Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Content Warning: Assisted suicide, suicide, ableism, transphobia, queerphobia, ageism, sanism, sexual abuse and assault, psychological abuse and assault, physical abuse and assault, childhood and adult trauma
“Thanatopolitics Meets Piss On Pity” could be another title for this groundbreaking, unnerving, and riveting book. Referencing without relying on a gigantic number of Crip luminaries, Baril retells and decodes (with respect, not abjection or intrusion) the myriad, complicated stories of living, dying, and deceased Mad Queer and Trans Crips. Some of these local and global descriptions and analyses include graphic examples of assault, abuse, predation, and many other forms of trauma sustained and survived during childhood and/or adulthood. Obviously, this book is a tough, essential text.
As the foreword by Robert McRuer makes vividly clear, self-empowerment and self-determination have long held powerful sway—as they should—in Disability activist loci and labors. Articulating and summarizing what McRuer refers to as Baril’s “rhetorical strategy” of “active desubjectivization,” his foreword offers a strong cadence and principled perspective for the assertions that follow. The “refusal of objectivization” is indeed what Alexandre Baril aims to assert unequivocally, as McRuer advises.
“Suicidism,” as Baril explains, is a “theoretical framework for conceptualizing suicide” (also the title of the first chapter). After reviewing, explaining, and critiquing several normative models of suicidality and associated stigma, Baril makes the complex and persuasive argument that “suicidism” is a form of “epistemic violence.” The idea that one can “queer” and “trans” suicide and suicidality (“queer” and “trans” are verbs in these instances) is made explicit as the book continues. There are myriad, often dangerous “discourses” of suicidality and embodiment. As Baril argues forcibly and necessarily, the mutual imbrications and interdependencies that exist between and across anti-transness, queerphobia, sanism, and suicide / suicidality narratives require relentlessly deep, bold interrogation.
Mad Studies activist scholarship finds a profound home in this work. It is abundantly clear that Baril is not only a part of but contributes mightily to a widening movement. Baril’s is an insistence to undermine the ways in which anti-ableist intentions and choices so very often exclude, objectify, or otherwise other as well as create and further sanism and mentalism. Some of these ostensibly anti-ableist while vividly sanist and mentalist behaviors and actions may seek to elide or minimize harm on the proverbial surface, but nevertheless directly contribute to the suffering of and epistemic violence experienced by Mad folx—particularly Queer and Trans Mad Folx of Color.
As articulated in the book’s third chapter, “Cripping and Maddening Suicide: Rethinking Disabled/Mad Suicidality,” there are “alternatives” for thinking and living in, within, with, and alongside suicidism. Baril asks how “cripistemology” addresses these questions. Moreover, as Baril claims effectively, how is suicidality disabling, and a disability?
What is popularly referred to as “right to die” language receives sustained and unequivocal attention as assisted suicide is “rethought” in the subsequent passages. Many will find the “rethinking” here disconcerting while others will find validation, and perhaps even experience a kind of nuanced, complicated relief. The fact that each section and chapter concludes with “final words” seems both deliberate and discursive in their own right(s).
Baril’s claim that suicidism is imbricated with “an ethics of living” is the heart of the book’s many vivid approaches. Hearkening explicitly to Spivak, Baril asks in the conclusion, “Can the Suicidal Speak? Suicidal People’s Voices as Microresistance.”
Especially intriguing and (dare I say?) hopeful to this reader, as I thought about how different readers may or will wander and breathe through Baril’s pivotal, painful, and exquisite discussions of life, death, rhetoric, epistemic violence, and human rights, was the fact that Baril is a tenured social work professor who has been awarded high praise for their labors in Canadian disability studies.
“Envisioning a suicidal futurity is not only a transitory political battle for people who will die by (assisted) suicide but also a battle for many suicidal people who will most likely continue to live,” Baril states (p. 247). My response to this assertion, and to this book as a whole, based on my lived experiences “personally” and “professionally”: Hells Yes.
Title: Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide
Author: Alexander Baril
Publisher: Temple University Press
Year: 2023
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.