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Women and the Material Culture of Death, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin

Scholars of rhetoric have long been concerned with death, from Pericles’ Funeral Oration to contemporary studies of public memorialization. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin’s edited collection Women and the Material Culture of Death draws our attention to the gendered dimensions of mourning that extend beyond speeches and slabs of stone. This is the fourth edited collection from Goggin and Tobin on women and material culture (Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies; Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices; Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950). The editors describe the collection as calling attention to the role of women in their fundamentally invisible work as “memory-keepers,” arguing that scholars have largely overlooked women’s unique relationships to the material culture of death (3). The collection offers scholars interested in gender, feminist historiography, material culture, memory, and publics theory significant historical insight into past and present attitudes surrounding death and its aftermath. Moreover, these studies encourage further inquiry into the gendered aspects of public memory and memorialization. Objects that become associated with or representative of the dead challenge the cultural and social boundaries that separate the living from the dead—and women have most often been the creators and keepers of those objects. The material culture of death warrants scholarly attention for the ways in which it “straddles the binaries of life and death, subject and object, production and consumption, private and public.” Goggin and Tobin locate material culture and cultural production in Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, which they summarize as “that which was once a subject and is now an object” (2). They assert that understanding material culture practices, from the mundane to the extraordinary, within the category of the abject allows them to “argue for the cultural importance and semiotic significance of the material culture of death and women’s role in it” (2–3). In other words, by participating in material culture women engage in a rhetorical process of meaning-making and re-making that helps to mitigate the fluid boundaries between life and death. This collection, then, can help rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in vernacular memory and material culture, account for the ways in which women have communicated—both