Gender and Sexual Diversity and Suicide on Australian Screens: Culture, Representation, and Health Pedagogies

Representations of sexually-diverse characters, themes and stories are increasingly common in film and television, with regular depiction of ‘resilience’ as key parts in a creative screen text’s narrative. However, a sizeable number of Australian film/TV texts produced during this decade depict the suicides of LGBT characters. While popular cultural depictions of suicide do not cause self-harm, they play a role in sustaining older stereotypes that represent suicide as a social outcome. This paper investigates the cultural and thematic frameworks of suicide causality in six recent Australian texts, theorising that depictions of minorities fixate on discourses of ‘hopelessness’ for younger minorities.