ABSTRACT
Usually carried out by a pathologist, the post-mortem examination is crucial to verifying whether a death is a suicide. Investigating what is required in this examination, Holmes and Holmes ask: ‘How does one determine whether a death is a suicide? .. For example, does the death appear to be self-inflicted?’ (2005: 113, my emphasis). For me, analysing what appears to be self-inflicted is a difficult task. This is because it involves examining what is visually confronting, and should come to the attention of very few, excluding those who are grieving after losing someone through suicide. In this sense, I am cautious about the analysis I am about to offer. Yet I remain convinced that what happens to the physical body holds the key to understanding suicide in social and cultural terms. The body, as an inscriptive corporeal site, is at the heart of suicide’s epistemological wiring. If we do not consider the physical body more directly, we will not understand more fully the gendering of suicide.
