Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture, forensics, and the rise of the corpse

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of the real and simulated cadaver of scientific and forensic investigation in popular culture and the cultural meanings of that ascent. While it spotlights the celebrity corpse, it explores the obscure one too, for modern media constructions have transformed both into infotainment commodities. In societies oversaturated with images of sex, death is the new sex, the corpse the new body to be voyeuristically explored. Gorer's essay, The pornography of death (1955 Gorer, G. 1955. The pornography of death?. Encounter, 5: 49–52. [Google Scholar]) is updated with a discussion of three kinds of dead body porn, including corpse porn. Other themes examined include: the continuity and discontinuity between actual corpses and their facsimiles, how images of corpses figure with other representations of the body, cultural ambivalence about the corpse, the banality of death, the search for immortality, and how the corpse as a social construction challenges Western cultural taboos and practices surrounding the dead body.

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