Le retour de la mort dans les représentations visuelles américaines du corps féminin. Entre déconstruction sociale et esthétisation thanatique

Western postmodern society is no longer as reluctant to allow death to be represented, therefore we can speak of a new paradigm of the revival of death (Walter, 1994). This does not mean that the forbidden death (Aries, 1977) is completely out, only that we are no longer dealing with an all-encompassing paradigm. The study aims at examining from a socio-cultural perspective some visual representations of the feminine body produced by contemporary American photographers, which testify to the emergence of the revival of death. These representations are built around the body seized by cancer : representations that depict death as a scar (“Scar Project”, the photo album of David Jay and “A beautiful body project” of Jade Bell, in relation with Andres Serrano’s “The Morgu”) and those creating personal narratives of dying (Angelo Merendino’s album in relation with the works of Annie Leibovitz and Darcy Padilla). I will try to show that, by using death as an artistic strategy of construction, the authors contribute to the achievement of social deconstruction of the hyper-sexualized female body. I will also demonstrate that this deconstruction remains problematic, since most of the analyzed representations manage to contest the hyper-sexualized female body only partially, the side effect being a phenomenon of thanatic aestheticization.