Transformative Technology and Posthuman Futurity: The Psychosocial Cartographies of Zombie...

Transformative Technology and Posthuman Futurity: The

Psychosocial Cartographies of Zombie Narratives

Jeremy R. Strong

Abstract Zombies have exploded their fictional boundaries in what is essentially a return to their supposed beginning in social reality. These horror icons have changed through their various manifestations in film, fiction and media, however, becoming more than just metaphor for capitalism or social conservatism. Although clear connections exist between the collective symbolism of zombies and movements such as the Occupy protests or on the other hand between zombie annihilation fantasies and colonial history, no single metaphorical interpretation seems able to contain the zombie phenomenon. They have become a powerful social technology capable of creating and dismantling meaning. This ability to simultaneously construct and destroy make zombies a powerful tool in deciphering individual transformations in post-apocalyptic fictional worlds and also a key influence in forging links between those transformations and real social change. In this chapter I argue that zombies are the same kind of ‘meaning machines’ J. Jack Halberstam discussed when she attempted to revise the definition of Gothic horror in her book Skin Shows. Via Kristevian abjection, I also explain why it is important that the Romero zombie has become the dominant cultural manifestation of this particular monster. Ultimately I examine the role the technology of the zombie plays in physically re-mapping human bodies in the post-apocalypse and do this through a sustained analysis of the AMC series The Walking Dead. I find these cartographies often transgress the boundaries of the fictional worlds they manifest in and establish themselves directly in our own social reality; this is best revealed by a sustained consideration of Afro-Orientalism as political alliance between the characters in the same television series. Finally, in attempting to demonstrate the function of zombies in these processes, I discuss unexpected but potentially important connections to the field of critical posthumanism – ending on the strange subject of zombie sexuality. Key Words: Kristeva, abject, Halberstam, Romero, Afro-Orientalism, protest, capitalism, colonialism, revolution, zombies, posthumanism, horror, The Walking Dead, Michonne, Rick Grimes, social transformation, Warm Bodies, sexuality.

***** 1. From Agricultural Espionage to Cannibalism to Criticism

I will briefly trace the evolution of the zombie from its origins in Africa to the present day. The term zombie seems to derive from West African folklore, where it was first pronounced nzambi.1 In West African tradition the word has several

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connections to the afterlife and could either mean soul, or in certain contexts be affiliated with a high creator god. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the etymology of nzambi is very closely linked to the Kongo word for fetish, a fact that will become important at the end of the chapter when I focus on the implications of the relatively recent development of zombie sexuality.

The figure of the zombie was a cultural reality in Haiti long before American media set it on its path to becoming one of today’s most versatile and persistent monsters. Academics and certain ethnographers predominantly considered the zombie to be a mythological ghost of sorts, though one folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston, claimed in the early 1930s to have seen evidence of the dead being returned to life and claimed that it was through science and not secret Voodou magic that this was accomplished. The controversy was enough to spark a rash of Hollywood films about mind-controlled slaves, such as I Walked with a Zombie (1932), The Scotland Yard Mystery (1934) and The Walking Dead (1936). In some of these films the dead are returned to life, in some, the living brought into a trancelike state near to death. The zombie slaves do the bidding of the master, including acts such as murder and not-so-covert agricultural espionage. Cannibalism was for the most part in the early days of the pop culture zombie, thematically absent.

Perhaps still one of the most famous and controversial dissertation topics of all time was undertaken by Canadian scholar Wade Davis, in an effort prove that the Haitian zombie was a real phenomenon. Published in 1983, ‘The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombi’ caused an eruption of controversy and a new explosion of interest in Haitian culture and the zombie. Davis followed this up with the 1986 book The Serpent and the Rainbow, in which he details the supposed true story of his research in Haiti. The book was very loosely adapted into a popular Wes Craven film of the same name.

It was another and far earlier film however, that made the most profound change to the way in which we understand, or fail to understand, the zombie today. That film is George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Produced independently on a budget of just over one hundred thousand dollars, the film initially grossed approximately thirty million. The film was very frightening according to the standard of the day and also considered transgressively violent. Director Romero went on to make use of his profits and notoriety to make several other culturally significant zombie pictures. Many consider him the father of the modern horror film, and certainly the genre has been heavily influenced by his work. There have been somewhere in the neighborhood of one thousand zombie films made to date, and that number is only an estimate. The Romero zombie is normally characterized by its extremely abject appearance, its slow but determined shuffle and its primal urge to devour the flesh of the living. The only way to dispatch a Romero zombie is to destroy its brain. Bites cause death and subsequent reanimation. These rules more or less define the Romeroverse and have grown to

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become the dominant tenets of zombie mythology in contemporary pop culture.2

The importance of Night of the Living Dead and the Romero zombie for the purposes of this chapter is threefold: first, Romero’s work is more or less responsible for the conflation of zombies and cannibalism; second, under Romero the zombie receives the polar opposite of a makeover and abjection becomes permanently infused with its appearance; and finally, I argue that the single most important moment in the history of the critical discourse surrounding zombies, can be traced to the ending of this film.3

Much of the scholarship and analysis of the zombie owes to ways in which the ending of Night of the Living Dead has been perceived or understood as poignant cultural and political commentary. Romero has often been interviewed on the subject, but given his responses, you can imagine why there have been efforts onthe part of scholars to understand it. Take for example, an excerpt from the transcript of the following recent Noel Murray interview with Romero:

I made the first film, then all of a sudden people started to write about it like it was an essential American movie. And a lot of that was accidental. We cast an African-American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends. And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the movie became a reflection of the times. There’s a certain anger in the movie already, but a lot of why that film gets applause is because Wayne is a black guy. In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy. And he would’ve been shot by the police even if he was a white guy. But because he happened to be an African-American, that made it much stronger, particularly after the assassination. We shouldn’t take all the credit for that. A lot of it was an accident.4

The important piece of information to be gleaned from the above excerpt is the fact that Romero’s casting an African-American actor for a role that has become synonymous with the civil rights movement was an arbitrary decision, even if the actor in question, Duane Jones, did not take an arbitrary approach to his performance of the role. And whether the social significance of Night of the Living Dead was intentional or not, George A. Romero garnered international attention with it and the five sequels that make up the rest of his Dead series (1978-2009) and remains the director most easily connected to the current popularity of the zombie in modern Western culture.5 During the aforementioned interview with Murray, Romero was also questioned about the construction of the zombie and said:

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The point is, it’s become this new sort of monster, and it’sidiomatic. I expect a zombie to show up on Sesame Street soon, teaching kids to count. And you can sorta glue onto it anything you want to talk about. Unfortunately, people don’t seem to be using it as metaphor as much as they could.6

But despite Romero’s sophrosyne regarding the importance of the film to the ongoing discourse about racial tension in the United States and his apparent benightedness regarding the figurative tradition surrounding the zombie, critics have nonetheless somehow been able to ‘glue’ some fairly interesting ideas to the zombie.7 Though a small handful of academics attempted to engage with the zombie in the 1970s and 80s, scholarship focusing on the zombie seems to have declined during the 1990s. After the start of the new millennium and the world-altering events of 9/11 however, the zombie suddenly began to resurface to wide cultural popularity, the apex of which we may or may not be currently experiencing. Seemingly inspired by AMC’s successful series The Walking Dead(2010-ongoing), scholarship engaging with the zombie has recently undergone an explosion of interest. Some of the most stimulating work being done in critical race theory, gender studies, social-cultural anthropology, science fiction studies, psychology, philosophy and other peripheral disciplines has increasingly been focused on bodies, visibility, representation and biopolitics. The zombie manages to shuffle into all of these discourses, unmindful of traditionally established borders.

