The supposed ‘emotionalization’ of the public sphere has recently
been the target of much hostile commentary, both lay and academic. In the news
media, there certainly seems to be a growing interest in emotion, as more and more
space is devoted to the representations of mourning in the coverage of major
disasters or extraordinary deaths. In this study I look at the news coverage of the
display of public grief in the Finnish newspapers following the murders of Olof
Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden in 1986, and Anna Lindh, the Foreign Minister of
Sweden in 2003. The similarities between the Palme and Lindh cases give an
opportunity to examine how the representation of mourning has changed over time. The
second aim of this article is to explore how gender is constructed in the portrayals
of grief: are we witnessing a change regarding the persistent stereotypes about the
emotional woman and the unemotional man in the representations of grief or just a
new deal in gendered emotions?
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