“There’s just no ritual in it anymore. People die and we throw them on a conveyor belt of sorts – body bag, casket, ground. Or the crematorium. Either way, it’s about getting it done quickly and efficiently as possible, not about grieving and processing that a death has happened. The funeral homes, they all say they’re about dignity and respect, but in reality, they’re just an assembly line” (emphasis my own).
-Mod Mortician
It is estimated that every minute, more than one hundred people die in the United States (Xu et al., 2018). These deaths are not just sources of grief for those close to the deceased, but also represent the potential for high profit, underpinning a funeral industry that is worth over $15 billion annually and averages $7,360 per funeral (NFDA, 2018). These numbers are only expected to climb as the American population greys, drawing increased attention from venture capitalists and pension funds looking to cash in on a growing business that historically has been considered to be low-risk and high-margin. However, this burgeoning market is not all rosy, becoming the central object of a debate over how intensified commercialization and corporatization of funeral homes have deeply informed the development of modern mortuary traditions – some arguing that they have turned death into an assembly line in an ever-evolving pursuit to address the enduringly modern problem of dealing with the dead (Aries, 1975).
Of course, discontent with the relationship between death and commodification is nothing new. Activist and author Jessica Mitford, whose 1963 book The American Way of Death became a bestseller for its brash takedown of funeral directors’ egregious (and often illegal) practices of lying and overcharging for unnecessary services, was one of the first to famously take notice of this tension. Taking place during the post-WWII boom that enabled a burgeoning middle class to spend more on arrangements, funerals had quickly become the third largest expense for most families in their lifetime (following only a house and car). This had been made possible, Mitford concluded, because funeral directors had perpetrated “a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public” (Mitford, 2000). She argued that the professionalization of funeral directing had brought along with it the worst parts of capitalism, seeing death as an opportunity solely for profit and exploiting grieving families who were unable to make rational consumer choices. This expose inspired activism that eventually achieved some success to reign in the industry’s darker impulses, such as requiring funeral homes to make their pricing lists publicly available. However, with little government oversight and a partial dismantlement of federal regulations in the 1980s that were spearheaded by neoliberals and conservatives to discredit the social justice gains of the 1960s, many of Mitford’s critiques still remain relevant today.
The funeral market has drastically changed in the ensuing decades, undergoing processes of liberalization alongside demands for transparency from what some have begun to call “Big Death” or the “McFuneralHome.” Taking place largely out of the public eye, it has become increasingly corporatized in the last twenty years, with major mergers consolidating the market and larger firms purchasing local family-run funeral homes. This has been accompanied by the privatization of cemeteries (especially in smaller locales), as state budgets have downsized the reach and resources of governmental cemetery boards. In turn, these changes have deeply affected what services are offered, with many operations selling bundles that often include medically unnecessary procedures and are aimed at streamlining profits by commodifying how much one cared for the deceased. In a 2017 pricing study, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that since the mid 1980s, producer prices for burial caskets increased more than twice as fast as producer prices for all commodities (Bureau of Labor, 2017).
Image source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2017)
These practices have also come with serious environmental costs, as toxic chemicals and waste from embalming, burial, and fire cremation have turned mortuary sites and cemeteries into what the World Health Organization has come to call a “special type of landfill.” Furthermore, the heavy land and water use of maintaining crisp, green memorial plots typical of many modern cemeteries has also become a growing concern. This state of affairs is vastly different from the relatively simple home funerals of past generations, reflecting a worrisome trend of unsustainable growth.