For example, scholar Gerry Canavan explores the relationship of the zombie to Walter Benjamin’s concept of divine violence and to perpetually continuing colonial violence.8 Recently, Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry have reimagined Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a zombie manifesto that explores the crisis of human embodiment caused by the irreconcilable existence of capitalism and posthumanism. They find the zombie to be the only ‘imaginable specter that could really be post human.’9 Allen Cameron, in a 2008 essay entitled ‘Zombie Media: Transmission, Reproduction, and the Digital Dead’ argues that zombie films explore the dissolution of bodies, images and meaning. Finally, Shaka McGlotten and Sarah McGundy discuss recent issues of futurity, normativity and political possibility in the embodiment of the zombie. They examine the film Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) in relation to necropolitics, necrophilia and pornography. The point seems to be that a combination of the mass popular appeal furnished by Romero and the versatile applications of critical and cultural theory to the zombie, has led to the recently widespread phenomenon of the political zombie. In his article ‘The Scene of Occupation’, performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’odiscusses some of the reasons the zombie is such a fitting figure for the representation of political dissent. He writes: ‘the zombie is a complex icon for Halloween, for capitalism, and for the protest of capitalism. As David McNally

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usefully argues, zombies are potent symbols because they work simultaneously as agents and victims of rapacious capitalism’.10 Nyong’o also points out that the zombie represents a breach of what José Esteban Muñoz terms ‘straight time’, a concept I will return to in a later section of the chapter.11 Finally, in a brilliant chapter appearing in this volume, Kelly Gardner unites biopolitics with eschatological philosophy in a sustained discussion of the figure of the zombie and argues that the zombie might play a role in shaping our understanding of apocalyptic time. Gardner also examines the failure of zombie survival guides to guide readers towards utopia through their narrow focus on the elimination of the zombie as threat. I find much common ground with Gardner’s approach in carefully considering the zombie apocalypse on the one hand for its potential promise of renewal and on the other hand for the likely trap of repetition.12 These brief examples of a great many, demonstrate that zombies are seen by some to be inherently political bodies in their own right. This might justify examining the phenomenon of zombie walks as subversively analogous to outright social rebellion.

2. Zombie Walks: Biopower vs. Abjection Gerry Canavan recently wrote that zombies:

arise not from without but from within: not externally as a threat to power but internally as the truth of it. The homo sacer of the zombie, simultaneously included within and excluded from the body of the state, exists at the site of biopower’s limit and in this sense beyond the control of either state or market.13

This chapter engages with the idea that zombies do not simply exist in Canavan’ssense at the borders of biopower but that they instead represent the final breakdown or destruction of those and other borders. In this sense zombies are the ultimate post-apocalyptic bodies, as they are continually ending civilisation; they are the never-ending apocalypse.14 Canavan’s identification of zombies as border breakers seems a logical extension of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘homo sacer’:a critical framework that grapples with the very nature of law formation and implementation as well as with the nature of how biopower is created. Using this framework, I contend that zombies must be seen as undead beings that are ‘outside both human and divine law’.15 This would seem to indicate that as much as zombies resemble human beings, they are nevertheless not subject to social law or perhaps even to physical reality.16

The social relevance of the zombie has significantly increased in recent years as humanity’s understanding of the destructive power of bodies has evolved. The concept of Individual responsibility for environmental damage has increased through the idea of the carbon footprint while media focus on the tactics of

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terrorism has begun to dissolve the boundary between human and bomb. A good example would be the London police shooting of Charles de Menezes in 2005, widely acknowledged to have occurred due to irrational fears he was a suicide bomber. Police were criticised for racial profiling of de Menezes due to his visible characteristics.17 The incident is a good example of how bodies themselves converge with fears of destructive technology and of the power the visual holds over introspective reasoning. However, suicide bombers, whether imagined or real, are not the only place where technology merges with biology.

A rebirth of protest movements, enhanced by social media, has at least given the appearance that bodies are powerful entities for positive change as well as triggers for irrational fear.18 The success and international mobility of the Occupy movement in particular demonstrates a large proportion of public support for social action. Most importantly, the zombie is adopted symbolically by collectives such as Occupy, and so represents a tangible threat to power structures. The use of the zombie as a symbol of political protest is not in itself as surprising as the reasons for our attraction to its representative power. Those reasons seem best revealed by applying Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, in which she identifies the ability of the abject to draw the individual ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’.19

According to Kristeva’s theory, the abject is also the primer of culture and the place where as individuals we are ‘at the border of [our] condition as [living beings]’.20 She identifies the corpse as the most powerful example of the abject, though clarifies that this is not due to ‘lack of cleanliness or health’ but rather to the ways in which abjection ‘disturbs identity, system [and] order. What does not respect borders, positions [and] rules’.21 Zombie narratives fascinate us because we desire to understand the rules, borders, systems and basic order that construct and cohere various human social groups and also civilisation more generally.

