Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture: Foreword

by: Michele Aaron , March 26, 2026

In an age of #MeToo, the manosphere and Epstein-mania, the enabling of violence against women has never felt quite so exposed, so out in the open, or so flourishing in the shadowlands. Social media has a huge role to play here, but this—this public/private punishment of women—is an old story, the oldest perhaps. Woman is beauty, and most beautiful in her self-sacrifice. She is desirable, and most desirable in her lack of innocence. She is innocent, and most innocent in her death. She is irresistible, sinful, and defiant. She must be controlled, curtailed, and castigated. Eve. Lucretia. Shafilea. Virginia. To name a few. I’m getting a little carried away, but the point here is this: the story of a woman’s relationship to death is the story of the world, of then, of now, of always, of still.  2025’s launch of ‘All in’, a global initiative to end violence against women, pinned its hopes, like so many international feminist collectives, on that ‘always’ being undoable. Likewise, proliferating analyses of the structures sustaining such story-telling—which the issue that follows so richly adds to— give shape to the contours of this world and in so doing also shed light on and, crucially, in the shadowlands and the networks of impunity, complacency and disavowal that sustain them. 

Visual culture has long been at the forefront of reflecting-shaping women’s worth and the impositions and contradictions determining it. In the simplest terms, when illness gets the better of Judith (Bette Davis) at the end of Dark Victory (Edward Goulding, 1936) or when Lucy (Gillian Anderson) takes her lethal dose in The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000), their beautiful deaths confirm and redeem, celebrate and censure, the women’s waywardness. But I’m reminded particularly of Greta Schröder’s Ellen Hutter in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). No doubt, and to continue my symbolism, this is because the woman’s self-sacrifice in this film combines with an unusual nod to her self-knowledge and/as knowingness that both exposes and extinguishes the monster through, of all things, the casting of light. The markedly beautiful and innocent Ellen anticipates that the vampire, Count Ortok (Max Schreck), will be unable to quell his appetite for her. He does indeed feast upon her blood for far too long, beyond the day’s first rays, and his immortality, his always, is undone, and the world is saved. But the racialisation, the proto-necropolitics, of the film’s mortal economies is even more important. The antisemitic stylisation of the Count’s face and frame speaks both to Dracula’s status as ‘dark other’ vis-à-vis immigration and xenophobia in the source text’s Victorian England, but also to the growing hostility to the Jew in fin-de-siecle and the first decades of the 20th century, Europe. The Jew, it should be remembered, was perverse in both his racial and sexual deviance (Halberstam, 1995). Indeed, the two were often figured, and figured on film, as inseparable (Aaron, 2000), as they are in Nosferatu. He, too, must be punished.

Ellen, however, is not Judith or Lucy. In contrast to them, but especially to the racially marked Count, and the specific fears of 1920s Germany that he represented, she bears no other symbolic weight, beyond the woman’s burden that is. But Judith and Lucy, like Delaroche’s Lady Jane Grey (1833) and Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2) before them, are paragons of ‘white’ womanhood, luminescent in their virtue in or through death. Judith and Lucy’s to-be-deadness is inherited, distilled and enshrined in the exquisite and reverberating Eurocentric stagings of their demise. There is no comparable staging of black women’s deaths in Hollywood (and little beyond). Like Judith and Lucy, Annie (Juanita Moore) gets a dignified departure in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), but the scene favours simplicity over symbolism and centres the experience of Lana Turner’s ‘Miss Lora’ throughout. But it is some of Queen Latifah’s key roles that tell us much of what we need to know about the West’s/Global North’s cultural grammar for expressing black death. In Last Holiday (Wayne Wang, 2006), the only fiction film—English-language or otherwise that I am aware of—about a black woman with cancer, never mind a terminal diagnosis, Latifah plays Georgina Byrd, who actually ends up not having cancer at all. No sorrowful black death here either then (hooks, 1994). In Set it Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996) however, as cleaner-come-bank robber Cleo, she goes out in a blaze of glory or at least on her terms, and in an unusually moving scene full of melodrama and martyrdom and including cuts to her crying girlfriend watching the televised event. After an OJ-echoing chase along the LA highways, Cleo is encircled by multiple police cars and has an excess of guns trained upon her, but chooses instead to drive through them. Peppered with bullets, her car comes to a final stop, but still she gets out and fires back. There’s no freeze frame here to dignify her demise: she’s no Thelma or Louise, Butch Cassidy or Sundance. Instead, in seeming slow-motion, we see her body struck and jolted by endless rounds of bullets. This perverse, macabre quasi-dance recalls the similar exit of Bonnie and Clyde: an orgiastic overkill of firepower reserved for the sexually free. While we don’t see Bonnie and Clyde’s killers, the extreme number of officers surrounding and shooting Clea speaks to the enormity of the (queer black female) threat she represents.   

The ‘to-be-deadness’ of the woman joins the ‘dead-already-ness’ of the racial other, which is epitomised by Count Ortak but echoes down the decades in mainstream film, television and media’s doomed villains or victims of diverse or marginalised national, ethnic or cultural identities, including Cleo. Together, these two formulations, or mortal economies, provide the blueprint for ‘modern’ visual culture’s inscription of human worth along gendered, racialised, and always also wider normative lines. They, at most, determine or, at least, frame whose lives matter and whose do not. This is the legacy and practice of coloniality, and while visual culture is shaped by it with varying degrees of compliance or complexity, visual culture also provides the main venue for imagining ways out. Both TJ Cuthand’s tongue-in-cheek short Reclamation (2018) and Kamal Al Jafari’s mesmerising Recollection (2013), for example, build post-colonised, post-catastrophe worlds in which native, queer, and Palestinian life is revitalised and re-centred. But as the following essays demonstrate, the undoing of visual culture’s deathly logics takes many forms. These run from exposing its structures and cultural specificities—that lethal, if only, shedding of light—to responding to or creating texts that enact or invite, if not insist upon, new terms of engagement with gendered, necropolitical, death. These new terms intervene in the then-and-now of visual culture’s relationship to death, but also, crucially, in its future.