The funeral industry has also undergone significant transformation as social, religious, and technological change have threatened to turn the progression of traditional business models on their head. Consumer demand and knowledge are profoundly different today – as one activist told me in a conversation about death and the Internet, “Families are simply better-informed and no longer always do what they are told or pay whatever they are asked.” This is a part of what some called a democratization of death, with more and more people questioning the logics and rationale of modern funerals that cater to the wants and needs of affluent white individuals. Responding to innovations and institutions that removed the presence of death from everyday American affairs in the past century (Farrell, 1980), death activism in this vein underlines how Big Death is a critical part of deathworlds fundamentally structured by social formations of power. These perspectives are informed by lived experience within marginalized communities for whom death is a more present threat, arguing that neoliberal commodity markets have seeped into all forms of meaning making around death and divested it of ritual and sacredness. Recalling Lauren Berlant’s “good life genres” and the fantasies they sustain despite deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions, there is growing recognition that distributions of death are uneven, contradictory, and often absurd; and that many cannot buy into either genres of good life or good death (Berlant, 2011). This attending to the remains of social abandonment and structural violence that produce “good” deaths and “bad” deaths hopes instead for more accessible futures, fighting back against what what many scholars historically have called the Western “death denial” thesis. Broadly fashioned, death denial is theorized as a continuous turning away from death that denies emotion and connection in the grieving process and has been theorized to characterize Western societies beginning in the last century (Aries, 1975; Dollimore, 2013). While its causes, breadth, and effects are hotly debated, death denial can be located in various contexts such as death sequestration, the management of dying by experts, and the decline in formal, community-inspired rituals and attachments. Together these trends act to hide illness and dying so that others are “free to concentrate on the problems of living” (Seale, 1998).
New forms of engagement with mortality and internment have also partially led to a diversified market. One can find caskets for sale at Walmart, get a custom-made urn that doubles as an art piece, or send their pet’s ashes to a jeweler through Etsy, who will create a necklace or ring out of them. These array of products and services, often offered by non-conventional funeral providers, have captured the imagination of Western media and reflect ethics of individualism and choice in death. As a director of a co-op funeral home told me this past summer, “There should be no such thing as a standard funeral package. Everyone is different, everyone’s family is different. You should get to pick what best reflects you and how you want to be remembered.” While this statement may seem uncontroversial, this idea if a relatively modern one, considering that for most of human history only the rich and powerful were memorialized. As “we have come to believe that everyone deserves to be remembered, no matter how famous or obscure, young or old, rich or poor” (Sloane, 2018), individuality for everyone has been subject to tensions of standardization. This is perhaps best exemplified by obituaries, which detail a person’s life but have become scripts based on a fill-in-the-blank system. However, while these themes open up many possibilities, the question of the self after death is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by developments invested in methods of preservation that aim to ward off decay or are invested in futures of immortality, such as cryogenics, modern mummification, and new burial technologies. Accessible to only a privileged few, these forms of internment occupy a marginal space between life and death, promising to shield one in varying ways from the desubjectifying, negating moment of death. But how did these come about?
While this configuration is complex, a part of the answer likely lies in neoliberal ideologies that have unwittingly structured the fashioning of desires and attachments around death and commodified the human body in ways that often lie in legal gray areas. The funeral industry dates back decades before neoliberal economics were even a thought, but has taken on a specific shape as the economic has been increasingly mapped onto the social. Overall, I am less interested in the economics that drives the funeral market and more by the relationship between neoliberal assumptions and values and the conception of the self after death. This direction is partially inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s notorious description of her belief that politics should be aimed towards the personal rather than the collective when she remarked that “the method is economic, but the object is to change the heart and soul.” Such a statement was obviously made in a different context that the one examined by this paper, but succinctly illustrates the foundational issue of how neoliberal discourses have affected new ways of being in death.
Of course, many scholars have attended to the ways neoliberal hegemony has seeped into all kinds of life, marking certain bodies as disposable and others worth saving (Stoler, 1995; Moodie, 2006. Neoliberalism is clearly not only a bundle of economic policies or the distinct politics of Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, but has come to be a pervasive mode of discourse that frames the meaning of everyday reality for many, insidiously influencing mundane language (Harvey, 2005). We are acutely familiar with tropes of the successful entrepreneur, sovereign consumer, and hard-working taxpayer, and their effects on the formation personhood (McGuigan, 2014), but less work has explored in neoliberal framings of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators in regards to the cessation of death.
With particular attention paid to the body and internment, this paper argues that neoliberal logics of progress have uniquely contributed to larger cultural shifts that have begun to see death as a failure, defeat, or a disease to be cured. Informed by long standing beliefs that corpses and decay are dangerous, these shifts have occurred alongside industry standards that hide dead through methods of efficiency and have influenced the development of certain kinds of internment. Perhaps best articulated by Grant Farred,
“It is ironic that neoliberalism – an economic force so intent on the destruction of postcolonial resources, labor, the environment, and social structures not least among them, and so indifferent to the life or death of the state in which it operates (as long as it continues to be profitable) – is so singularly incapable of speaking to the event of death” (Farred, 2010).
