Suicidal Pedagogies

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

What does suicide and its ideation have to teach us about the structures of the crushing present? Through an attention to film, literature, performance, notes, and murder, this panel scans the entanglements of suicide and its ideation in the pulse of contemporary life and non-life, particularly in relation to modes of anti-queer, anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant repudiation. Working with a related and fleeting set of objects and archives, we explore how self-negation and its drives are also a practice of survival, even at life’s end. By attending to anxiety, fear, rage, ambivalence, self-annihilation—a sensorium of feeling precarity under neoliberalism—we might loosen the knot that places suicide in a feedback loop of pathology. Anti-trans/queer hostility, the twining of the subject, confinement, and exhaustion are an occasion to return to suicide ideation as an epistemology to read fatalism when survivance seems unimaginable.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• CR Snorton, USC and Cornell University

Panelists

• CR Snorton, USC and Cornell University

• Eric Stanley, University of California, Riverside

• Bobby Benedicto, McGill University, Canada