Zombies also fall under Judith Halberstam’s revised definition of the Gothic and are therefore closely connected to human beings through the force of abjection.22 They become the ultimate ‘meaning machines’, as metaphorically cannibalistic as they are literal.23 This contributes to the zombie narrative becoming ‘an essentially consumptive genre which feeds parasitically upon other literary texts’ and perhaps even co-opts other genres.24 In the previous chapter, Kelly Gardner aptly and hilariously draws attention to something resembling this phenomenon with her sustained discussion of the way in which the zombie ravenously devours the market share of the survival guide genre even while failing as a sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction. As Gardner points out, ‘The zombie survival guide, while elaborate in its discussion of tactile deployment, fails to address the societal problems represented by the figure of the zombie.’25 In my own investigation of zombie narratives later in this chapter, like Gardner, I engage with Halberstam’s work on gothic monstrosity. I follow Halberstam’s lead in loosening the definition of a text to include films and television series and attempt to trace how emotional experience is marked on the body in AMC’s The Walking Dead.26

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But before narrowing the discussion to individual human characters and tracing their cartographies from the fictive to the real, I first turn to one of the crucially important attributes of the zombie that influences its effectiveness as a powerful force of horror: collectivity. Monsters and other quasi-human forms drawn from fantasy and science fiction serve as natural antagonists to the real world of paper, policy and government plunder. Even masks express the uncanny, hence both the Occupy movement and the hacking group Anonymous adopting the Guy Fawkes mask popularized in the film V for Vendetta (2005). The zombie however, has two distinct advantages over almost every other costume of protest. First, as argued above, it functions under the fuel of abjection and therefore triggers powerful primal responses from those who encounter it. Second, the zombie is almost never just the zombie, but rather zombies; a collective of uncanny, shuffling nightmares that will inevitably obliterate all defenses and partially devour their victims before ultimately, transforming them into part of the horde. It isn’t surprising in other words, to see more zombies cropping up at social protest movements around the world. In a different interview with Romero, this time conducted by Peter Keough of The Boston Phoenix, the film director raises the issue:

Peter Keough: Are there associations of wannabe zombies? Like re-enactors?

George Romero: I haven’t seen that, no. [B]ut you know what’sstunning to me is the “zombie walks” that have popped up everywhere. Man, I mean, I just did a phoner from Budapest or someplace and they had my voice over a loudspeaker and there were like, 3,000 people dressed up like zombies in Budapest. The one in Toronto last year had more than 3,000 people. What’s that about? I mean, I don’t get it. It’s sort of an easy makeup job, I guess, for Halloween, but it doesn’t always happen on Halloween. What is that about?

Peter Keough: Does that disturb you?

George Romero: It doesn’t really. I’m just wondering, you just want to say “get a life.” I don’t know. I mean, it’s great fun. I went to the one in Toronto and it’s great and these people are so dedicated. Some of them I wish I could have them on the set, they’re so creative. Some of the makeup [is] great, some of the walks and stuff that they do [are] worthy of Lon Chaney. But [why] is that fun? That’s like a, some kind of a new happening. I can’t quite identify it.27

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Romero’s own anxiety about zombie walks is almost palpable in his repetition of ‘what’s that about’.28 By examining the reaction of governments, police and the public, a similar anxiety about the threat of the zombie is revealed.

In an example drawn from my own local area, the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, a planned annual zombie walk that had exponentially gained in popularity since 2007, attracted the attention of city authorities in fall of 2013. The walk, organized from its inception to march past the parliament building in the heart of the city, was anticipating a record turnout and organizers were informed they would need a permit and would be required to pay for police officers to ensure the safety of the public. One interesting conundrum was raised in The Winnipeg Free Press on September 26th in an article entitled ‘Costs, Safety Concerns Kill off Zombie Walk’. In the article, one of the chief organizers of the Zombie Walk, Rodney Smith, explained that ‘The Zombie Walk has become a victim of its own success’.29 We can imagine what Mr. Smith might mean by this, but I would nevertheless like to spell it out explicitly. The Winnipeg Zombie Walk somehow gained meaningful representative power. Though the Free Press article discusses many of the reasons that the walk was cancelled, the message seems to be that clearly government regulations apply to events planning to incorporate more than 800 people. The very fact that the event reached a level of popularity that produced a political representative indicates both the limits and reaches of that representative power. But why was the zombie walk shut down when other larger events, even some protests, have been allowed to continue?

It seems natural to me to consider other large movements of people that situate at or somehow involve incorporation of legislative or political buildings. Winnipeg certainly has its bases covered regarding large gatherings of people drawing attention to the big three social stratifications of race, gender and class. The Idle No More movement, Winnipeg’s Pride parade and the Occupy Winnipeg movement have all spent time in the media spotlight and have all at one time or another had to negotiate or conflict with various levels of government. But are these movements of human bodies seeking justice (or protesting the lack of justice) really similar to the shuffle of the zombie? I will return later to what I think is an important way in which they are, and why marginalized communities and social groups in Winnipeg and around the globe should take a particularly vested interest in government responses to zombie walks.

In zombie narratives, when biopolitical forces – remade in some attempt to establish a new world order – encounter the zombie, the result is time and again a reiterated or re-lived apocalypse or collapse. In this sense, biopower proves unable to combat the exigent duality of abjection that the figure of the zombie embodies. This can be seen time and again in zombie films and novels in which human strongholds are eventually and inevitably breeched. Take for example the tragic finale of the third season of The Walking Dead, in which human survivors vying for control over seemingly sustainable space manifest abjection between them in

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the form of Hershel’s decapitation. Though the Governor and perhaps his hijacked and frightened crew seem exclusively to blame for the act, the symbolism of Michonne’s Katana blade being used to perform the execution is hard to ignore. The use of the weapon firmly establishes some of the responsibility for the killing in Rick’s own camp, as Michonne is one of the most highly valued members of the group. Robert Kirkman, creator of the original series of graphic comics, seemed perhaps subconsciously aware that the reiterated biopower in any zombie narrative is doomed to failure. In the introduction to his series, he writes:

The idea behind The Walking Dead is to stay with the character, in this case, Rick Grimes for as long as humanly possible. I want The Walking Dead to be a chronicle of years of Rick’s life. We will NEVER wonder what happens to Rick next, we will see it. The Walking Dead will be the zombie movie that never ends [italics are my addition].30

The implications of the ‘zombie movie that never ends’ and given Kirkman’spenchant for Romero’s work, is the denouement of an apocalypse that can be re-enacted over and over again.31 This holding pattern for zombie narratives, coupled with the fact that the zombie has recently been sharing the spotlight with other bodies in the increasingly growing field of critical posthumanism, could mark a sort of apex for the zombie as cultural artifact. As I will next discuss, the zombie seems even to have begun to cannibalize the emotional experiences of human beings in certain narratives; I argue this has led ultimately to zombie sexuality and the firm establishment of the zombie as the dominant contemporary posthumanfigure in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film, fiction and other artistic works imagining the end.

