“The Male Preserve of Martyrdom”

Abstract

Suicide bombing occupies an uneasy place in relation to suicide in newsprint media. It is often described simultaneously as suicide, murder, and terrorist attack. It almost always involves the death of more than one person in a very public manner. When placed alongside cultural questions of gender in suicide, the uneasiness of suicide bombing intensifies, dominated by deeply biased and contradictory interpretations of gender. Guided by Debord's notion of spectacle and Butler's work on naming, I will argue that what is represented about Palestinian female suicide bombers as examples of suicide-related deaths is part of materializing suicide as masculine and masculinist, hailed by gendered understandings of suicidal violence and agency. Such a production, I will also argue, is rendered by race as another condition of understanding how gender comes to reside in suicide. I will begin by examining the articulations of Palestinian suicide bombers in selected Australian newspapers. I will then interrogate the meanings and assumptions made available in what is represented, and the ways by which spectacle and language gender suicide.

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