The ‘body’ has remained the pivotal and essential mechanism for analysis within disability scholarship. Yet while historically conceptualized as an individual’s fundamental feature, the ‘disabled identity’ has been more recently explained as a function of ‘normalcy’ through social, cultural political, and legal discriminations against difference and deviancy. Disability studies’ established tradition of consultation with philosophical endeavour remains apparently unwilling to exploit or utilize Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ‘Being’ and interpretation of Dasein as a possible framework for unravelling the complexities of (...) contemporary discrimination and oppression of those others. This paper in tracing Heidegger’s explanation of humankind, inspired by arguments proposed by Cerbone (Int J Philos Stud 2:209–230, 2000) and in consultation with Levin (The body: classic and contemporary readings, Blackwell, Malden, 1999), Aho (2009), Malpas (Heidegger’s topology: being place, world, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008), and Rae (Hum Stud 33:23–39, 2010) among others, will interpret the ‘embodied’ reality of ‘Being,’ of being-disabled-in-the-world as primarily involved within the practical context and structured according to impersonal, normative social norms, rather than detached, theoretical contemplation or observance. (shrink)

Suicides among marginalised groups are one of the few occasions in which self-harm and suicide are framed as having cultural, social, environental, historical or structural causes. Suicidology, psychology and public discourse typically understand suicide causality to be grounded in individualised psychic pain and pathology, disavowing the social, cultural, environmental and linguistic contexts. However, public discourse on suicides of ‘marginalised’ groups such as asylum seekers, Indigenous persons and queer/LGBT youth are ‘authorised’ to be discussed from social perspectives, informing opportunities to re-think (...) suicidality, identity and liveability. Building on recent critical challenges to dominant theories, this article examines some of the ways in which the suicides of marginalised groups are described in social terms, demonstrating how cultural approaches to relationality, aspiration, performativity and mobility can expand current thinking on suicide cause and prevention. (shrink)