In its attempts to deny it or overcome it somehow, neoliberal norms have rendered it even more impossible to “discuss what it means to be a mortal subject” (Clack 2016). This state of affairs had fueled desires to be immortal, taking form in the futurism of American Immortalism studied by anthropologist Abou Farman to more mundane manifestations like embalming that theoretically aim to preserve the body forever. Although these goals remain unattainable, their promise is alluring, offering a conception of peace from fears about mortality and finite ends. This is especially important when contextualizing death within larger anthropological work on the symbolism of the body. The dead body – insignificant in isolation – can come to represent both the past and the present, but can also represent a lost vision of the future that may be “endowed with a people’s struggle, its relative significance engorged by association with state or nation” (Moodie, 2006). The lost potentiality of the deceased is also reinforced by broader valuations of life, such as life insurance that promotes the idea that a certain amount of time constitutes a “full” life and that successive generations will learn more about the world and become more able to manipulate it for human gain and contentment (Horlick-Jones, 1995). Where did this fantasy of life expectancy emerge, and how has it been exacerbated by regimes of thought that increasingly quantify life through labor and capital?
Much attention has been paid to the ways neoliberal regimes of power and their attending norms have valued life with infrastructures of calculation for the sake of economic futures (to borrow from Michelle Murphy’s terminology). However, fewer have highlighted death within these configurations, or at least have done so in particular ways. This paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on how values of efficiency, success, and individualism have structured the modern American funeral industry and the services it offers. Of course, this is a broad overview that does not properly attend to important concerns over secular and religious approaches to death and the body, but these issues certainly inform my general approach. Regardless, this work is important for several reasons. Classic anthropological studies of death have argued in a very Durkheimian sense that mourning practices and body disposition revingorate social cohesion and renew common social values through making death manageable and interpretable (Hertz, 1907; Durkheim, 1912; Kiong & Shiller, 1993). This perspective is still relevant to consider, but how can we complicate it while attending to the ways death rituals produce marginalization for some and potential immortality for others?
The Enlightenment and The Birth of Death Denial
While neoliberalism comprises a very specific historical moment playing out in different manners as it has become a global phenomenon, its roots extend much further back, going back to the early days of the Enlightenment. Transforming European society beginning in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was a time of reason, hope, and optimism, in which many truly believed that the human species was at the threshold of major change (Habermas, 2018). Science in particular held distinct sway, promising that humankind would take its destiny in its own hands and that it was no longer necessary to accept powerlessness as a given of existence (Gay, 1996). Followed to its logical end, scholars have noted that it became a long-standing project of the Enlightenment to control human destiny, with the ultimate dream of conquering death (Strenger, 2009).
As ideologies of reason and progress gained sway, changing notions of the secular and religion began to break down, bringing forth a moment in which the conventional distinction between the natural, preternatural, and supernatural (as instituted by Thomas of Aquinas and upheld by theologians and philosophers until the end of the seventeenth century) broke down (Braunlein, 2012). This had a significant effect on how society approached mortality, bringing more emphasis to the body and the private sphere. As Foucault has noted in Other Spaces, it was quite natural in a time of belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul that importance was not accorded to the body’s remains: “From the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language” (Foucault 1986). It was thus around the beginning of the nineteenth century that it became more important for everyone to have a right to their own “little box for their own personal decay.”
Focuses on the body were only intensified by processes of medicalization and scientific discovery. However, far from mitigating fears over what it meant to die, the horror of death did not abate throughout the scientific revolution. Although the functioning of the human body was gradually deciphered, the possibility of intervening in the body remained very limited. (It wasn’t until later on during the twentieth century that advances in medical science and its ability to cure and prevent illness made the idea of “antiaging” even possible.) Nonetheless, it was during this time that death began to be the domain of doctors rather than priests, emerging in the same moment that concerns over public health demanded the adoption of a whole set of measures whose aim was to marginalize interaction between the worlds of the living and the dead. Beginning in the 1830s in the United States, cemeteries moved from central locations to the edges of cities or towns, underlining an obsession with death as an illness or contagion that could be caught through proximity. This banishment of malignant bodies resulted in domesticated and moralized landscapes that managed the chaos and unruliness of death through mechanisms of organization and discipline, constituting another city rather than the sacred and immortal heart of the churchyard (Foucault 1986). Unfounded fears over decay were also partly responsible for the shift from home funerals to the birth of the funeral industry after the Civil War, as only professionals should theoretically be handling these dangers.
