Women and Death in Film, Television, and News

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 1-23

3. Film Narratives, Dead Women, and Their Meaning in a Changing World

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 25-53

4. Family Films Gone Terribly Wrong

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 55-82

5. Television Narratives and Dead Women

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 83-123

6. News-Mediated Narratives of Disappearance

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 125-147

7. Conclusion

   • Joanne Clarke Dillman

   Pages 149-156

8. Back Matter

   Pages 157-207

   PDF

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

• Women
• death
• images
• violence
• media
• corpses
• television
• film
• news
• women

“Women and Death in Film, Television and News analyzes the significance of images of dead female bodies across multiple texts, namely film, television and newspaper. … the analysis provides a convincing argument for the power of images and successfully articulates the relationship between images of dead women in the 2000s and the cultural environment in which they are produced.” (Jennifer Huemmer, Communication Booknotes Quarterly, Vol. 46 (4), October-December, 2015)

"This is a powerful work of immeasurable importance, a book which calls out our contemporary media culture for the insidious manner in which it has come to so effortlessly co-opt the bodies of dead women for our entertainment. Clarke Dillman compellingly charts the ubiquity of such representations and unpacks how they drip-feed us a relentless affirmation of the disposability of women within the misogynistic discourses of the twenty-first century. A shrewd, provoking, and truly overdue book." - Deborah Jermyn, University of Roehampton, UK and author of Crime Watching (2006) and Prime Suspect (2010).

"Clarke Dillman's book intelligently explores an extremely timely and worthwhile subject: the recurring images of brutalized and often murdered women across a wide range of media subjects and venues in contemporary representation. Clarke Dillman steadily, consistently, and persuasively builds her case that the dead, often murdered, woman has become crucial to narratives in the post-9/11 moment, allowing them to address a hovering sense of loss through the allegory of the dead/murdered woman. By analyzing a wide range of texts, she ultimately offers an exhaustive and persuasive case for the disturbing centrality of the dead/murdered woman in visual representation." - David Greven, University of South Carolina, USA and author of Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema (2011)

Joanne Clarke Dillman is Lecturer in Communication Arts and Culture at the University of Washington, Tacoma, USA.

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