ABSTRACT
I began my analytical labours by considering whether suicidology generates its own afterlife of words: a body of knowledge that speaks of and for the dead and for those who survive suicide attempts. This body is not inert matter because, as I have demonstrated, it does things: it generates a plethora of ideas, assumptions, meanings and explanations. What do they amount to? They show that suicide as a material act of dying can never occur outside discourse, but instead is caught in the webs of context, history and culture. Without these we cannot think of suicide, let alone make sense of it. To return to my metaphor, I might have needed the ingredients on my chopping board, but it was the chopping board that was important all along to what I could and could not do, and, to extend this further, what suicidology can and cannot say of suicide. Gender is a pivotal part of this enterprise. The intelligibility of suicide cannot be thought outside gender. As I have shown, the way we think about suicide is dependent on gendering as a process of giving form to meanings of suicide. This confirms that suicide is neither self-evident nor obvious (as scientific models would have us think), but rather conditioned by specific value assumptions and norms so that the gender of suicide turns out to be masculine and masculinist.