3. Feeding on Human Failure and Emotion: Zombies as Succubae There is something inherently subversive about any work that imagines the end

of the world. What we do when we imagine the end is acknowledge that civilisation – as we know it – either could or should, end. In David Moody‘szombie novel Autumn (2010), Michael Collins stands as a guest speaker in front of a classroom of students who do not want to be there and who direct animosity towards him. He hates ‘compromising himself’32 by speaking to the students and thinks – ‘if the behaviour and apathy of the students wasn’t bad enough, now even the teacher was being sarcastic’33 – in response to the teacher’s ineffective effort to calm the students. In other words, a room is purposefully filled with people in order that they might sit there and disdain the way in which power has been exercised and control exerted over them. This is only one example of how everyday life is presented as undesirable or unbearable through despairing emotion only moments before the zombie apocalypse begins. The extent to which zombie

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narratives do or do not allow society to rebuild in the wake of the zombie apocalypse is an indication of the degree of hope any particular author might have for the society in which we currently live. This apathetic phenomenon is recognisable in the Romero films, which become progressively bleaker from Night of the Living Dead (1968) through to Survival of the Dead (2009). In the latter –the sixth entry in Romero’s series – the rights of the zombies are respected more than the rights of human beings. The film series actually seems to trace the emotional drain on the human race due to its constant interaction with the collective and oppressive abject force of the undead. The characters seem to suffer the most when they repeat the damaging patterns that allowed the apocalypse to happen in the first place. Some of the more carefully considered zombie fiction demonstrates a similar emotional pattern through allusion to the history of imperialism and the pitfalls of its biopolitics and late stage corporate hegemonies. Max Brooks’ novel World War Z (2006) is the most easily recognisable as a text that functions in this fashion, despite the fact that it may also naively reinforce patriarchy and militarism, often at the same time.34 Of course, militarism has long shared an uneasy relationship with apocalyptic thought, as discussed at length by Thomas E. Bishop in the first chapter of this book. In a fascinating unpacking of the Minutemen and their Cold War mentality, Bishop writes that ‘mobilisation around a dynamic of violence illustrates the unstable nature of masculinity as a gender construct; one that is viewed as equally offensive and defensive depending on the perspective of the individual and the power structures they exist in.’ I find this to also be almost unwaveringly true about the typical zombie narrative; zombie narratives like World War Z are normally mobilized around violence, and often depict unstable masculine power structures.

World War Z the novel, like Romero’s film Day of the Dead, invites viewing the zombie as the natural postmodern successor to Frankenstein, the monster that –according to Halberstam – is ‘always part of his maker’ and I would argue therefore always emotionally connected to that maker.35 In World War Z, the zombies are directly compared to African Golem legends from which ‘Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein’.36 Humans are further conflated with zombies in World War Z through a shared system (responsible for emotion): ‘wouldn’t destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn’t it the only way to annihilate us as well?’37 This is the rhetorical question the character Jurgen Warmbrunn poses and immediately answers before claiming that like humans, zombies are ‘a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body’.38 Warmbrunn further identifies the fact that ‘the only measurable difference between us and “The Undead” [is that] their brains do not require asupport system to survive’.39 This fact seems to allow quite a bit of room for a posthuman zombie capable of emotion and perhaps other cerebral functions yet mysterious to man. This is also potentially important in relation to the cannibalistic nature of the zombie discussed previously. The zombie urge to feed then, is

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disconnected from any form of necessity; feeding is just another representation of monstrosity or another technological component of abjection.

In Seanan McGuire’s novel Feed (2010), which was published under the pseudonym Mira Grant, the zombie urge to feed on brains is conflated with the urge of human beings to consume information. And any academic would likely agree that it is certainly possible to cultivate an emotional relationship with information, as unrequited as such a commitment is likely to remain. Could zombies in their devouring of human brains be continually seeking the same kind of unquenchable desire for emotional satisfaction that humanity has searched for in science, religion and the arts since the brain became larger – and by implication –perhaps tastier? In Feed, the character Senator Ryman appears to experience stress as a result of not having ‘had a site feed since the outbreak bell rang’.40 This stress seems to indicate his emotional dependence on a constant flow of information; his desire is for a continual ingestion of the minds or brains of others. The death of a key character is a shallow secondary concern to the Senator when compared to his desire for and attachment to information. Coupled with his non-human desires is the fact that his political status serves as yet another projected form of that dead or abject presence within. The characters in the novel focus more on the ability to consume and share information and less on the actual interpretation or relevance of that information. Thus Feed, like Autumn and World War Z, draws attention to something rotten or horrible within the mind that is projected onto society. All three of these works also seem to indicate that constant warfare with an unconquerable abject enemy seems to allow for not only emotional drain, but for those lost emotions to become – along with brains – potential fuel for the never ending energy needs of the posthuman zombie collective.

The never-ending need to literally consume intelligence in the form of human brains, makes the zombie as posthuman form ripe for comparison with the kind of posthuman apocalyptic threat that Scott Dimovitz discusses in Part 2 of this volume. His discussion of David Mitchell’s quasi-posthumanist novel Ghostwritten explains that the kind of technological singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge can potentially manifest in a variety of differing forms. Though perhaps seemingly not as consciously aware of their ability to ‘monitor all human activity at all times’,41

zombies are nevertheless never too far from their human counterparts. They are also everywhere; in the world of the zombie the walkers litter the roads, clog doorways and collapse fences with their sheer volume. In Marc Forster’s same-name cinematic version of Brooks’ World War Z, the zombies swarm one on top of the other in scenes reminiscent of angry anthills in nature documentary footage. They seem to be driven by a sort of hive-mind mentality. This certainly resonates with the ‘disembodied consciousness’ Dimovitz writes of and this type of consciousness could be argued to both destroy and preserve humanity beyond mortality into some as of yet misunderstood future. After all, the zombie way of life is far more sustainable than the current trajectory of our own mode of

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production would suggest. While zombies do eat human flesh, they do not seem to need to. They also consume nothing aside from flesh that could be considered material and create no pollution besides what would certainly be a continual plethora of odorous emanations. They seem incapable of any kind of natural death and consume none of the planet’s resources. In fact, the zombie modus operandi would actually serve to cleanse and restore the earth, by ridding it of its most persistent parasite: us. But as I have demonstrated above, zombies may be quite active in their consumption of another less countable commodity, and that is emotion. They are both the crucible in which it is expressed and also the technology that seems to draw it out and drain if from the human survivors. I will come at length to conclude rather optimistically on the implications of the zombie phenomenon to critical posthumanism, but will first provide a more specific example of human to zombie emotional transmission.

4. Gothic Technologies of Projection and Re-Mapping the Human Body In George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which holds firm as the

standard zombie narrative against which most popular modern zombie film and fiction is measured, the protagonists are isolated in the farmhouse. First they struggle to understand the living dead before being destroyed by them.42 In Kristeva‘s sense of abjection, this is the way in which the abject ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject’.43 Stephen Brett Greeley argues that in the AMC series The Walking Dead,44 Rick Grimes engages with the sense of lost humanity that zombies represent, an assessment that I agree with.45 However, he claims that ‘sympathy for the undead in zombie films is unprecedented, and it speaks loudly to the essential worth of the human being’,46 implying that Rick’sbehaviour is rather extraordinary in the zombieverse; this claim runs contrary to the events and thematic structure of Romero’s lesser known but important film Day of the Dead (1985) as well as an almost uncountable number of low-budget attempts. In Day of the Dead, the mad Dr Logan is conducting gruesome experiments with the bodies of dead soldiers in an underground bunker, including feeding them to a pet zombie he nicknames Bub.47 Dr Logan becomes emotionally attached to Bub and seems to feel more sympathy for the undead than for their human victims. But rather than Dr Logan’s experiments revealing the essential worth of the human being, instead, the temporarily sustained social structure in the film is undermined through this sympathy, which causes most of the human characters to reveal themselves as despicably selfish, racist and ultimately worthless. The film ends in death for most of these characters, which are torn apart in visceral scenes that force the viewer to experience the abject.