Neoliberalism and Death
These processes of rationality, secularization, and anxiety over mortality and the body happened along the same period in which early strains of global capitalism and industrialization began to form, drawing upon certain strands of Enlightenment thought – namely the free market and laissez faire theories of the Scottish School and Adam Smith. Regimes of science and industry were increasingly subsumed into the profit-making schemes of capitalism and for the benefit of an elite minority (Habermas, 1990; Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002). Of course, flaws in the system eventually emerged with events such as the Great Depression, but tended to be mitigated by government policies up until the 1970s. This began to change around the same time Jessica Mitford aimed to take down the funeral industry, as early tenets of neoliberalism had already begun to assume dominance and worked to minimize any government influence to allow the market to reign supreme.
These paradigms were not valueless economic trends, but also had a significant effect on the self, who came to be considered an upstanding individual, and what it meant to cease to be. Many considerations of neoliberal regimes and identity have focused on Marx and his conception of the self, which is best understood within the dialectic of alienation and unalienation (Ollman 1977). However, I aim to go in a slightly different direction, looking to Foucault’s early approach to the significance of the neoliberal episteme. In his lectures at the College de France in 1978 and 1979 on biopolitics, Foucault underlined the historical profundity of a revival of neoliberal thought and noted that neoliberalism was not confined to economics and governmental politics in the conventional sense, but that it represented a scheme for reordering the social and a design for refashioning the conduct of the self. Coupled with core Western values of selfhood that lie in authenticity and individuality and haven take on a specific form in American culture, this mix has placed stress on the personal biography as emerging neoliberal technologies of rule shifted risk from collectivist institutions created during the New Deal to individuals (Horlick-Jones, 2005).
Perhaps it is broad emphasis on individualistic value systems, freedom of choice, and “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mythology that has lended American death denial to be particularly robust. While individualism promises that freedom from communal and transcendental bonds to reason one’s own behaviors, this freedom can also be isolating, alienating and terrifying to the individual (Fromm, 1994). Scholars as early as the 1970s and 80s took notice of this conundrum, arguing that death in the West (and America in particular) was less visible than in other times or in other cultures (Aries, 1975; Elias, 1985). Some theorized that obsessions with youth were the cause, while others pinpointed discourses of progression and success that created an atmosphere in which “even talking about death is sometimes seen as something morbid and sinister, as something that healthy people should not do” (Dekkers, 1997). In his groundbreaking analysis of Western attitudes toward death from the Middle Ages to the present along these lines, French historian Philippe Aries refers to the practice of lying to medical patients about the gravity of their diagnosis (especially when terminal). Arguing that it originated in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, medical lies were motivated by a desire to shield the patient from an unpleasant reality, but increasingly became no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society’s sake. Death was not mentioned to avoid “the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so.” (Aries, 1975). But what constitutes the concept of a happy life?
While there are many possible avenues to explore, the development of life insurance and its attending notions of risk and expectancy is quite illustrative. Substantial literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events, but less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques have been deployed as political or social technologies. However, as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, human consciousness is shaped by the constant presence of the inevitability of death. The human need for the containment of death and the contingent, and the maintenance of order, is intimately related to risk, as risk threatens to puncture the carapace of basic trust that humans need in order to function in the world (Heidegger, 1962).
Raising issues of the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades (especially in regards to the rise of neoliberalism), the concept of life insurance unsurprisingly emerged during the Enlightenment. The first company to offer life insurance as we would recognize it today first appeared in London in 1706 and crossed the pond only a few decades later. Although it was a controversial concept at the time, planning for risk in such a fashion made possible new ways of understanding and acting upon contingency by bringing the future into the present and making it calculable (Rose, 2002). This only became more prevalent after WWII, when insurance institutions and actuarial practices heavily expanded and played a crucial role in introducing neoliberal rationalities and governance to American life. Through postwar marketing, public service campaigns, and a host of instructional and lobbying efforts, private insurers sought to “train and produce a new kind of responsibilized insurance consumer and entrepreneurial subject-citizen – one who could think in actuarial, risk-based ways about family, finance, and the future, and who eschewed the public provision of social welfare in favor of private security” (Horan, 2011).
