FEELING POST-MORTEM PHOTOGRAPHY: ETSY SELLERS’ MOURNING LISTINGS

Abstract

Etsy sellers employ such terms as ‘touching’ to describe vintage post-mortem and mourning photographs. In this article, I provide an analysis of the ways sellers produce feelings and encourage buyers to connect with earlier sentiments around mourning. Sellers digitally reproduce antiquarian photographs and contemporary props, incorporate framing information, and suggest how items physically and emotionally feel. I argue that sellers use these practices to provide viewers with emotional experiences of mourning and what has been described as ‘feeling photography.’ As Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu note in their feminist and queer anthology on the subject, feeling photography stimulates dismay and sympathy when seeing violent images and mourning when viewing portraits of deceased intimates. As part of these processes, Etsy sellers reference textured objects to connect buyers to items and feelings. I thus cite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s and other scholars’ considerations of textures and feelings, Roland Barthes’s proposal for how death and mourning are experienced through photography, and analyses of nineteenth-century photographs. My feminist and queer reading demonstrates how sellers support normative expectations about the heightened mourning of children, displace contemporary inequities by focusing on earlier losses, and (often unintentionally) render such less traditional identities as the queer child.