Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead but Not Gone [Hardcover]

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.1. Introduction 2. Film Narratives, Dead Women, and Their Meaning in a Changing World 3. Family Films Gone Terribly Wrong: The Lovely Bones (2009) and Disturbia (2007) 4. Television Narratives and Dead Women: Channelling Change 5. News-Mediated Narratives of Disappearance: Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, and Conventions of Dead Women in the News Conclusion

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).