At a superficial level, this quantifying of human life made possible the navigation of an imperfect and frightening landscape, especially after the devastation of two world wars and the impending threat of nuclear apocalypse. However, it also fostered romantic fantasies that themselves generated risky futures by bringing a sense of authority and control that was not actually there (Horlick-Jones, 1995). Life insurance today continues to underline the idea that there is a certain amount of life one is entitled to, supported by numerous methods of calculation and reporting like the human development index or national life expectancy at birth statistics. The assumptions inherent in these reports tend to sweep under the carpet future risks and purposely leave them hidden from sight (Power, 2004), making it all the harder to address the hard fact that one’s life will inevitably come to an end and that they will eventually fade from memory (no matter their circumstances or affluence).
The Prolonging of the Dead (Body)
These many strands have led to me to my final consideration of death technologies that are invested in preservation or immortality. While more and more people today are choosing cremation for its cheaper cost, there are still ever-evolving techniques to delay the inevitable decay of the body, ranging from embalming, sealer caskets, and grave vaults, to more futuristic methods of cryogenics and modern mummification. Together these methods philosophically reject decomposition, seeing it as a process of ruination and the erasure of the self. Needless to say, preservation of the body and desires for some form of immortality not just a modern aim, but has long been a part of human deathways. However, this has taken on specific contours within an American context, especially considering the fact that American medical determinations of personhood have tended to be located in and through the body as opposed to in social ritual and exchange (Farman, 2012). This becomes especially potent in regards to death, considering that the dead body holding tremendous power as an ambiguous and thus dangerous borderland (Douglas, 1966).
Decomposition provides a natural set of limits that these various techniques try to push against, striving for knowledge that will either keep a body intact and therefore recognizable, or one day allow for the possibility of reanimation. Embalming, a process that replaces the body’s natural fluids by injecting a solution into the arterial system, is one of the earliest forms of this ideology (or fantasy, as many of my interlocutors refer to it). Chemical preservation has been practiced for centuries, but modern iterations of the solution still used today did not emerge until the commercialization of funerary services in the wake of the Civil War. Utilizing French advances, businessmen with little to no undertaking experience began performing rudimentary embalmings on the corpses of Northern soldiers as a way to sanitize the body for funerals and prepare them for train rides home. Within the emerging context of this early American “culture of immortality” (Podgorny 2011), promoters soon began to travel across the country to market embalming fluids, perform injection methods, and display corpses and embalming equipment at scientific and industrial fairs, framing it as a privilege for royalty that had finally become accessible to the common man. Embalming especially took off in the United States after its usage on Abraham Lincoln, whose body was toured around the country as a “living” advertisement of what the procedure could do. The public was aware of death in ways quite unlike our current times (with an average life expectancy of around 45 years), so seeing a corpse that exhibited lifelike color and less rigid features was groundbreaking and seemed to expand the limits of life into the future. However, this has radically changed in the ensuing decades as death got medicalized and individualized, as now embalming procedures have become largely invisible and confined to the mortuary. It is still commonly used in conventional funerals, many funeral directors arguing that one cannot or should not have a viewing without it. As one from a mortuary in Los Angeles told me,
“We’re here to create beauty. It would be disturbing to see your mother or your grandmother begin to fall apart, don’t you think? Embalming simply makes it possible for her to remain herself and to avoid anyone being traumatized.”
Based on the commercial success of embalming (which became the prime moneymaker for the burgeoning industry), other commodities were developed that also upheld notions of the body as something/someone that must be kept pure, especially from soils and bacteria not amenable to traditional “anthropogenic ways of apprehending and assimilating” (Hird, 2015). Grave liners in particular came to marketed as a protective measure from water, microbes, and vermin that would “defile” the body, gesturing towards anxiety over pollution of ontologically hygienic portraits of the human subject (Weinstein 2015). Although they are not shown to actually slow the decomposition process, these concrete, metal, or plastic structures still contribute to myths that it is possible to enshrine the body forever. Sealer caskets have also come to be used in this configuration, using thick rubber seals to provide an air-tight seal between the lid and body of the casket. Federal regulation forbids claims that caskets or special casket features can preserve a body indefinitely, but activist interventions have found that they are still commonly sold as another barrier of protection from decay.
