Intimate Deathscapes: Examining Alternative Discourses of the Dead Body and Death Care Spaces

Abstract

Over the last two centuries Western death care has undergone a gradual process of defeminization, professionalization, and medicalization. It has also grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry and is now facing criticism for practices that are financially exploitive, environmentally harmful, and contribute to the invisibilization of death. Over the last decade, alternative understandings of death and death care practices have begun to emerge in response to these criticisms. Some of these alternative understandings come from death care workers who espouse the benefits of engaging with death. In this thesis I examine the spaces of the dead body and death care spaces, which I refer to as intimate deathscapes. To consider the formation of subjectivities and knowledge production within intimate deathscapes, this thesis examines three autobiographies from death care workers (Doughty, 2014; Nadle, 2006; Wilde, 2017). The authors make compelling claims about the positive influence that can come from more engagement with death, which differ significantly from dominant discourses that pathologize death and cloak it in negativity and fear. Alternatively, they propose embracing mortality as a way of improving one’s life. I conclude that their material engagement with dead bodies, as represented in these texts, effects an epistemic shift in relation to death. Employing a material feminist framework, I argue that the spatiality and materiality of deathscapes influences the formation of subjectivities, and it is the relational and emergent subjectivities of the living and agencies of the dead that together produce an alternative knowledge about death, and consequently life. This knowledge contests the pathologization of the dead body and instead considers the potentially beneficial effects of more engagement with death. Therefore, in arguing that deathscapes are spaces from which these alternative death epistemologies can emerge, I echo challenges to dominant death care practices and support emerging discourses that propose more robust communication about death and call for changes to death care as a means toward more meaningful engagement in intimate deathscapes.