Men on the Edge: Suicide, Masculinity, and Representation in Transnational Popular Cultur

Focusing on the transnational relations produced through globalization and militarism among the United States, South Asia, and the Middle East, this dissertation explores how literal, potential, and symbolic acts of masculine suicide challenge dominant categories of race, class, and citizenship. In order to confront these concerns, this dissertation examines what I call the "identitarian suicide"-the suicide that is rationalized and explained through collective terms of identity, rather than an individualized pathology. Within popular discourses, for example, the visibility of groups like poor, rural farmers in India or Muslim American men is increasingly defined by the perceived risk of suicide among these communities, thus entailing that suicidal potential is central to cultural construction of these forms of identity. However, rather than functioning as an inherent characteristic of certain identity categories, I suggest suicide signals the failures of representation afforded by these classifications, and accordingly points to unheard forms of self-depiction that can potentially challenge dominant structures of power. My particular interest in masculine suicide arises from the ways that globalization and militarism appear as processes enacted in active, male terms, which consequently undergird the need to obscure the subversive potential of non-normative masculinities. Emphasizing the centrality of popular forms of cultural production to these processes and their potential critique, I examine practices of representation in transnational popular culture--particularly film, contemporary fiction, advertising, and television-to locate the making and unmaking of ideal transnational masculinities and their corresponding structures of social power.;The individual chapters of the dissertation explore various forms of identitarian suicide within the triangulated transnational context I use to frame my analysis. My first chapter explores cultural responses to farmer suicide in India and its relationship to US-led practices of globalization. Next, moving away from the discussion of masculinities in ascent under structures of liberalization, I examine changing structures of white masculinity during the American recession, paying particular attention to representations of white male suicide in recent popular television. Building off of this, my third chapter examines Muslim American men in popular culture and the ways anxieties over suicide terrorism shape their representation. Building off my discussion on the American recession, this chapter further examines the changing states of proper/improper belonging in an American context increasingly defined by its global relationships. My final chapter investigates more figurative forms of suicide. This discussion explores the perceived willing devaluation of life among male migrant Indian laborers in the Persian Gulf States and how this experience of social death challenges established modes of belonging. Ultimately, this project challenges accepted notions of identity within the field of transnational American Studies by revealing the subversive formations found within unrecognized modes of self-representation.