A sociological analysis of death from a gender perspective

This thesis, titled "The phenomenon of death from a gender perspective," aims to reveal how death is constructed and gendered within the social structure by examining the intersection of the sociology of death and gender theories. The attitudes and behaviours surrounding death are examined, with a particular focus on gender. Within this framework, this study addresses the concepts of gender and death by drawing on socially organised and interpreted phenomena such as war, suicide, violence, condolence practices and forms of public commemoration. In this context, the thesis aims to objectively describe the inequality of death based on gender by analyzing the representational, discursive, and structural differences between female and male deaths. The main problem of the study revolves around the question of how female and male deaths are represented in different ways in the public sphere, in religious rituals and in everyday language and how these representations reproduce gender regimes. In particular, it problematizes how gendered death is reproduced within collective memory, symbolic representation, public discourse and male-dominated structures. In this regard, war deaths and suicide, social violence and femicide and condolence and mourning practices have been identified as basic areas of investigation that reveal the gendered nature of death. The theoretical background of the research is based on an interdisciplinary framework that combines death sociology, sociology of religion and gender studies literature. Although the research is primarily qualitative, it also uses various quantitative data to support its findings. Methodologically, a phenomenological approach has been adopted; discourses, practices, and representations related to death have been analyzed through objective findings, going beyond individual experiences. The literature review reveals that the perception of death in modern and traditional societies is largely constructed through male experiences, while male deaths are associated with sacrifice, heroism and public values, female deaths are mostly rendered invisible or represented within the boundaries of victimhood and privacy. The research findings show that death is systematically gendered through female and male gender and that this creates a powerful symbolic field that reproduces social inequalities. In conclusion, this study suggests that addressing the phenomenon of death from a gender perspective offers a unique contribution to both the sociology of death and gender studies, it provides an important analytical grounding, particularly in terms of making women's deaths visible and questioning the male-dominated structure of discourses on death.