If sympathy for the zombie is fatal, then extending Halberstam’s notion of ‘Gothic Technologies of subject production as they operate through the apparatus of the contemporary horror film’ to zombies seems to me justifiable.48 Zombies operate as Halberstam claims Frankenstein’s monster does, as a technology of

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meaning through the constant ‘dismantling and reconstruction of bodily identities and also of spectatorial positions, gazes, and desires’.49 Halberstam’s ideas about how projection and visibility function in Frankenstein (1818) are useful precedents for understanding the zombie narrative as a symbolic realm where ‘monstrosity and humanity emerge as inseparable’.50 I will extend her focus on the body as the ‘locus of fear’ to zombie film and fiction generally.51 In Romero’s Day of the Dead, Dr Logan is nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’ by the other characters, due to his participation in human experimentation; this naming is conveniently appropriate, as Dr Logan does what Halberstam asserts Victor Frankenstein does; transforms the monsters, in this case zombies, into: ‘a screen, a place for the re-inscription of monstrosity’.52 In the Freudian sense, this projection is actually mirroring, and therefore any zombie monstrosity is re-re-inscribed back onto the human body; killing zombies is therefore a continual destruction or attempt at eradication of the tainted portions of the individual or of humanity. In the collective sense, zombie narratives could represent our repressed or misunderstood desire to alter our failing modes of production.

As mentioned previously, the release of Night of the Living Dead coincides with the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. That and the fact that the film features an African-American protagonist unjustly killed by the authorities was the beginning of a long and not necessarily understandable or consciously intended interrelationship of the zombie narrative to postcolonial dialogue.53 The zombie then seems to have evolved into an abject symbol that forces the survivors in post-apocalyptic narratives to confront their own internalised notions of definitions and borders and to realise that those notions are as fragile as living tissue and can and will be eventually consumed. The adoption of the zombie for the purposes of the protest movement resonates with this individual psychological state that is glimpsed or accessed by readers or viewers of zombie narratives.54 In their masquerading as zombies, protesters are (likely unwittingly) threatening the still persistent power structures of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, by both beseeching and exposing or pulverising the state. In this sense, even zombie walks staged by horror fans for the pure abjectified joy of the exercise are inherently political acts. Turning now to AMC’s The Walking Dead, I will perform a sustained analysis of the series for its potential Afro-Orientalist political alliances. Alliances such as these are key in understanding the way in which human identities – as formed by discriminatory gender, class and racial practices – are visually remapped. Understanding the way the human individual changes in confrontation with the abject technology of the zombie will help to better illustrate my final section about zombie sexuality and the posthuman connotations that arise when the zombie is considered in this sense as the saviour of mankind.

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5. Afro-Orientalism as Political Alliance in The Walking DeadIf anyone is naive about the construction of identity in AMC’s The Walking

Dead, it is series protagonist Rick Grimes. He rides on a horse towards Atlanta alone, in his Sheriff’s uniform, wearing a Stetson, carrying his sidearm and a bag of guns.55 He is the ultimate stereotypical representation of white, masculine American culture: the cowboy and law bringer. It is perhaps unexpected that analysis of The Walking Dead using the Afro-Orientalism framework laid out by Bill Mullen would yield any useful insight to connect the series to contemporary critical race theory. However, Mullen’s assertion that the ‘logic of equivalence’56

put forward by early African-American political writers became a ‘movement to reimagine black and Asian people as hand-holding grave diggers of Western capitalist modernity’57 is an idea that seems to resonate very powerfully with the series and seems worthy of some investigation. Here I hope merely to do some justice to the claim that this is a useful lens through which to temporarily view the show and that it yields a few important implications about the methods by which bodies are remapped in a psychosocial fashion. It might be crucial here to take note of Mullen’s warning that recognising blackness could be a form of ‘culturalist fundamentalism’58 that could lead to ‘ahistoricist (and even racist) readings of both black and Asian culture’.59 If Mullen is right in this warning, which he borrows from Vijay Prashad,60 then we should be particularly wary of any diasporic culturalworks, or representations of diaspora that ‘celebrat[e] multiculturalism’.61 But The Walking Dead does not appear to relate to any distinct ethnicity or cultural group, nor does the series seem to celebrate multiculturalism. If anything, the series displaces all of its characters from their homeland in capitalist America and repositions them all in a quasi-Marxist fantasy world where their conceptions of race, gender and other stereotypes are continually tested, re-imagined and dismantled.

Throughout the first season, Rick is guided into a new world order first by Morgan, an African-American single father, and then Glenn, a young Asian American. When Rick wakes up from his coma in the beginning of the series, the world as he and as we know it now has changed. Rick is a white cop, and he quickly discovers that the traditional understanding of law and order, of property rights and even what defines a human being have all changed. Rick is lucky to meet Morgan Jones and his son Duane. Morgan gives Rick much needed information in their short time together that is undoubtedly directly correlated to Rick’s ability to survive in the new nightmarish landscape. He tells him ‘don’t do that they’ll see the light’ when Rick goes to peek out the window of the house at night.62 Then when a car alarm is set off, presumably by a zombie looking to boost a ride, Morgan tells Rick, ‘the sound draws em.’63 He also tells Rick ‘walkers...try to eat you...don’t you get bit. Bites kill you, the fever burns you out but then after a while, you come back.’64 Morgan’s character attempted to prepare Rick Grimes not

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only for the new dangers of the post-apocalyptic world, but to be ready to abandon any assumptions he might have about identity.

Similarly, Glenn demonstrates very quickly that old cultural tropes are not relevant in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. After rescuing Rick from certain death, Glenn calls Rick out on his white cowboy heroics. Then later, as they continue to run from hordes of the undead, they have the following brief conversation:

Rick: ‘Back at the tank, why’d you stick your neck out for me?’

