Introduction to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture

This chapter introduces the book Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. We reflect on the terms ‘difficult death’, ‘dying’ and the ‘dead’ and their potential meanings and we explore some of the challenges of writing about death in mediated form. We consider the difference between media and culture in the context of death studies and draw on a range of scholarship to consider the mediation of death, dying and the dead in culture. We provide a summary of each of the chapters included within the collection, and some suggestions on how you might approach the reading of the book. We argue that the terms ‘difficult death’, ‘dying’ and ‘the dead’ are contingent ones, and, for example, that what constitutes a difficult death will be culturally and socially relative, as well as dependent on a series of individual factors including life experiences and expectations. We suggest that when death is constructed as difficult, it is often so because it occurs at the nexus of myriad forms of social inequality that function as mechanisms of systemic marginalisation in life and in death.