I'd like a dead woman with that, please
Bopping into Albertson's last night, I was amazed but not surprised to see an eroticized female corpse featured on the news rack. Maybe I should say I was surprised but not amazed. Even after all these years of documenting my culture's love affair with beautiful dead women, I'm still a little taken aback at just how common these images are.
Anyway, I snapped a shot of her so she could be added to my growing flickr archive. Here you go.
Why do these representations proliferate in a democracy predicated upon equality? Well for one thing we've not yet gotten past our sexist belief that it's only the men who are created equal. Women are another species entirely. And so these fetishized corpses help position the female as "other," in Simone de Beauvoir's terminology, something that exists separate from normal humanity. It's no accident that we were completely left out of the earth-shattering Declaration that all men are created equal. In that liberating document, “men” does not mean me.
This image, like hundreds of thousands of others that represent the female as an object, construct the viewer as male. For what's my relationship to this fetishized object? Am I supposed to identify with her? I'd rather not, all things considered, and so I am forced to become in effect a man who is gazing at the mortal chaos of femininity. Since most of our representations in this media-saturated culture replicate the same sexist dynamic, most women tend to identify against our own position as woman, forcing us into a kind of schizo relationship to self. I'm not man, goes the argument, but I am certainly not that thing either, so I must be something else, not sure what, but something else.
For this very reason many of us females "side" with male culture against women, hating feminism, the only civil rights movement in a nation predicated on civil rights which expressly defends woman's rights. It would be impossible to understand this rejection of our own independence movement were I not familiar with how our identity has been affected by living in a male-dominated society. This hesitancy to identify with the "female" also accounts for why so many of us have uttered the phrase "I don't really like women." Again it would be crazy for a female to say this since she's in effect saying "I don't like myself," but actually she's referring to that Thing that we are all told women are. I don't want to see myself as helpless, idiotic, silent, stupid, dead, nor do millions of the rest of us, and so we turn on "woman," fearing that if we become one, our human potential will be forever curtailed. Better side with men and make fun of women. It’s safer.
At the same time there's myriad pressures to be "her," to look pleasing, be cooperative, not have power except the power to draw the male gaze. We are allowed to desire as long as what we desire is to be the object of desire. Welcome to the bizarre world of the female. I'd better make you look at me or else I don't matter, but when you do look, you see me only for my use value and deride me for my vanity.
See why I loved finding feminism? It offers a route out of this madness.
Finally, we represent females not only as objects but as dead objects because for one thing the most objectified a human can become is to be a corpse. Corpses both are and are not human beings, pieces of garbage yet poignantly familiar. So a dead woman titillates us with her proximity to humanity and yet her always already outside positionality, a perfect example of the Other. Also, as death became less and less familiar to Westerners, with the medicalization of illness and the handling of bodies by professionals, we grew more and more likely to represent it as beautiful. Since women=beauty for us, then a beautiful corpse needs to be sexed as female.
Also, as in this latest image, the suggestion of violent death comforts us insofar as it's well removed from the way most of us will die--of old age. Sexy, violent youthful female death thus permits a massive cultural fantasy that mortality is actually the fate of the "other," not us; we're immortalized by our position opposite to the helpless female corpse. JonBenet anyone? How about A Walk to Remember? Saw both of those representations of beautiful dead females on t.v. yesterday, as well as seeing the Black Dahlia ad later on at the grocery.
And people tell me this is my obsession! Believe me, the LA Times wasn't responding to my pleas when they decided to put the picture of a dead woman on the newsstand. Nor did the book author, publishing house, screenwriter, producer, director or movie studio take suggestions from me in creating this project. I'd be more than happy to see these images go away. Meanwhile I am still waiting for a publisher for my book, which is about refusing to become the perfect corpse.