Glenn: ‘Call it foolish naive hope, that if I’m ever that far up shit creek, somebody might do the same for me. Guess I’m an even bigger dumbass than you’. 65

Glenn has reason to question his chances of being treated fairly and to describe his hope as ‘foolish’ and ‘naïve’.66 He could just be commenting on the general selfishness of human nature, but the incident with Merle later in the same episode demonstrates that Glenn has reason to question his chances of being treated fairly. The characters on the show seem to suffer under the trap of visibility mentioned byMichel Foucault67 and later reiterated by Linda Alcoff, a trap: ‘that assures the automatic functioning of power’.68 It is clear that the character Merle represents the remnants of this power as a constant threat to non-white minority bodies and to women. When Merle is left alone with T-Dog on the roof in the same episode, he tries to abuse that kind of power and convince the man he recently insulted – and tried to kill – to let him go:

Merle: ‘What do you say man, come on get me outta this thing.’

T-Dog: ‘So you can beat my ass again? Call me nigger some more?’

Merle: ‘Come on now, it wasn’t personal, it’s just that your kind and my kind wasn’t meant to mix, that’s all. Don’t mean we can’t work together, parle, as long as there is some kind of mutual gain involved.’69

The ridiculous circular logic used by Merle here indicates that the stereotypical racist attitude has survived the apocalypse. However, when T-Dog accidentally drops the key to the cuffs and can’t let Merle out, the old mode is literally left behind; there is no place for someone like Merle in the new order. Merle then screams ‘T-Dog man, you can’t leave me here man it’s not human’, a statement containing not an inconsiderable amount of verbal irony considering Merle’s

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previous treatment of T-Dog.70 The episode ends with what could be Glenn expressing his joy at being liberated from what Mullen calls the ‘traditions of racialsupremacy and superiority of Western culture’71 when he escapes down the highway in a red Camaro. The road is empty and open to him, a cover of the Bo Diddley song ‘I’m a Man’ blaring as he laughs and hoots. He defies North American convention by piloting the car backwards down the right hand lane of the highway; the clear road is a representation of his new psychological and social freedom post-apocalypse.

Rick’s new identity is negotiated in The Walking Dead partly through interacting with characters that embody that aspect of Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism that represents: ‘a counterdiscourse to Western modernity precisely when it eschews the temptations of culturalism and raciology’.72 These characters are few, but they also survive the longest in the series and include Daryl, a white redneck who defies the teleology of Capitalism as much as Glenn and Michonne do. Afro-Orientalism allows these characters to live communally together as they struggle to understand and remake the world around them. Michonne at different times represents a threat to both of the camps that develop in Season Three. These camps potentially mimic the bipartisan political system in the United States. Her being captured by one camp, and not trusted by but invited in to the other camp for her perceived value, seems to mimic one of Mullen’s key points, his idea that:

engagement with Afro-Orientalism facilitated or was produced out of a recognition of learned activist crisis in their own lives and work that produced a variation on what Wright calls “negative loyalty” to the west.73

In this context, Michonne’s grudging decision to join Rick’s camp makes a lot of sense; she is essentially choosing the side that is the lesser of two evils.

Rick leads the survivors in The Walking Dead. Surely it is significant that he has abandoned his badge and cowboy hat (the symbols of patriarchy, American exceptionalism and colonialism). However, the survivors are also in conflict with each other and survive, or don’t, based on their ability to create and embrace counternarratives. Merle’s release of a captive Michonne and subsequent suicide mission against the evil ‘Governor’ and his henchmen could be read as a kind of redemption of character. I see it another way; Merle is the ultimate representation of the problems with the pre-apocalypse world. He must die because the old ways of thinking that created him are obsolete. This means that not only do deaths like Merle’s correlate directly with an ability, or in his case inability, to remake identity, but also that every bullet or blade through the brain of a zombie in The Walking Dead is a reenacting of the apocalypse and therefore a symbolic wish to destroy a good many isms. This argument seems to mark out the zombie apocalypse as a sort of nightmarish vision of utopia for minority characters.

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However, an incident mentioned earlier in the chapter now becomes all the more crucial for its potential symbolism.

Michonne is the character that most visibly represents Afro-Orientalism at its most violent and political. She spends much of her time silent and alone, carries a samurai sword and travels with two zombies on chains. She could represent the link ‘between and among people of color in response to white Western domination’.74 Her enslaving of two zombies in this case could signify her reclaiming and ultimately destroying colonialism. The significance of Michonne’spotential connection to Afro-Orientalism traces directly back to her sword being used in the execution of Hershel in Season Three. The implication seems to be that even Afro-Orientalist challenges to power structures, as rebellious and politically refreshing as we might find them today, are still part of the old modality of human existence. At least – in the world of the zombie apocalypse – it might be crucial to remember that different groups of people vying for equality, power and their place in the world more generally, must now contend with a posthuman figure that is incredibly powerful in its collective opposition to individual identity – political, cultural or otherwise. 6. Cartographies of Pain

Gerry Canavan, who has written at length about the zombie, highlights the fact that The Walking Dead graphic comics and other zombie writing introduce the idea that human survivors, and indeed perhaps all of us, are the walking dead.75 This naturally makes one consider the ways in which we are indeed just like the very monsters we try to so hard to keep away. But I can’t help but consider the other side of things. Many works of zombie fiction seem to go to great lengths to separate the experience of the zombie from that of the human being. Take for example, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. Consider also World War Z (the film or the book) and even the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Like The AMC series, these works distinctly use human emotion to separate humans from zombies. The bodies of the characters in question become psychosocial road maps that we recognize as being very much akin to our own in their alterations through stressful and tragic events. In ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism’, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry write that ‘our fascination with the zombie is, in part, a celebration of its immortality and a recognition of ourselves as enslaved to our bodies’.76 Following the Harraway model laid out in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, they argue that the zombie is the ultimate point of analysis for critical posthumanism, due to its close relationship with the human body.77

In fairness to Canavan and his time spent considering a difficult to ignore fact about zombie narratives that resonates with Kelly Gardner’s chapter in this volume – that being the constant and repeated killing of zombies – I would like to push at the zombie manifesto slightly. How can something dead be immortal? Well,

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perhaps that begs the question of whether or not zombies are indeed dead – when they can after all – be killed by a bullet to the brain. They crave sustenance or at least follow the primal urge to feed. Instead of immortal, zombies could potentially be evolved forms of man, tuned up for a much longer life span. Zombies eat only meat and seem to require no shelter. They normally do not use anything, or need to. And when they do, they do not attempt to exercise ownership. Finally, as mentioned earlier, they don’t have energy needs that we know of beyond the need to feed. Zombies are also more collaborative than people. They flock together to increase the chances of catching and eating prey. They admirably share space, normally without interfering with each other. The zombie secretaries in Colson Whitehead’s wonderfully written novel Zone One are locked together in a small room for several years and don’t harm each other. These advanced beings are usually marked severely by their struggle, so they are abject in the extreme, but complete in their evolution and able to act as fully functioning technology in their interactions with human beings. These human beings undergo drastic changes as well, remapped and marked through the power of abjection.

