Abstract:This essay concentrates on a series of suicide plots in which the risk of one's undoing does not indicate a refusal of one's existing life as much as it performs a fantastic desire to live a different one. Willa Cather's short story "Paul's Case" (1905), Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman (2014) help us think about how suicide functions as a sustaining fantasy and a queer narrative strategy. In each, the main character's retreat into suicidal fantasy is not limiting but productive: it creates a space of protection for otherwise damaged individuals, allowing them to imagine an alternative configuration as/at the end of their world. This essay thus makes the counterintuitive claim that the suicide plot should be read non-tragically. It considers how acts of self-annihilation force us to think about the binding narratives of gendered and sexualized person-hood. If these narratives most readily seem to forward a critique of the hetero and sexist norms for life, they also offer a compelling argument about how the use of death works to imagine new forms, narratives, and possibilities of living.

中文翻译：

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自杀倾向

摘要：本文关注一系列自杀情节，在这些情节中，一个人失败的风险并不表示拒绝一个人现有的生活，而是表现出一种想要过另一种生活的奇妙愿望。Willa Cather 的短篇小说“Paul's Case”（1905 年）、Ridley Scott 的 Thelma and Louise（1991 年）和 Alejandro G. Iñárritu 的 Birdman（2014 年）帮助我们思考自杀如何作为一种持续的幻想和酷儿叙事策略发挥作用。在每一个中，主角退缩到自杀幻想中都不是限制性的，而是富有成效的：它为其他受到伤害的人创造了一个保护空间，让他们想象世界末日时的另一种配置。因此，这篇文章提出了一个违反直觉的主张，即应该以非悲剧性的方式阅读自杀情节。它考虑了自我毁灭的行为如何迫使我们思考性别化和性化的人格的约束性叙事。如果这些叙事似乎最容易对异性恋和性别歧视的生活规范提出批评，那么它们也提供了一个令人信服的论点，即如何利用死亡来想象新的形式、叙事和生活的可能性。