What can we learn about a society and culture through the suicidal behavior of its members? China has recently been singled out for its high rates of suicide, making suicide one of the most important public health problems in China today. In particular, Chinese women have shown much higher suicide rates than men, primarily due to a plethora of female suicides in rural areas. The gender pattern of suicide in China is a unique trend that runs counter to those in other places. These unique characteristics of Chinese suicide raise an anthropological question about the relationship between suicide and sociocultural contexts, especially related to gender. How do the various ideas about and treatments of suicidal attempts that have recently emerged in China participate in creating new forms of gendered subjectivity in a rural context? Further, what do these new discourses and practices of suicide and gender suggest about China 's responses to the broad Western influences that have increasingly entered China since the market reforms of 1978? My research objective is to investigate the relationship between the discourses and practices of suicide and gendered subjectivity in rural China today, particularly by focusing on how suicide prevention programs and key social actors play a role in changing the ways people in rural areas understand suicide and gender.

My research project is primarily concerned with two aspects of Chinese suicide: (1) local meanings of suicide as understood by different social actors including officials, medical professionals, NGO activists, religious practitioners, and male and female villagers; (2) gendered subjectivity as related to the diverse discourses and practices of suicide. By focusing on the local meanings of suicide in Chinese contexts, this research aims to discern the reasons behind high rates of rural female suicide in China , which have not been adequately explained. Moreover, by examining how the practices and discourses of suicide constitute new discourses about gender and cultivate new gendered subjectivities, this research will seek to explain the broader contexts that lead to the unique gender patterns of suicide in China . By attaining these aims, I hope to contribute to a more complex understanding of the sociocultural processes by which gendered subjectivity is formed.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.  I conducted a total of twenty months of fieldwork (from June 2004 to August 2004 for the pilot study, and from July 2005 to December 2006 for the main study) in two rural villages located in Hebei Province of northeastern China , with some supplementary research conducted in Beijing . In my particular focus on the role of the suicide prevention program, I selected as research sites two neighboring villages, one that had a suicide prevention program and another that did not.