Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture: Foreword
Looking at a broader context, Aaron praises our authors for interrogating how women’s deaths are currently conceptualised in visual culture.
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Welcome to MAI 16: Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture
Dear MAI Readers,
Some research projects are published very quickly. Others take more time to come to full fruition. This issue of MAI exemplifies the latter. It was a long time in the making for various reasons. Due to time pressures and the energy demands that neoliberal academia places on many of us, we often fit research, writing, and editing only outside busy workdays. More significantly, some subjects in feminist scholarship require a greater time commitment to allow for in-depth reflection rather than prioritise speedy completion. Certainly, death, which is at the centre of this collection, is one such subject. We often avoid it in our daily conversations, either because it can trigger intrusive anxieties or because we are conditioned to be productive rather than meditative in the global capitalist society. However, we hope that some reflection on death, as present in the work of our contributors here, will feel as strangely rewarding for our readers as it does for us. Approaching a subject that brings discomfort by familiarising ourselves with it can be a process of shedding, crossing emotional boundaries, and achieving mental liberation from fear that often thrives on avoidance.
Guest edited by Devaleena Kundu, Bethan Michael-Fox, and Khyati Tripathi, this collection of essays unexpectedly shows that feminism extends beyond one’s lifespan. Yet, with its focus on dead women and gendered death, it can feel like a demanding read. These articles demonstrate that portrayals of dead women’s bodies have been, to say the least, problematic. Our authors reveal how visual culture can sentimentalise, politicise, or sanitise women’s death. Even though death is unavoidably an integral part of all human experiences, many representations of dead women are still subjected to patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist discourses, while their bodies are exposed to violence or sexualization. Sensitive, caring portrayals appear to be much less frequent.
What’s inside this issue is a reminder of our own mortality and the mortality of others, persons of all genders, whom we need to respect and represent with dignity. We, therefore, invite you, to find some time, not to erase and turn away from death, but to think how reflection on its more considerate future representations can steer care—not only palliative care for the terminally ill, but genuine compassion and support for communities affected by death—and respectful treatment of human bodies at the end of their life journey without gendering, racialising or any other form of discrimination.
If, as a feminist community, we stand for and in solidarity with anyone oppressed as they live, our authors in this issue remind us that our support must extend to the time of death and beyond it. The moment of one’s dying does not free us from our feminist duty. It is a feminist responsibility to advocate for the just and fair treatment of the deceased, be it in our proximity or in various zones of conflict around the globe. As much as we may find it uncomfortable or upsetting to face representations of gendered death discussed here, in a somewhat surprising way, this collection of essays is also a reclaiming of feminist empathy for human suffering and respect for all people that is so needed in the world today.
With care and warmest wishes,
Anna Misiak (Falmouth, UK) & Houman Sadri (Gothenburg, Sweden)
May 2026
Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture
Three guest editors discuss how the articles collected here invite readers to rethink the politics of looking, mourning, and remembering.
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Caught Between Slides of Screen
This short film demonstrates how posthuman feminisms and new materialism can disrupt practices which commercialise immortality.
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Death Without Dying: Invisible Depictions of Black Women’s Death on Film
Focusing on the ‘dying mothers sub-genre’, the two authors ponder the meaning of Black women’s bodies’ absence in film.
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Forests, Fear, and Femicide: Images of Unbelonging in Rural Noir Visuals
Black argues that visuals in rural noir texts tend to exploit forests and green spaces as malevolent mise-en-scène to femicide.
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Motherhood, Gendered Death & Violence in Netflix series You
Gardner and Miller argue that women’s fate in the Netflix series You depends on their status as ‘good’ mothers, lovers, and wives.
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A Little Beautiful Garden: Between Woods, Between Worts, Between Daily Lights
This creative article uses a fragmented structure to echo narratives of those whose lives were affected by femicide and gendered violence.
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The Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman
Pedersen demonstrates how Whiteness shapes the trope of the beautiful dead girl/woman and how it has been used to privilege white victims.
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Imagining Her Death: Cinematic Othering of the Absent Muse
Arguing that women in cinema bear rather than make meaning, Lake asks what happens when a woman’s death is unseen.
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In His Arms: Exploring the ‘Women in Refrigerators’ Trope on Screen
Comparing two deaths of female characters in superhero media, Stephens explores the relationship between embodied death and identity.
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Queering Aqua and Flora in John Everett Millais & John William Waterhouse
Golovchenko offers a queer reconsideration of two Pre-Raphaelite paintings through their symbolism of water, vegetation, and the female body.
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Drowned & Torn: Fantasies of the Female Corpse in the Victorian Gothic
Cline examines the negrophilic desires of the ‘Vampire of Montparnasse’ as an illustration of the Gothic fetish for women’s deaths.
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Helpless Women vs. the Big Bad in Chinese Wartime Propaganda
Price explores how images of dead women were used in government propaganda during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
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Henry Darger’s The Vivian Girls: Femininity, Dark Play & Death
Widegren explores death and childhood femininity when the ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger’s work on girls is transformed into a play.
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Gender Paradox: Representing Female Suicide in Modern European Cinema
Analysing European female-directed films, Horner compares cinematic representations of women’s suicide with clinical literature.
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Collapsing the Frame: Dead White Women in Nocturnal Animals
Using poetic performance, Swingler shows how dead white women in Nocturnal Animals are haunted by colonial and extractivist violence.
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A Mother’s Job is Never Done: The Trope of the Kept Corpse
Deboeck investigates the trope of the kept mother’s corpse and how, despite the maternal blame, it resists the male gaze.
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Atkinson Grimshaw’s Sleeping Beauties: Objectifying the Female Corpse
Guiol analyses the objectifying representations of Tennysonian heroines in the works of Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw.
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Living Dead Things: The Wilful Female Corpse in Antichrist and Midsommar
Hall explores how spectral images of female corpses in Antichrist and Midsommar depict a persistent and wilful refusal to remain buried.
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Feminist Necropoetics: The Female Corpse in Oda sa Wala (2018).
Freibert explores how Dwein Baltazar’s Oda sa Wala (2018) cultivates themes of collectivity across the life-death divide.
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The Dead Girl Formula: Ophelia and Sharon Tate
Byington links images of Ophelia’s death to Sharon Tate’s fandom to show how both echo anxieties about mortality and the post-Anthropocene.
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A Dead Woman Talking: Gendered Agonic Retrospect in Two Brazilian Films
A comparison of two films in which the voices of dead women question death as the ultimate silencing during the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil.
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The Impossible Women on TV
Reading Hoerl’s book, Sweet follows the author to lament that TV makers favour neoliberal feminism over collective feminist politics.
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Thinking about Feminist Memes
Agreeing with MacDonald that social media is a site of feminist resistance, Casey praises her book as a research inspiration.
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Beyond the Maternal Ideal: The Cinema of Crushing Motherhood
Acknowledging Landry’s focus on the dark side of motherhood in films, Maynard recommends her book as a timely contribution to research.
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WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey