Abstract
Dead women litter the cultural landscapes of the 2000s. Their bodies appear at the beginning of films and television shows, inciting the narratives that follow. The audience might witness a sequence of events leading to the moment of a woman’s violent death; most often the audience sees the aftermath of murder: a woman’s corpse. In an increasing number of cultural products, a dead woman comes back to life, either as a reanimated corpse or as a normally appearing person in a liminal state between life and the afterlife. In other cases—especially in news stories about young women who have disappeared—the dead woman is herself invisible. She has only a spectral presence conveyed through photographs of her when she was alive, repurposed to animate and individualize stories about her death. The dead women in visual texts interact with the living: they look back, talk back, or are championed by those who look and talk back on their behalf. Using examples from three sites across the visual field—film, television, and Internet-mediated news—I make the case that the images and stories of dead women have both a haunting power and a disciplining function.
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Notes
The term comes from Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006).
For analysis of the present-day chattel class of the American and global workforce, see ibid.; Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and
Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). The discourse of disposability was visible a decade earlier during the phase of deregulation and liberalization initiated by the Clinton administration. For example, the US Senate Subcommittee on Labor published a transcript of its hearing on June 15, 1993, under the title “Towards a Disposable Workforce: The Increasing Use of ‘Contingent’ Labor.” In the hearing, Wendy Perkins, author of Temporarily Yours (Google Books/Permanently Collectible, 1989), describes her experiences in the early configuration of “temp labor,” conveying that the disposability of human workers was long in view and desirable from a corporate perspective: “Temps are an invisible work force with the toughest jobs in America and the least amount of respect. They are unrepresented in collective bargaining power to seek greater income stability and work benefits… Management gets rewarded for cost control of the labor force, early retirees, and eliminating full-time jobs to create contingent jobs. They save 30 to 50% for not providing benefits to their workers. Have we created a modern day slave or a flexible, highly skilled worker?” See Towards a Disposable Workforce: The Increasing Use of ‘Contingent’ labor: Hearing before the Subcommittee on labor of the Committee on labor and Human Resources, 113th Cong. 4 (June 15, 1993) (statement of Wendy Perkins).
Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, 2nd ed. (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 194.
See Petra Kuppers, “Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2004): 150.
See Manuel Castells, The Rise of The Network Society (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); and
Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Svetlana Alpers, The Dutch Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xxv.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972).
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 4 (December 1995): 542.
Margaret Dikovitskaya, “An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell,” in Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 238.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What Is Visual Culture?” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9.
Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 63.
Hollywood director Budd Boetticher, quoted in ibid., 19. Film theorist Raymond Bellour makes a similar argument in an interview with Janet Bergstrom. He posits, “It seems to me that the classical American cinema is founded on a systematicity which operates very precisely at the expense of the woman, if one can put it that way, by determining her image, her images, in relation to the desire of the masculine subject who thus defines himself through this determination” Qanet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour—An Excerpt,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley [New York: Routledge, 1988], 195).
Teresa De Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 119. De Lauretis also discusses the cinema as an apparatus that functions to model gender and reproduce gender ideologies in culture, in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 11–15.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (London: Routledge, 1992).
Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20 (Autumn 1987): 187–228.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) helped me to recognize this facet of my own research.
Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
The term “unruly” gains its feminist cachet from Kathleen Rowe, Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
Judith Halberstam, “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance,” Social Text 37 (Winter 1993): 187–201.
Foucault writes, “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, 1979], 201).
Brian Norman, Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 3.
Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), offers a fascinating discussion of the ghost as a figure that powerfully haunts as a means to social justice. Gordon discusses the ghost in relation to Argentina’s desaparecidos (“disappeared”), Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: A Novel (New York: New American Library, 1987), and Sabina Spielrein.
Deborah Jermyn, “You Can’t Keep a Dead Woman Down: The Female Corpse and Textual Disruption in Contemporary Hollywood,” in Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyberspace, ed. Elizabeth Klaver (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 153–168;
Deborah Jermyn, “Women with a Mission: Lynda LaPlante, DCI Jane Tennison and the Reconfiguration of Television Crime Drama,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 46–63.
Mary, the mother of Christ, is the “mother of sorrows.” See Margaret Bruzelius, “Mother’s Pain, Mother’s Voice: Gabriela Mistral, Julia Kristeva, and the Mater Dolorosa,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 215–233.
Isabelle Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasure of Horror Film Viewing (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 6.
Elisabeth Bronfen, “Risky Resemblances: On Representation, Mourning, and Representation,” in Death and Representation, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 19.
Lindsey Steenberg, Forensic Science in Contemporary Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77–79.
Manuel Castells, End of Millenium, rev. ed. (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 135.
Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 76–78.
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy (Seattle: Seal Press, 2004).
Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Guys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008);
Daniel Maurer, Brocabulary: The New Man-i-festo of Dude Talk (New York: Collins Living, 2008).
Both figures from Dustin Harp, “News, Feminist Theories, and the Gender Divide,” in Women, Men and News: Divided and Disconnected in the News Media Landscape, ed. Paula Poindexter, Sharon Meraz, and Amy Schmitz Weiss (New York: Routledge, 2008), 267.
Angela McRobbie, The Afermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (Los Angeles: Sage Books, 2009), 11.
Sue Tait, “Autoptic Vision and the Necrophilic Imaginaryin CSL,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 45–62.
Beth Loffreda, Losing Matthew Shepard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), x.
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© 2014 Joanne Clarke Dillman
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Dillman, J.C. (2014). Introduction. In: Women and Death in Film, Television, and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452283_1
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