Gender and death

Between 1996 and 2002 Mortality published 11 papers which address gender issues. Some make women their focus, others address the relationships between the genders, or make comparisons between them. Some adopt an explicitly feminist perspective; others simply take gender as a variable. Alongside ‘gender’, they address its cross-cutting relationship with age, race or social class. They might seem, therefore, to represent a highly disparate collection. Certainly their methods encompass large-scale quantitative studies, indepth qualitative interviewing, documentary and media analysis and autobiographical ethnography. What links them is the feminist argument that in privileging gender, we acquire a fresh, usually critical perspective. Thus, for example, these papers challenge our understanding of the boundary between life and death, of death ritual and of awareness contexts. They expose the internal networks of family and gender relations, plus the absence of a gender analysis from much historical work. Their scope also reveals the limits of the death studies literature. From anorexia to acting, a gendered perspective opens up new areas for scrutiny, so re-framing our understanding of death and dying. The papers address each phase of the trajectory from illness through death and disposal to bereavement. Elizabeth Young, Michael Bury and Mary Ann Elston[1] use qualitative interviewing to show how identity is negotiated through friendship by dying women. Locating themselves within the informal, domestic, sphere of personal friendships, their work critiques theories of awareness contexts, its alternative perspective revealing the specificity and arbitrariness of apparently universal categories and contexts. Glaser and Strauss’s definitive work on awareness contexts[2] relates to but one context: the institution. Young, Bury and Elston shift the site to the home and demonstrate women’s agency and indeed creativity. Friendships may tend towards either the integration of the impending death, the segregation of that awareness to preserve the existing pattern of intimacy, or the transformation of friendship often via new friendships or ‘friends for death’. Interestingly, in terms of critiquing existing positions, these data reveal the positive role of denial in sustaining an earlier identity. While this work provides a typology of friendship strategies, it avoids reifying these modes of social dying, instead suggesting that acknowledgement of death is a fluctuating aspect of dying women’s friendships. Young, Bury and Elston’s study does not seek to compare the way dying men manage their friendships. However it does reveal friendship as a practice or process rather than a state or status quo and so contributes to one of this collection’s important theoretical positions: that the very category of ‘gender’ Mortality, Virtual Themed Issue