Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture

by: Devaleena Kundu , Bethan Michael-Fox & Khyati Tripathi , March 24, 2026

This focus issue emerged from a shared desire amongst the editors, all of whom work within the interdisciplinary academic field of Death Studies, to interrogate the constructs that shape representations of gendered death in visual culture. We reside in a world saturated with images of death. As Anthony Elliott observes, death is ‘on show’ everywhere (Elliott 2018: 118), from news media to fictional drama. Keith Durkin’s observation that popular culture is ‘fraught with thanatological content,’ whilst privileging violent death and denying ordinary dying (Durkin 2003: 47), draws attention to ways that death is often presented in sensationalised form in visual cultures. Geoffrey Gorer’s (1955) essay on the ‘Pornography of Death’, popularly cited within the field of Death Studies, identifies a cultural tendency to aestheticise and eroticise death while suppressing its natural and social dimensions. As Vidal and Blanco (2014) similarly note, alongside the spectacle of fictional death, many are haunted by more frightening realities of dying through cancer, heart disease, and the protracted decline of old age, which are less prominent in visual cultures despite their prominence in our lives. This challenging dichotomy is encapsulated in what Michele Aaron (2014) calls the ‘necropolitical grammar’ of mainstream cinema, where death is everywhere and nowhere at once, omnipresent in dramatics, yet absent in mundane realities (if you are interested in Aaron’s body of work, you can hear a full interview about her research here – Aaron 2025). As Aaron (2014: 1) argues, the ‘pain or smell of death, the banality of physical, or undignified decline, the dull ache of mourning, are rarely seen’ on screen. Instead, the deaths audiences are presented with are often violent, dramatic, and highly gendered (Burfoot & Lord 2006).

The sexualisation and objectification of women in death is a longstanding subject of debate. The deaths of women and of minoritised genders can be especially ‘difficult’ (Coleclough, Michael-Fox and Visser 2023), with some women’s deaths becoming highly sensationalised and attracting global attention, whilst others go unremarked. This dichotomy is tied to intersectional politics and myriad inequalities, and to the ways in which, as Aaron (2014: 7) notes, ‘geography, race, class, gender, age and so on determine our proximity to death’. So, when the dead body is on show in a global visual economy that privileges what Jacobsen (2021) calls spectacular death, it is often the corpse of a woman. As death becomes a site where femininity is negotiated in ways that make its passivity in death appealing, it is important to ask if the visuality of female death reaffirms something (purity, victimhood, control?) that it is turned towards recurrently. Strategised and staged visual representations of women’s death aim to challenge the ordinary or mundane corporeality of death, bringing the spectacular to audiences and giving them a subtle push to experience the extraordinary, where the female body remains a fertile ground for violent tricks and grotesque displays. The dead female corpse, in its visual representation, is intended to be agency-less and an entity to be dissected visually. As opposed to the extraordinary deaths, there are silenced deaths that remain hidden because of their perceived impotence to reproduce the needed extravisual.

Berger (1972) argues that the ‘ideal’ spectator is typically assumed to be male, and the much theorised ‘male gaze’ shapes how gendered death is represented and consumed. As bell hooks writes, often ‘the death that captures the public imagination … is passionate, sexualised, glamorised and violent’ (2021 [1994]). Consequently, the female figure is often rendered as a passive recipient of male fantasy, rarely seen as a ‘maker of meaning’ (Mulvey 1975). As Bronfen (1992: 121) argues, whilst ‘woman is the visual sign, she is not a straightforward signifier’. A female body is thus surrounded by a polycontextuality of meanings through her appearance, presence, and performance, and resists being confined to a fixed, stable meaning. Its visuality is often fluid and slippery, directed and mediated by the context, the viewer, or the medium. Depictions of dead women often provoke a mediated intimacy that can elicit outrage, vulnerability, or voyeuristic pleasure, whilst also being assumed to maintain a safe psychic and physical distance for the viewer due to being accorded representational, rather than ‘real’, status.

Meaning-making of the tangible and intangible occurs within a culture directed by our everyday repertoire of meaning construction and assimilation. The meanings ascribed to female bodies remain contingent on the cultural constructions of collective reality, with a potential for striking shifts or transitions. Holmstrom (2017: 214), on artistic representation of female autopsy bodies, turns the focus on the eroticisation of female bodies after a ‘dramatic arrival’ of the dissected female body in artwork in the late eighteenth century, before which there was only an all-consuming interest in male cadavers and male anatomists. Representations of the female corpse have been of interest to scholars, in particular feminist scholars, in a range of fields and disciplines, including death studies, film studies, television studies, gender studies, art history, psychoanalytic studies and more. This is in part because of the increasing proliferation of images of dead women in our mediatised society, and partly because images of dead women and their attendant socio-political meanings can be identified in so many different cultural contexts. In the US, Foltyn has examined the place of the female body in fashion and advertising, using terms such as ‘corpse porn’ and ‘corpse chic’. She argues that the twenty-first century is ‘the corpse’s cultural moment’, with magazines that feature ‘striking, eroticised tableaux of ‘cadavers’ modeling clothing’ (Foltyn 2008: 165). That ‘graves and/or corpses’ was one of the recurring motifs in America’s Next Top Model, one of the longest-running TV shows, goes to show how glamorised depictions of death and the dead body, particularly the female body, are enticing to the popular imaginary. In India, scholars have commented on women’s bodies being tightly bound up with community honour (Das 2007), and M. Elise Marrubio has analysed depictions of dead Native American women in film, demonstrating that ‘the cinematic beauty of film can either overshadow or emphasise the very real racist and sexist agendas of the film narrative iconography’ (2016: ix). Helen Wheatley points out that often ‘the corpse is rendered the spectacular object of a simultaneously fascinated and appalled gaze’ (2021). Both Joanne Clarke Dillman (2014) and Ruth Penfold-Mounce (2016) argue that visual representations of dead women are naturalising. Dillman identifies the proliferation of dead women on screen in the 2000s (and beyond) as being connected to profound ambivalence about women’s changing roles in society. She shows that screen representations depicting dead women often ‘feed on the expendability of women’ globally (2014: 123). Penfold-Mounce (2016) states that the rise in TV ‘Crime Porn’ effectively glamorises and normalises violence against women. The highly gendered visual politics of death raises questions about spectatorship, the communal act of seeing/witnessing and the socio-cultural factors catalysing the proliferation of such content.

