Women and Death in Film, Television, and News

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. Films, television shows, and news reports are saturated with images of dead female bodies, women being murdered, women who have come back from the dead, disappeared women who are presumed to be dead, and women threatened with death. Compared to ea [...]
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Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. Films, television shows, and news reports are saturated with images of dead female bodies, women being murdered, women who have come back from the dead, disappeared women who are presumed to be dead, and women threatened with death. Compared to earlier decades, images of dead women are much more graphic and sensationalized in these contemporary, mainstream cultural products. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts. Across the visual field, the bodies of dead women have both a haunting power and a disciplining function that can be seen but not stated as such. Although many of the visual texts gesture to and acknowledge feminist gains, their use of images of dead women has the symbolic effect of forcing women's immobilization while also reaffirming constraints on women within still powerful patriarchal structures.