Page - 63 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

Staging the Dead | 63www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 57–64 can be made, using the approach of the sociologist stefan hirschauer, that gender is a continuous negotiation process.16 Gender can, depending on the context, step back behind other cultural attributions and can even become, in specific mediatisations, irrelevant. in our case this works via material communication in a religious context. CONClUsiON: The MaTerial BODy as a MeDiUM fOr GeNDer aND reliGiON i have chosen the example of the exhibition of the dead because the end of life proves useful when thinking about the basic categories of culture understood as “shared meanings”.17 These shared meanings are communicated through social practices and different media “which carry meaning and value for us, which need to be meaning- fully interpreted by others, or which depend on meaning for their effective operation. Culture, in this sense, permeates all of society”.18 Using the example of the exhibition of mortal remains, i wanted to follow Mia Lövheim’s argument that gender is a methodological lens for elaborating different mediatisation processes. in the example above, the body in a religious setting be- comes the main medium for forming and communicating gender.19 The dead body cannot be detached from materiality, and we can observe very different processes of communication through these material mortal remains. if the individual aspect is em- phasised, the genderisation seems to be important. as a result, gender is interrelated with an individual’s identity and the memory of this person. if the focus is on the un- derlining of collectivity, gender falls behind other semantics. in this second case, the function of the exhibition is not related to an individual memory, but much more to a normative demand to live in a certain (religiously virtuous) way. To conclude these observations: Religion can include and exclude gender differentiations, whereby dominant social expectations and ideas can be underlined or challenged. in our case, both happen through the body as the main (and a material) medium. Therefore, the material body can become a medium for communicating the importance of gender, but also a medium for overcoming such dichotomic gender separations, depending on not only the specific context and on cultural conventions, but also the function (in our case an emphasis on the individual or the collective) that the public presentation of the lifeless body adopts. 16 see hirschauer 2001, 214. 17 hall 2013, xvii. 18 hall 2013, xix. emphasis in the original. 19 McGuire 1990, 284.