My paper concerns the depiction of dead females in Western (popular) culture and focuses specifically on various texts inspired by or based on the 1965 torture and murder (or femicide) of Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis, Indiana. I take as my starting point the trope of “the beautiful dead girl,” often seen in stories belonging to genres such as true crime, detective/mystery/crime fiction, and horror, and suggest that elements such as slut-shaming, victim-blaming, the eroticization and/or aestheticization of dead/dying/tortured/suffering women inform the depiction of female bodies and both build on and reinforce Eurocentric ideals of beauty (whiteness and youth = beauty) and heteronormative views on concepts such as virginity and chastity. I analyze existing texts on/about Sylvia Likens, which together form what I refer to as “the Sylvia Likens Archive” (inspired by Halberstam’s “Brandon Archive”), and I suggest that most of these narratives follow a specific “structure of unmaking,” a term borrowed from Elaine Scarry’s 1985 study on torture, “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.” I argue that in the creation of the Sylvia Likens femicide narratives, the victim is made (created) and unmade (killed) by artists and murderers alike. I propose that it is possible (and necessary) to produce narratives (of various forms) about victims of femicide in a caring and responsible manner that does not replicate acts of violence. By utilizing a caring ethitcs of (re)mourning, grounded in queer feminist ethics, I will produce my own Sylvia Likens narratives, through the writing of fiction and embroidery. For instance, I will be making a shroud for Sylvia Likens, thus invoking the idea, described by Susan M. Stabile in “Memory’s Daughter’s: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth Century America” (2004), that the shroud, or winding sheet, “is an emblem of women’s collective mourning and memory.” The act of using the embroidery needle to create a text for/about Sylvia Likens is meant to contrast one of the first narratives written about (and on) her: the words „I AM A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!,“ which were branded onto Sylvia’s body by her tormentors.

Anne Bettina Pedersen is a PhD fellow at Aalborg University. The title of her project is “(Un)Making Sylvia Likens.” She has an MA in American Studies from University of Southern Denmark (SDU). From 2013 to 2017, she worked as an assistant lecturer at SDU. She has taught courses on Creative Writing, American Horror, American Literature before 1922, American Cultural Studies, Contemporary British Studies, and more. Her main areas of interest/research are: dead women in popular culture, (toxic) motherhood, trauma, horror, and feminism. She has published papers on the cult TV-series Twin Peaks and femicide narratives.

.