The Death, Dying, and Beyond Unit invites papers on the topic of “Embodied Death: Understanding Death from an Intersectional Lens” Our primary session will be a selection of papers on the intersection of death and embodied experience, ranging from thinking about how embodied experiences shape the dying narrative, the ways in which disability is or isn’t accounted for in the dying experience, an examination of the dominant able-bodied and primarily white, male narrative on death as one of decline rather than gain, alongside topics interrogating the understanding of death and from an intersectional and layered lens.
Papers
This paper approaches the exploration of disability, dying, and death through the lens of fatness. As part of a larger commitment to the project, materially and spiritually, of fat liberation, this paper first engages fatness within the hermeneutics of disability. In challenging the limits of a category that often relies on formal medical and/or legal language and enforcement to provide protections and accommodations, placing fatness as both within said category and outside of it. On the inside, fatness is representative of disability in a material sense insofar as many fat people–because of their weight–have accessibility, mobility, and/or general health conditions and comorbidities that qualify under the legal definition of disabled. However, disability is not singularly a category of material or practical concern, but also of socially and culturally relevant corporal deviance. However, on the outside, fatness is not, in and of itself, considered a disability. This reveals quite a bit about the perceived difference, even if the material and social conditions are exactly the same. The social and cultural implications of deviance produce spectacles of fat death which degrade material and spiritual support options for fat people.
Candida R. Moss proposed that according to John the injuries of Jesus were required to properly identify him as not a ghost, or corpse, but as resurrected (Moss, 2011; Moss 2019). Using this understanding of injury as imperative to identification and therefore identity this paper will explore second-century understandings of the injured, disabled and otherwise disfigured after the resurrection. Using literary analysis and emerging methods from Disability Theology, this paper will reveal how imperfections, both lifelong and incurred were understood to exist on the body after the resurrection. The second-century perspectives explored in this paper are the Gospels of Luke and John and 1 Corinthians, communicating some threads of popular thought on the bodily resurrection.
Many who have reflected on death have recognized that it is misguided to try to understand it. In Ghana, death is not only perceived as predestined and a necessary end but as a transition from this world to the asamando ancestral world. Previously, death transitions were culturally the family’s duty in the Akan sense is the extended family and the community. Mourning activities comprising wailing, singing, drumming, and dancing were a family affair; however, in recent times, material culture has subtly taking-over, changing funerals trends drastically and giving way to more individualistic/modern or nuclear celebrations, making mourning fall in the hands of professional mourners. Nowadays, professional women “criers” are paid to cry at the funerals of strangers.
This paper examines the materiality of the funeral, examining three women's professional crying groups-Ami Dokli and the widows, Mame Ode and group, and Linda Opoku Mensah and sisters, and argues that mourning is essential to a good funeral in Ghanaian society. The ethnographic data was collected from funeral organizations in four selected towns and villages in Ghana.
This paper seeks to construct a theology of human frailty using the thought of Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar and an appropriation of the methodology of Christological anthropology. In it, I argue that the surprising fact that even Christ’s body can be broken, damaged, and dis-integrated illuminates a surprising element of human creatureliness: we are those who are falling into disrepair. In so doing, I appropriate von Balthasar’s insights regarding the death of Christ to delineate three varieties of human frailty: bodily frailty, psychological frailty, and personal frailty.