Subjective Connectivity: Rethinking Loneliness, Isolation and Belonging in Discourses of Minority Youth Suicide

ABSTRACT

While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in much suicidology as having social and cultural causes. At the same time, contemporary media, film, television and other popular cultural representation of suicides of both youth and minorities present an account of suicidality grounded in issues related to loneliness, isolation and disconnection from contemporary sociality. Problematic among these depictions is that ‘ways of being connected’ (and therefore what counts as a liveable life) are understood principally through white, western, older-generational perspectives of what social connection means and how it is recognised. At the same time, such approaches often problematically conflate and interweave complex concepts of loneliness, aloneness, isolation, disengagement, disconnection and disintegration in the representation of forms of suicide causality. In the context of queer youth suicide, this paper (i) examines some examples of popular stereotypes of “suicide-causing loneliness, (ii) undertakes a new critical reading of Durkheim and Joiner’s writings on suicide as related to social disconnection and (iii) deploys theories of networked connectivity and social relationality to determine their efficacy in understanding minority youth dis-attachment in relation to Judith Butler’s approach to grievability, liveability and social belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Loneliness
• isolation
• suicide
• connectivity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Rob Cover

Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and a member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne Australia. He is Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council project investigating gender- and sexually-diversity in Australian screen media. Recent books include: Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Routledge 2016), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (Elsevier, 2016), Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (Routledge 2019).