Obituary Intimacies: Exploring the Sonic Cultivations of Intimacy in Podcast Storytelling

The funny thing about death and dying is the cultural perception of death as a visual and sonic landscape occupied by only absence. There is a tendency to believe that, at the end of life, the only thing present is the bareness of our grief. While one should never discount the monumental presence of grief, it is important to remember that grief is only given life through its connection to the senses. The truth is that when people die, there is a rush of affects, images, sounds, smells and sensations that facilitate the process of a life ending, and that, while each sensation is important, there are some senses better attuned to transmitting affects that help us communicate the stories our grief embodies. This paper explores how those stories about death get told through the podcasting medium by focusing in on the Fable and Folly Network’s podcast, Death by Dying (2020), a comedy fiction podcast that tells the tales of the dying through our host, the Obituary Writer. Employing a queerfeminist death studies lens, this paper seeks to examine how this podcast re-conceptualizes stories of death and dying in a norm-critical way. This podcast challenges the normative prescriptions of obituary writing, which typically consists of a short article generally characterized by life-affirming qualities and remarks on the deceased person’s greatest achievements, their kin and those they held dear, and who they leave behind, by asking listeners, instead, to get to know the dead by the obituary writer’s investigation into their death. This podcast creates an environment that is composed of the sonic-affective intimacies between the writer, the people he writes about (the dead), and those he writes for (us). In reorienting the audience’s relationship to death by forging critical intimacies between the dead and listeners, this podcast demonstrates a different way of re-conceptualizing how we come to know the dead.