Going Public: Performing Dying in the Second Decade of the 21st Century

It is now more than a decade since the death of celebrity television personality Jade Goody—a high water mark in public dying comparable to the watershed moment in public mourning marked by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, a decade or so earlier. As Walter (2009) has noted in this journal, Goody’s very public and highly mediated dying will not be the last. With that in mind, this article analyses the sociological significance of public dying in the decade following Goody’s death—the ‘tens’ of the 21st century. It does so chiefly by focusing on a number of high-profile instances which gained significant media traction, using these to examine the ways in which dying is both performed and made meaningful in contemporary 21st century culture. The argument presented operates on the assumption, following Goffman (1959), of life—and by extension, dying—as performance