NYU Press Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying

lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying. Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors. From the Back Cover Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death, and Dying is the first major study of the sexual politics of death in the West. As such, it splits open the silence which both surrounds mortality and shrouds women's relationship to it. Illuminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying. About the Author The author of several books, Sally Cline is the recipient of an Arts Council Writers Award (1995) for outstanding literary merit for her work on this book and a Harry Ransom Research Center Fellowship for her work on her forthcoming biography of the novelist Radclyffe Hall. She was for many years Co-Course organizer for Women's Studies at Cambridge University.