Looking at a broader context, Aaron praises our authors for interrogating how women’s deaths are currently conceptualised in visual culture.

Three guest editors discuss how the articles collected here invite readers to rethink the politics of looking, mourning, and remembering.

This short film demonstrates how posthuman feminisms and new materialism can disrupt practices which commercialise immortality.

Focusing on the ‘dying mothers sub-genre’, the two authors ponder the meaning of Black women’s bodies’ absence in film.

Black argues that visuals in rural noir texts tend to exploit forests and green spaces as malevolent mise-en-scène’s to femicide.

Gardner and Miller argue that women’s fate in the Netflix series You depends on their status as ‘good’ mothers, lovers, and wives.

This creative article uses a fragmented structure to echo narratives of those whose lives were affected by femicide and gendered violence.

Pedersen demonstrates how Whiteness shapes the trope of the beautiful dead girl/woman and how it has been used to privilege white victims.

Arguing that women in cinema bear rather than make meaning, Lake asks what happens when a woman’s death is unseen.

Comparing two deaths of female characters in superhero media, Stephens explores the relationship between embodied death and identity.

Golovchenko offers a queer reconsideration of two Pre-Raphaelite paintings through their symbolism of water, vegetation, and the female body.

This article illustrates how Isabel Aretas in Bad Boys for Life, before and after her death, is constructed for male visual pleasure.

Cline examines the negrophilic desires of the ‘Vampire of Montparnasse’ as an illustration of the Gothic fetish for women’s deaths.

Price explores how images of dead women were used in government propaganda during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Widegren explores death and childhood femininity when the ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger’s work on girls is transformed into a play.

Analysing European female-directed films, Horner compares cinematic representations of women’s suicide with clinical literature.

Using poetic performance, Swingler shows how dead white women in Nocturnal Animals are haunted by colonial and extractivist violence.

Deboeck investigates the trope of the kept mother’s corpse and how, despite the maternal blame, it resists the male gaze.

Guiol analyses the objectifying representations of Tennysonian heroines in the works of Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw.

Hall explores how spectral images of female corpses in Antichrist and Midsommar depict a persistent and wilful refusal to remain buried.

Freibert explores how Dwein Baltazar’s Oda sa Wala (2018) cultivates themes of collectivity across the life-death divide.

Byington links images of Ophelia’s death to Sharon Tate’s fandom to show how both echo anxieties about mortality and the post-Anthropocene.

The author shows how, in the 1970s, two Cinema Novo directors used stories of dead women to convey criticism of the Brazilian dictatorship.

Reading Hoerl’s book, Sweet follows the author to lament that TV makers favour neoliberal feminism over collective feminist politics.

Agreeing with MacDonald that social media is a site of feminist resistance, Casey praises her book as a research inspiration.

Acknowledging Landry’s focus on the dark side of motherhood in films, Maynard recommends her book as a timely contribution to research.