (Jaworski), they provide value for the analysis of cultural understandings and textual representation of suicidality in two ways. Firstly, Durkheim's framework helps identify the social, environmental, and relational aspects in which suicide is both experienced and caused in contrast to dominant medico-psychological approaches that both pathologize and individualize the suicidal subject (White et al.). Secondly, it provides a detailed system of categorization of suicidal causality, one which does not correlate with our more complex, interdisciplinary knowledges of the twenty-first century but is inflected in contemporary stories of suicidality and the oversimplified articulations of cause that, by necessity, circulate in shorter-form texts such as film and television. In the story, Mike (Tristan Barr) is alienated in school until a new student, William (Lucas Linehan), arrives. They are partnered for a class assignment, spend time together, and realize their attraction for one another. Dramatic tension centers on William taking longer to accept his nonheterosexuality than Mike. With notable similarities to the 1996 British film Beautiful Thing (also depicting two school-aged boys at different stages of discovering their mutual attraction and nonheterosexual identities), William is subjected to violence and emotional abuse from his alcoholic, homophobic father and is burdened by serving as a cook and housekeeper in the absence of his mother who is catatonic and psychiatrically excluded. A mutually supportive relationship develops, although William continues to experience social isolation due to his sense of the social unacceptability of his sexual orientation. After being outed to their respective parents, the two boys avoid adversity by spending a night together in a park beneath a tree. In the morning, Mike finds that Will has hanged himself from one of the tree branches above him. The suicide results in Mike's mother gaining greater sympathy for minority youth and the school's homophobic bullies apologizing to him for their past behavior. The juxtaposition of the recognizable and rare events repeated in film narratives produce a stereotype of expected attributes for persons identifying according to those identity categories. In Monster Pies, the recognizable and rare are contrasted in the linearity of its story: two boys learning about their nonnormative sexual attraction, one slightly more experienced than the other, the experience of bullying in schools, parents who do not understand, parents who see it as a phase or the result of the influence of others, and, finally, suicide. In this instance, the rare experience of suicidality becomes part of the recognized story of young gay teenagers, not because it is widely experienced but because this aspect of the narrative draws on the 1990s (and earlier) cultural cliché that young gay men kill themselves, which is no longer reflected in young people's experiences of growing up gender and sexually diverse (Cover, Emergent Identities). Indeed, Monster Pie's incorporation of suicidality as an expected element of young gay men's growing up results from the history of its creative production. Writer-director Lee Galea has stated publicly that the script for the film was written originally in the 1990s (Galea). Thus, although the film is set in the period of its release (2013), it retains a number of discursive articulations of the health and social wellbeing of young, school-aged gay men that are more germane to the 1990s, which in the Australian context was a markedly different environment for minority sexual identity (Marshall et al.). The milieu of recognizability of experience for young gender and sexually diverse men has not, however, been updated to reflect prevailing social conditions and norms for contemporary, school-aged diverse sexualities. Instead, it is grounded in the familiarities of 1990s Australian discourses of health and vulnerability for young gay men. For example, stories similar to those depicted in the film were of widespread public currency in the Australian media in the late 1990s, particularly the very public story of fourteen-year-old Christopher Tsakalos, who had taken the NSW Department of School Education to court for failure to protect him against vilification and violence that led to multiple suicide attempts (Cover, "Mediating Suicide"). This is part of the cultural knowledge of "1990s queer Australia" that articulated suicidality as an endemic and expected experience of young gay men who were depicted as vulnerable and without "hope" due to a mythical framing that young gay men always experienced isolation, either geographically from urban centers or emotionally from smaller communities of straight peers and family (Gibson). Although Will's suicide appears in the film's narrative to be an unexplained gesture as part of its "surprise ending"—he kills himself because that's what gay men do—the cultural knowledges that inform the reading of suicide causality are firmly grounded in a Durkheimian approach to suicide as being the result of the experience of excessive isolation and lack of integration. What the suicide narrative of Monster Pies demonstrates, however, is that older conceptualizations that dominated public discourses of gender and sexually diverse persons, past themes and concepts, continue to be repeated, despite the ways in which such ideas are no longer part of the scholarly, pedagogical, health, mental health, or community discourses of diverse liveabilities. By looking, however, to the discursive construction of such texts and the creative practices that have produced them, it becomes possible to identify the kinds of older discourses, stereotypes, and clichés that link nonheteronormativity to suicidality that are repeated and maintained in circulation in ways which may be interpreted as normative, timeless, and a "social logic" by some viewers. Boys in the Trees The 2016 wide-release Australian film Boys in the Trees (directed and written by Nicholas Verso) differs from Monster Pies in that it may not have been scripted in the 1990s but is indeed set in that decade and thereby similarly draws on 1990s discourses of queer youth suicidality that are no longer representative of contemporary LGBTQ experience (Clarke et al.). Its characters are not ostensibly or openly queer, although the preproduction script won an award at the 2011 New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the film has been shown in LGBT film festivals and its central character is widely interpreted by reviewers as a young gay man (di Rosso), while the relationships between other boys are remarked upon for their combined homosociality and homoeroticism (saltypopcorn), together making this text available to be read as part of an Australian queer cinematic canon. Much like Monster Pies, the film represents a causal motivation for queer suicidality: the suicide of Jonah (Gulliver McGrath) is depicted as the outcome of the experience of persistent bullying. Bullying, which is typically defined as a subset of aggressive, unprovoked, and repetitive behavior intended to cause physical and/or psychological pain to the recipient (Kalliotis 50), does have a discursive relationship with self-lethality in suicide literature (Espelage and Swearer 157) from a period since the late 2000s, primarily in relation to the public circulation of high-profile stories about school bullying, young gay school students, and suicidality (Cover, "Conditions of Living"). Although contemporary suicidology literature does not always find direct causal links between bullying and suicide risk (Kim and Leventhal 151), by drawing on 1990s discourses and utilizing a setting that is both Australian (suburban landscape), North American (Halloween), and internationalized (gay identity and antigay discrimination), bullying is represented as an unfortunate yet timeless experience of minority life, positioned as an expected adversity that produces pain significant enough for some to choose suicide as its solution. The film begins with a gang of high school skateboarders bullying a fellow student, Jonah, on Halloween. Although Australia has only a gestural acknowledgment of Halloween, the boys are dressed in elaborate Halloween costumes and ride around the streets terrifying dozens of younger children out trick-or-treating, before settling down to drinking in a cemetery. Jonah, meanwhile, is drinking alone by a pond. Gang member Corey (Toby Wallace) parts from the group when one of the other boys moves in on a girl he is flirting with and returns to the skate park where he finds Jonah. As they wander the streets, it emerges that the two were childhood friends and had grown apart. One became a bully while the other became a victim. They reconnect while telling scary stories, and Corey regains some empathy for Jonah after the latter explains his experiences of being bullied and victimized through homophobic abuse. They are variously chased by the gang, stalked by an Indigenous man in a white suit (Trevor Jamieson), and set-upon by mystical shadow figures. Although their walk is—oddly—interrupted when Corey leaves Jonah waiting in the street while he has sex with a girl in her bedroom (Mitzi Ruhlmann) before returning to Jonah, there is considerable physical and visual flirting between the two boys and slippage between homosocial and homoerotic touching, a depiction of flirting which is, of course, a communication form that is always marginal, liminal, and transgressive (Bartlett et al.). A struggle with shadow-like monsters is followed by a confused flashback: it is revealed that at a previous Halloween when they were children, two older boys attempted to sexually abuse them; Corey escaped and left Jonah behind. The trauma of this experience is related as the cause of their broken friendship and Corey's later victimization of Jonah. Standing by a pond, Corey regretfully apologizes to Jonah and then Jonah points to his own corpse (having been a ghost all along—Jonah's postsuicide body floating in the pond). The film ends with Corey in New York City telling a friend via Skype that he is about to go out to take photographs for The Village Voice of a presumable gay Halloween parade downtown, with a large photograph of Jonah on the wall behind him; he puts on the Halloween mask that was on Jonah's head in the water. As with other Australian films and series, a connection between suicidality and queerness is articulated as a particular kind of logic resulting from the experience of adversity, pain, or upset (Kral, The Idea of Suicide). As a more avant-garde text with a complex narrative and a surprise revelation that Jonah had been a ghost all along, audiences are more likely to be directed to this reading on the basis of the 1990s knowledge framework that links suicidality with gay young men. Indeed, from a semiotic perspective, as an "open text" in Umberto Eco's framework, the reader is directed to choose a complex set of linkages in opposition to a more simplified "closed text" in which a reader is more free to interpret meanings otherwise (Eco 3). In articulating suicidality and sexual nonnormativity, a reiteration of the social logic of queer suicide is performed, adding to the corpus of Australian screen material that marks suicide as a logical outcome of the social conditions of sexual diversity. As with Monster Pies, this film draws on older discourses of pain and perturbation depicted in popular representations of LGBTQ young people in Australia a generation ago to sustain a public notion of queer youth suicidality as normative. The Slap While the first two texts presented suicide causality in relation to social discrimination—one through isolation and the other through bullying, with both presenting 1990s frameworks of discrimination and suicide logic as the markers of sexual diversity—the next draws on suicidality to depict a "cry for help," inferring the logic by which young gay men are expected to turn to suicidal lethality as the form of responding to adversity, pain, and upset. Based on the 2008 novel by Australian gay writer Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap is a 2011 Australian television miniseries broadcast in eight parts (also remade as a US miniseries in 2015). It explores character histories, relationships, and the effect of rev
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