Spokes, Matthew 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6456-3879
(2023)
‘Death. Carnage. Chaos’: mortality and mountaineering on-screen, and on the roof of the world.
In: Coleclough, Sharon, Michael-Fox, Bethan and Visser, Renske, (eds.)
Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture.
London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 69-83
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Abstract
The concept of the ‘difficult dead’ (Spokes, Denham and Lehmann, 2018) has previously been applied to those whose death is problematic or whose actions in life makes their death, and disposal, a challenge problematic (Smith & Robins, 2021). Adapting the idea of ‘difficult’ in the context of leisure, this paper uses extreme mountaineering on Mt. Everest as a case study. Following some situating typology around types of risk and mountaineering, the paper compares popular culture depictions of mountaineering on Everest - with a focus on the film Everest (2015) as well as journalistic accounts such as Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1999) – with contemporaneous research conducted with climbers (for example, Miller & Mair, 2020; Mu & Nepal, 2016) towards an understanding of the relationship between representation and reality. How might the difficult dead trouble binary distinctions found in popular accounts and in the stories of climbers? And how might the cognate concept of provocative morbid space (Penfold-Mounce 2018) help us understand the liminal and troubling nature of bodies left behind on the roof of the world? The paper closes by framing these debates in the context of gender and class in particular.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Status: | Published |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
| School/Department: | York Business School |
| URI: | https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/8703 |
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