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Lisa Pollock Mumme, PhD student in musicology, Washington University in St. Louis

Title
“Death on the Road: Music and the Deaths of Women in the Mad Max Film Franchise”

Abstract
Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) became the Mad Max franchise's first woman road warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Many hailed the development as a feminist shift in a historically masculine-dominated franchise, but others interpreted the change as an empty gesture. Specific study of the music that accompanies the deaths of women in action films provides insight into women's subjectivities in a genre notorious for suppressing them. How are women's deaths treated differently in terms of music across the Mad Max franchise's thirty-six-year-long run? This talk engages feminist analysis in close readings of sound and image in the music that accompanies the deaths of feminine characters in Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

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