A new map changes our perception of the world and therefore our experiences, assumptions and interactions within the world. Rick Grimes is leader of the survivors on The Walking Dead and the story revolves around his experiences. Others will look to Rick as he undergoes changes, for clues about how to adapt to the world around them. They will read him like a map, or fail to do so. Survival in an unfamiliar world depends so much on understanding the map that has been laid out before you. Those that change and adapt, or, are remapped individuals on The Walking Dead, survive a little longer in the world of the zombie apocalypse.Characters that refuse to change, cannot understand how to, or hesitate in accepting the remapping of what they thought it meant to be a person in the world, die. And like a map that has ceased to be of use, they are torn up to avoid confusion or they are written over, imprinted anew. I invite readers or viewers of post-apocalyptic narratives, to think of characters not as they appear at any one time, but in all their incarnations, stretched out and pressed flat, a map in text, or pixelated images.

7. Evolutions of DesireWe can map these changes as they occur on Rick’s person, his clothing, his

face and his body. When The Walking Dead begins, Rick is smartly dressed in a pressed linen police uniform, with all the particular adornments that come with that position of authority. In the first episode, ‘Days Gone By’, Rick rides around much like a cowboy of the old west, with a bag of shotguns over his shoulder. As the show progresses, Rick is forced to make decisions of life and death involving other human characters, and forced into the position of killing countless zombies. By Season Two, Rick has already changed noticeably. His hair is grown out slightly and he has abandoned his police coat and Stetson. He is forced first to see his own son shot and near death, and then later to kill his former partner and best friend

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Shane. Finally, he must witness his son kill the same man, Shane, again, once he becomes a zombie. This emotional trajectory becomes imprinted on Rick. Every experience seems to leave a visible trace.

In Season Three of The Walking Dead, Rick is further distanced from his former life and brought through the difficult experience of his wife Lori’s death. He also experiences a confrontation with a rival camp of survivors and has to watch his son mature into a cold and indifferent killer of zombies and on one occasion, another human being. These experiences change Rick’s physical map once again. His facial hair lengthens, his hair begins to curl and his eyes become haunted and hollowed. Finally, as Season Four progresses, we see a new Rick Grimes once again. Gone are almost any traces of the police officer. Rick is now a shaggy, sweaty and peaceful subsistence farmer. Added to the digital roadmap that is his body are the mud of the farm, the blood of the pigs and sweat from the hot Georgian sun. Rick’s map will take viewers of AMC’s The Walking Dead on a clear journey through his psychosocial transformation that they can relate, through shared emotion, to their own lives. The zombie is the technology that makes this possible, certainly. However, the contemporary zombie is also much more than a convenient metaphor or even typical horror icon.

8. Conclusion: Posthuman Futurity Two relatively recent films have altered significantly the way in which the

zombie might be interpreted. They are the Bruce La Bruce film Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and the Jonathan Levine film Warm Bodies (2013). These films introduce – in ways that couldn’t be more opposed – zombie sexuality. In Otto, La Bruce makes the zombie to queer conflation quite explicit. In particular, La Bruce focuses in on the gay male experience. At the beginning of the film, we are told through clever frame narration that ‘a new wave of gay zombies [has] arrived’;78 seemingly the very thing an auteur like La Bruce would want to state at the exact moment that he ushers in the gay zombie era. La Bruce also seems to embrace the abjection of the zombie as an experience that echoes years of marginalization and persecution of the queer community. Otto is described as ‘extremely abject, wearing clothes that appear to have been lived in for days, or weeks, or even months.’79

In the film the line between sex and violence is obliterated by the zombies in their performing acts of cannibalism concurrently with sexual acts. This intercourse, like abjection, is designed to disturb systems and order. Scenes of unnatural penetration, fetishism of raw meat and the conflation of lover and victim are set against monologues disparaging capitalism, racism, sexism and other persecutory isms.

Warm Bodies is neither a biting commentary on the failures of social progress or an intriguing new incarnation of zombie futurity. Instead, Warm Bodies is as insulated from abjection as a film can get. The zombies are PG13 Twilight

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analogues. Goreless and humorously portrayed, they live quaintly and permanently in an airport terminal, perhaps reminding the viewer of a lighthearted Tom Hanks film. Warm Bodies is upbeat, tongue in cheek and in essence, cute. The film is heteronormative in every way that Otto resists that tradition. For example, it turns out that the only thing that can save a zombie from its monstrous fate, is a healthy heterosexual relationship built on mainstream music, fast red cars and getting into your future father in laws’ good books. The lead zombie ‘R’ builds a relationship with another zombie in the film through the barest use of language, though the love of a good woman quickly enhances that language ability so that the zombies are capable of cracking misogynistic one-liners about women. An example comes when lead zombie ‘R’ is left in dead teen angst by the desertion of his human love Julie and his zombie friend recovers enough humanity to be very humanly misogynist in his sympathy, grunting very clearly: ‘Bitches’.80

But treatments of sexuality aside, the real point here is that the films treat sexuality at all. The significance of the way in which a trend like this positions the zombie as a posthuman figure is massive. Zombies now, in additional to being powerful tools of transformation that operate through abjection are also –apparently – like Rick Grimes, capable of feeling both pain and desire. If this is the case, the post-apocalyptic realm of the zombie narrative becomes a bit more crowded, and, even as we are informed by the psychosocial maps of the human protagonists, we have now to consider the strange possible futurity of the zombie and all of the potential contact zones between the two.

Notes

1 ‘zombie, n.’. OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. Viewed on 27 February 2014.http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/232982?redirectedFrom=zombie. 2 See for example a site such as: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Romero_zombies. This is only one of many places where the distinct rules for the Romero Zombie are discussed by fans and pop culture enthusiasts. 3 For context, consider viewing the entire film or the final 5 minutes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_f2Enn8x5s. Night of the Living Dead is free to distribute and view as it entered the public domain through an error made by the distributor.4 George A. Romero, Interview with Noel Murray, ‘The Onion’ (The A.V. Club, February 12, 2008), viewed 13 May 2013, http://www.avclub.com/articles/george-romero,14198/. 5 Soon likely to be rivaled by his predecessor - the unacknowledged fan turned inheritor Robert Kirkman - creator of The Walking Dead.