Radically departing from these techniques in regards to feasibility and accessibility are those of radical life extension, especially that of cryonics. Abou Farman has noted in his ethnography of American Immortalism that cryonics has often “confounded and confronted secular law, science, and medicine, often at great expense to its reputation and, in the eyes of cryonicists, at great risk to its members whose freedom of choice and indeed right to life are threatened by the recalcitrance of conservative institutions that are afraid to see the logical end of their own positions regarding such matters as personhood and death” (Farman, 2012). Ultimately an expression of transhumanist philosophy, cryopreservation involves the freezing one’s body after death with the hope of being reanimated in the future. This is done through a complex navigation of legal landscapes: after a medical “death” is proclaimed, the “patient” (rather than the “deceased”) is cooled and over half of their bodily water is replaced with chemicals that prevent cell damage caused by ice crystals. After this process is complete, the patient is stored within vacuum-insulated containers filled with liquid nitrogen in order to wait until biomedical technologies may be able to reanimate them and cure what killed them in life. Many cryopreservation advocates claim that the practice is scientifically realizable (even if it cannot be validated by current scientific methods), and that the criterion for death will continue to shift as biotechnology and medicine advance. As Taylor Genovese points out, “a patient placed immediately into cryopreservation after they’re pronounced legally dead by a doctor in 2018 may not be considered dead at all by a doctor in 2118 – but rather, they will be seen as a patient in suspended animation awaiting revival” (Genovese 2018). Underlining the common anthropological contention that death is a process rather than a moment (especially in regards to the social body), these arguments also figure biological death as a process, one that has become “more social the more it has been given over to biomedical manipulation” (Farman, 2012).
Perhaps most interestingly, cryogenics represents the pinnacle of thinking that frames death as a disease, understanding bodies and brains as objects that depend on mechanisms that can succeed or fail. Modern mummification offers similar promises, with a facility in Utah claiming that modern medical discoveries will eventually be able to clone someone from techniques that can “perfectly preserve the DNA and genetic message within each cell indefinitely.” In both these methods, the problem of death or failure is therefore sidestepped and put off indefinitely by the anxiety-buffering potential of progressive or redemptive hope. However, these investments in a utopic future without death or disease are ultimately made possible by dominant social fantasies produced by the neoliberal project. By focusing on a time that has yet to come, they insinuate that the suffering and deaths of those who cannot afford to pay for such procedures should remain in the margins of the social realm, “unfolding in the social tense of the durative present, never rising to the level of the event” (Povinelli 2011). Such ceased lives then become the collateral damage of specific social formations that value bodies and individuals differently, only adding to neoliberalism’s long body count.
Conclusion
Upon further reflection on approaches to mortality within American security society, it comes as no surprise that many would be so afraid of death as the centrality of the self and other forms of hegemonic market thinking have taken on an elevated status. This attempt to tease out complex and overlapping social processes takes place among my broader research on transformations confronting the funeral industry, as climate change, land scarcity, and other issues threaten traditional or normative deathways here and in other parts of the world. It still requires further elaboration, but it has also become increasingly clear that mortuary practices and normative fantasies have historically have worked to correctly order or hide death and the dead, having consequences not only for the individual, but also broader political ones as well. As one mortician wrote in a declaration on her disillusionment with the commercialization of the funeral industry,
“A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia – have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.”
Many of the death activists I work with thus see a clear delineation between the negative fantasies of death denial and imagination. Advocating for creativity in facing death rather than a mode of thinking that they see as divorced from reality, they ultimately argue that one must try to look at the world squarely at is, echoing religion and race scholar Joseph Winters’ sentiment that typical ways of relating to the empirical world are “mediated by fantasies that ultimately produce distortions” (Winters 2016). One of these distortions is seeing death as an agent that takes away “the goods of life” from an otherwise complete human existence – a common outlook that has been criticized by feminist philosophers for its emphasis on agency and narrative unity (Brennan, 2006). Making the reality of death apparent and refusing to distort it through the use of euphemisms like passed away, departed, or resting in peace, many are fighting the liberalization of the funeral industry by bringing deathcare back into the home (when possible) so people can process these events outside the stressful environments of hospitals or funeral homes.
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