Page - 61 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

Staging the Dead | 61www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 57–64 that even other objects around the corpses are presented as gendered. For example, the pillows under the head of the deceased person can be bought in female and male styles (flower prints for women, rhombi for men, fig. 3).10 These examples show that a gendered exhibition seems to be important for this last presentation of the body. But why is this practice of gendering the dead and the materials around them so com- mon? i would argue that death reduces the body and its representation to the cultural concepts that are thought to be essential for a person, her/his attributive identity11 and a specific culture. The body itself is interpreted as passive in death, with the social actions around it coming from the living. The possibilities for communicating the indi- vidual characteristics of dead persons (besides talking or writing about them) are lim- ited. The material medium (as a medium that persists) becomes especially prominent in forming and communicating ideas about the dead body. That lifeless bodies are represented so prominently as gendered supports Mia lövheim’s view that gender is “at the heart” of Western culture.12 Gender in the form of the binary differentiation into male and female belongs in Western cultures to the main characteristics of an individual: a non-gendered individual is in fact “almost impossible for our imagination to accept”.13 so, to summarise, gender is so tightly connected to a person that it is staged prominently even after death, while other characteristics (such as profession, ethnicity or hobbies) are normally (at least in switzerland) not central to the repre- sentation of the dead body. OVerCOMiNG GeNDer ThrOUGh DeaTh The above mentioned publicly exhibited bodies are nowadays usually displayed in specific chapels, which replace the exhibition of the mortal remains at home, a prac- tice that was common, at least in Central europe, until around the middle of the 20th century. sometimes these chapels are newly built, but often, especially in the case of switzerland and austria, old ossuary chapels have been converted into display chap- els. Ossuary chapels have been built since the Middle ages to collect the bones of the deceased, which were exhumed after a number of years because of the shortage of space in cemeteries.14 some of these ossuaries still display the bones and skulls of the previous generations. For example, in Steinen (Schwyz, Switzerland, fig. 4), the mortal remains are laid out in front of an impressive wall made of human skulls 10 for another example, see the website of the company Urnesa from switzerland: http://www.urnesa. ch/sortiment/bestattungswaesche/kissenbezuege/index.php [accessed 15 March 2015]. 11 I would define “identity” in our example as a self attributed onto the dead body in the sense of “a symbolic project that gives […] a guiding orientation to ourselves, to other people, and to broader society” (elliott 2001, 4). 12 lövheim 2013, 2. 13 le Guin 2007, 85. 14 for charnel houses in general see Koudounaris 2011, for ossuaries in Germany: Zilkens 1983, for those in Austria: Westerhoff 1989, for Switzerland: Odermatt-Bürgi 1976.