With over twenty submissions, including a podcast episode, video, experimental and visual essays and traditional academic articles, this issue brings together contributions that explore gendered death as a discursive site through which themes of sexual objectification, Othering, voyeurism, agency, and resistance are negotiated. The submissions prompt us to ask: Why are death representations so heavily gendered? How do we react to the death of women in visual culture? What are the factors warranting the glamorisation and sexualisation of female death? How are gendered bodies claimed in death? What sociocultural ideologies are embedded in the interweaving of death, femininity, and sex? Do women and queer bodies exercise agency in death, or are they perpetually pinned to the status of vulnerable victims? In engaging with these questions, the issue challenges dominant norms of representation and invites readers to rethink the politics of looking, mourning, and remembering.

The contributions span time, geography, and medium, exploring Pre-Raphaelite painting and Victorian Gothic literature, Chinese wartime propaganda, Brazilian dictatorship-era cinema, contemporary streaming series and more. Several contributions feature an element of autobiography with visual and poetic submissions that negotiate the challenges of occupying a cultural climate in which dead women’s bodies are encountered with ease and prompt uneasy feelings. Despite their varied contexts, there are clear themes: the fetishisation of dead women, the invisibility and erasure of female death in a culture where a political failure to tackle femicide sits alongside its frequent popular cultural representation, the use of female death to propel male character arcs, and the portrayal of nature as a site of violated femininity. For example, Ana Patiño and Maria Karushina’s experimental essay uses the exquisite corpse form to explore power and voice in a garden setting, and Trish Black’s creative-critical essay explores rural noir texts, in which forests become malevolent mise-en-scènes, and the female corpse is cultivated as a site of social control.

Spectrality, haunting, and haunted bodies are recurring themes. Jenny Swingler’s poetic writing interrogates scenes of dead white women in nature as colonial hauntings. Farrah Freibert’s analysis of Oda sa Wala explores feminist necropoetics in Philippine cinema, while Alex Hall examines spectral female corpses in Antichrist and Midsommar as disobedient and wilful. Stacey Pitsillides and Ellen Sampson draw on posthuman feminisms to critique algorithmic immortality and the flattening of womanhood through the AI gaze, with a video and accompanying written submission. Several submissions interrogate historical, political and racialised dimensions of gendered death. Emily D. Ryalls and Jillian Tullis examine the absence of Black women’s bodies in film, while Enakshi Samarawickrama and Bushra Naqashbandi analyse the sexualised death of Isabel Aretas in Bad Boys for Life. Beth Price explores how images of dead women were used in Chinese wartime propaganda to incite nationalist sentiment, and Livia Lima examines gendered death in Brazilian cinema under dictatorship.

The maternal corpse is also a recurring motif in this focus issue. Lynn Deboeck investigates the ‘kept corpse’ trope in horror and crime genres, while Eleanore Gardner and Alyson Miller analyse popular Netflix series You, showing how women’s fates hinge on their roles as mothers and lovers. Historical visual culture is explored in Clémentine Guiol’s analysis of Grimshaw’s Victorian paintings and Margaryta Golovchenko’s queer ecological reading of Millais and Waterhouse. Emily Cline examines necrophilic fantasies in Victorian Gothic, while Danielle Byington traces posthuman parallels between Ophelia and Sharon Tate. Megan Stephens analyses the ‘women in refrigerators’ trope in superhero narratives, and Kaitlin Lake’s study of cinematic aposiopesis and the absent muse, and Kierran Horner’s comparison of female suicide in European cinema with clinical literature. Kajsa Widegren explores the transformation of Henry Darger’s girl-heroines into theatrical performance, interrogating tensions between death, childhood femininity, and outsider art.

As Metz (1982) observes, there is often an ‘active complicity’ between the spectator and the spectacle, and as Michael-Fox and Visser (2022) have emphasised, representations of dead women are often imbricated in the complexities of both complicity and critique. This issue invites readers to critically examine both potential critique and potential complicity, and to challenge the exhibitionistic representations of gendered death. Whilst Zimmerman and Rodin (2019) remind us that changing attitudes alone cannot address the structural conditions of dying in late capitalist societies, paying close attention to the representational politics of gender and death can, we believe, further efforts to make change. We thank our contributors for their work and for their patience as this issue, a perhaps odd ‘labour of love’ given its focus, has slowly moved toward completion. We also thank the editorial team at MAI for their support, and Professor Michele Aaron for her incisive foreword. An accompanying episode of The Death Studies Podcast features conversations with the editors and contributors, offering further insight into the debates and approaches that inform this issue. Through both written and spoken texts, the focus issue seeks to foster a deeper understanding of the intersections between gender, death, and visual culture, to provoke new questions about the politics of looking and mourning, and the ethics of remembering. We hope this issue provokes reflection on the politics of representation and encourages new ways of engaging with the visual culture of death, dying, and the dead.