“Taking life too lightly”: Masculinity, suicide, and gender failure in the Qing (Yvon WANG, University of Toronto)

This talk, drawn from my ongoing research, focuses on several examples of male suicide from Qing period legal archives across the 18th & 19th centuries.  Unlike early modern European societies, suicide was not inherently sinful or criminal in China, creating a unique suicidal “necropolitics.” Furthermore, in this era, there was unprecedentedly widespread positive state recognition of female suicide for “chastity” as analogy to men’s heroic self-sacrifice for the state, especially on the battlefield. Arguably, chastity became the main, if not the only, measure for proper femininity. What did this context mean for boys and men who attempted and completed suicide not linked to war? Using my examples, I’ll put forward an interpretation of these deaths as the result of “gender failure”: when men fall short of externally enforced & personally internalized gender norms, one way “out” was to end their lives.