Author ORCID Identifier:
Date of Graduation
8-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
Hinrichsen, Lisa
Committee Member
Bailey, Constance
Second Committee Member
Marren, Susan
Keywords
1990s; Death Studies; Materiality; Mortality; Queer; Social Death
Abstract
The United States in the 1990s was marked by pervasive representations of death in popular culture. As death imagery became increasingly visible in entertainment, there was a growing detachment from the embodied, biological realities of death, a tension intensified by the ongoing AIDS crisis. This project explores how death is politicized and how decisions about who lives and dies are shaped by power. I draw on a constellation of theoretical frameworks that collectively illuminate the operations of state-sanctioned death and social abandonment. These include Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which examines the management of life by state power; Giorgio Agamben’s focus on the production of the corpse as a byproduct of sovereign authority; and Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics, which extends biopolitical analysis into the realm of war and racialized violence. I also incorporate insights from queer theory, critical race theory, and death studies to trace how marginalized identities are targeted for physical and social death. The project begins with readings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which establish foundational associations between death and the American cultural psyche leading into the 1990s. I then analyze the political use of the corpse in AIDS activism, focusing on ACT UP and DIVA TV’s documentation of protest funerals. Following this, I examine Jonathan Larson’s Rent and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes to explore the tensions between capitalism and what I term queer (pro)creation--an ethos of community care, legacy-building, and artistic protest. Finally, I turn to Tananarive Due’s The Between and Stephen King’s The Green Mile to consider the material and liminal dimensions of racialized death, particularly as manifested in modern-day lynching and state executions.
Citation
Savage, J. A. (2025). End Times: American Mortality, Death Materiality, and Social Death in the 1990s. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5911