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6 George A. Romero, Interview with Noel Murray, ‘The Onion’ (The A.V. Club, February 12, 2008), viewed 13 May 2013, http://www.avclub.com/articles/george-romero,14198/. 7 Ibid.8 Gerry Canavan, ‘Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost: Zombies and Zombis in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse’, Science Fiction Film and Television 4.2 (2011): 179.9 Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.’ Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 35, no. 1 (2008), 4.10 Tavia Nyong’o, ‘The Scene of Occupation’, TDR: The Drama Review 56.4 (2012): 140. Viewed 24 January 2013, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DRAM_a_00219. Nyong’o discusses at length how the zombie manipulates both time and space in surprising and resilient ways. He also points out that it might be naïve to see the zombie craze as merely cosplay in the ‘post-9/11’ world (147).11 Ibid, 141.12 See where Gardner discusses Ketterer’s notions of apocalyptic oppositions.13 Gerry Canavan, ‘Fighting’, 179.14 I use the term in its etymological sense, an uncovering or revealing. Zombies are constantly uncovering the inside of bodies, literally and metaphorically. 15 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1998), 48. Kindle edition.16 In fact, zombies seem to defy known biological science in that their bodies seem to retain mobility during a constant near state of rigor mortis. The head of a zombiecan be removed - and yet the interruption of the circulatory system and de-centering of the nervous system in such a drastic way - do not prevent the body or face from functioning. The only exception of course, is that if the brain is destroyed, so is the zombie.17 See BBC coverage of this story: ‘Shot Man not Connected to Bombing’, BBC News, Saturday, July 23, 2005, Viewed on 27 February 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4711021.stm. 18 Tavia Nyong’o, ‘The Scene of Occupation’, TDR: The Drama Review 56.4 (2012): 140. Viewed 24 January 2013, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DRAM_a_00219 Nyong’o discusses at length how the zombie manipulates both time and space in surprising and resilient ways. He also points out that it might be naïve to see the zombie craze as merely cosplay in the ‘post-9/11’ world (147).19 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.

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20 Ibid., 2-3.21 Ibid., 4. 22 Halberstam also channels Kristeva‘s abjection in constructing this argument.23 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters(London: Duke UP, 1995), 21. I borrow Halberstam’s term and take a certainliberty in extending her definition of the Gothic to include the zombie.24 Ibid., 36. 25 Kelly Gardner, ‘Reading, and Surviving, the Zombie Apocalypse’, appearing in this volume.26 The films key to understanding the genre include those of George Romero and Danny Boyle but encompass a large proportion of standalone works such as Shaunof the Dead (2004) as well as films not primarily associated with the zombie, such as The Road (2009). For television series, I focus primarily on AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010-2013) but also consider other post-apocalyptic series. 27 George A. Romero, Interview with Peter Keough, The Boston Phoenix, May 7, 2010, viewed 26 June 2013, http://www.avclub.com/articles/george-romero,14198/.28 Ibid. 29 Rodney Smith, ‘Costs, Safety Concerns kill off Zombie Walk’. The Winnipeg Free Press, September 26, 2013. Viewed online, November 17, 2013, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/costs-safety-concerns-kill-off-zombie-walk-225307692.html 30 Kirkman, Robert, Cliff Rathburn, Rus Wooton, and Charles Adlard,‘Introduction’, The Walking Dead (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2013).31 Ibid.32 David Moody, Autumn (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), 8-9.33 Ibid., 9. 34 Max Brooks, World War Z, 183. In the novel, society is stabilised by military tactics while female characters are criticised for bearing feminine traits. The two occur simultaneously in the text when Colonel Christina Eliopolis is belittled by the character Mets: ‘What are you, you’re fucking mother!?!’ she taunts and equates the feminine and the civilian with certain death. 35 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 53. 36 Max Brooks, World War Z, 33. 37 Ibid., 35. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Mira Grant, Feed (New York: Orbit Books, 2010), 554. 41 As Dimovitz writes in his chapter in this volume.

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42 George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero (1968; Pittsburgh, PA: Image Ten, 2002 Millennium Edition), DVD. 43 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.44 Frank Darabont, The Walking Dead, Broadcast Series, dir. Frank Darabont, perf. Andrew Lincoln, Steven Yuen, Norman Reedus, aired 31 October 2010 (2010; Senoia, GA: AMC, 2012), Television. 45 Stephen Brett Greeley, ‘Monsters of Modernity’, The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2012), 168.46 Ibid. 47 George A. Romero, Day of the Dead, dir. George A. Romero (1985; Pittsburgh, PA: United Film Distribution Company, 1998), DVD. 48 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 138. 49 Ibid., 139. 50 Ibid., 44-46.51 Ibid., 28. 52 Ibid., 45. 53 Romero/Murray, ‘The Onion’. George Romero has admitted in this interview, that Ben’s race in Night of the Living Dead was a primarily arbitrary decision, while Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics do not seem to engage with racism in the same way that the AMC television series does. 54 That state being something akin to Freud’s ‘Urfantasien’. Kristeva describes how the vision of the abject brings this state about: ‘The vision of the ab-ject is, by definition, the sign of an impossible ob-ject, a boundary and a limit. A fantasy, if you wish, but one that brings to the well-known Freudian primal fantasies, his Urfantasien, a drive overload of hatred or death, which prevents images from crystalizing as images of desire and/or nightmare and causes them to break out into sensation (suffering) and denial (horror), into a blasting of sight and sound (fire, uproar). Apocalyptic vision could thus be the shattering or the impossibility not only of narrative but also of Urfantasien under the pressure of a drive unleashed by a doubtless very “primal” narcissistic wound’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 154-55).55 Frank Darabont, ‘Days Gone By’, The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 1, dir. Frank Darabont, aired Oct. 31, 2010. 56 Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 25. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 27. 59 Ibid. 60 Vijay Prashad, Introduction to The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), xv-xix.

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61 Ibid. 62 Darabont, ‘Days Gone By’, The Walking Dead.63 Ibid.64 Ibid.65 Frank Darabont, ‘Guts’, The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 2, dir. Michelle MacLaren, aired November 7, 2010. 66 Ibid.67 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 200. 68 Linda Alcoff, ‘Identity and Visibility,’ Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 201. 69 Frank Darabont, ‘Guts’, The Walking Dead.70 Ibid.71 Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, 27. 72 Ibid., 20. 73 Ibid, 31.74 Ibid., 12. 75 Gerry Canavan, ‘“We Are the Walking Dead”: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative’. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51.3 (2010): 431-53.76 Lauro and Embry, ‘A Zombie Manifesto’, 88.77 Ibid.78 Otto: Or, Up With Dead People. DVD. Directed by Bruce LaBruce. Perf. Jey Crisfar. Barcelona: Tema Distribuciones, 2012.79 Ibid.80 Ibid. Here I will note as further humorous evidence of the heteronormative aims of this film, that zombie ‘R’ and Julia are very thinly veiled allusions to Shakespeare’s most iconic heterosexual couple, Romeo and Juliet.

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Jeremy R. Strong is a graduate student in the PhD program in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at The University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He recently completed a creative M.A. thesis focused on the representation of bodies in post-apocalyptic film and fiction.

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Transformative Technology and Posthuman Futurity: The Psychosocial Cartographies of Zombie...

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