Embodied and institutionalized discourses and practices related to death,dying and mourning are pervaded by normativities and regulations,framed by intersecting power differentials related to gender, sexuality,race, class, religion, but also to the life/death binary and to materialagencies not so commonly included in discussions of intersectionality suchas liminality, killability, uncontainability, and vibrancy. These norms andregulations have often been left unproblematized by otherwise criticalintellectuals, including academic feminists, perhaps because the situationswhere these issues materialize as crucial on personal levels also oftenare situations, where people are most vulnerable and literally pushed tothe borders of ‘the Real’, and where well known symbolic grounds do notcount anymore.The panel aims to generate new discussions around these issues, criticallyand (self) reflexively scrutinizing and challenging conventionalnormativities, assumptions, expectations and regimes of truths that arebrought to life or made evident by death, dying and mourning.The panel will among others problematize grief-related normativityas well as the anti-grief and sadness norm carried by goal-oriented,neoliberal rationality. This includes examining how sadness, memorializationand non-acceptance can be performed and articulated asresistance against prescribed ways of mourning and being a mourner.Moreover, the panel will explore how boundaries between life/theliving and death/the dead are drawn, conceptualized and imagined, andwhat these boundary-shaping practices reveal about the role of religion,tradition, science, economy, and so on. Often sharp dichotomies areutilized to make sense of the relationship between life/death, the living/the dead, animate/inanimate, and of ethical distinctions bound to normsrelated human exceptionalism, contrasted by the precarious status oflives not counted within such norms. However, in some contexts suchdichotomies are nuanced and deconstructed. Concepts like absencepresence,liminality and social death, have, for example, been used indeath studies to address the false simplicity of the pre/post-mortem divide, while some bioart practices have created artworks on the boundariesbetween living and non-living meant to prompt new reflections on these.