Abstract
This introduction argues that The Walking Dead’s zombie narrative reflects cultural anxiety over the family unit. Threats of familial destruction or conversion come not only from zombies but also from non-heteronormative relationalities. Lee Edelman implicates the family in reproductive futurism, which enforces heteronormativity and depends upon the figure of the Child, presumed guarantee of a social future. Zombies represent a queer challenge to reproductive futurism, which a zombie child intensifies. The traditional nuclear family’s persistent dominance in the postapocalypse of The Walking Dead propels efforts to contain possibilities for alternative family structures, which repeatedly arise. Tracing how the franchise represents the transgression of heteronorms narratively, visually, and rhetorically reveals how recurring elements in those representations function to attempt to normalize, naturalize, and police sociosexual ideologies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Because the compendia, published by Image Comics, that serve as my primary source texts for The Walking Dead comics are unpaginated, references will be to the number of the compendium (abbreviated c) and of the chapter (abbreviated ch). The chapter number is equivalent to the volume of the original releases, and, for those referring to the original releases, I also include the issue number (abbreviated n). The first compendium (2010), by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Tony Moore, and Cliff Rathburn, collects issues 1–48; the second (2012), by Kirkman, Adlard, and Rathburn, collects issues 49–96; and the third (2015), by Kirkman, Adlard, Stefano Gaudiano, an Rathburn, collects issues 97–144. The comics render all text entirely in capital letters. I alter this when quoting but preserve original emphases. Episodes of the television series are referenced by title. All citations of Kindle editions reference page numbers when available, and otherwise reference location markers.
- 2.
In the season 8 episode “Big Scary U,” Negan makes a very similar confession regarding his own wife, even using the same phrasing (“I couldn’t put her down”), though it is not developed after it is mentioned.
- 3.
Barbara Gurr (2015) extends this connection to postapocalyptic narratives more broadly, writing that, after the 9/11 attacks, they represent notionally American value as “under constant threat from both outside and possibly inside forces” (5).
- 4.
David A. Reilly argues for substituting globalization for terrorism (Castillo et al. 2016, 68–69).
- 5.
Where a zombie narrative such as Day of the Dead critiques masculinity (Wood 2003, 289), The Walking Dead, especially the television version, valorizes it, most commonly presenting (masculinist) violence, often espoused by Rick, as the only tenable solution, even when it questions the effect of such violence on its characters. In the television show, for example, Carol and Morgan have both rejected and reembraced killing over the course of the series.
- 6.
Ashburn-Nardo (2017) cites three decades of studies with consistent results.
- 7.
Muñoz (2009) sets himself partly against Edelman (2004) as a representative of what Muñoz calls the antirelational school of queer criticism and its “romance of singularity and negativity” (10). He counters Edelman’s claim that “the future is the province of the child and therefore not for the queers” with the contention that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (11). I stake my own position between the two, if closer to Edelman: the negation espoused by Edelman may be necessary to unseat the child and reproductive futurity from their dominance in order to open a path to the more affirmative queerness that Muñoz advocates. I less reservedly agree with Halberstam’s (2011) critique of Edelman, which focuses not so much on negation as on his avoidance of material politics (loc. 1998–2076). Bernini (2017) makes a similar criticism (see particularly pages 77–82), and Part I of his book offers a useful and detailed overview of the evolution of the major strands of antisocial queer theory.
- 8.
This function aligns with Wood’s (2003) description of an Other as allowing something in the self or culture to be projected outward in order to be “hated and disowned” (65) and echoes Halberstam’s (1995) views of the traditional Gothic monster as representing who must be removed from the community (3) and of the modern monster as characterized by “proximity to humans,” which would be especially true of the zombie (23).
- 9.
McGlotten (2011) further claims that zombies may constitute “compelling sites for identification” and represent “a freedom from the responsibilities and obligations that are the ordinary stuff of life and, perhaps, forms of attachment that are a viscous drag of living life in more novel ways” (loc. 4004). However, like Muñoz (2009), she rejects Edelman’s vision of “the ethical demand of queer life and sociality” “as merely the negation of politics and the social itself” (loc. 3868).
- 10.
By Land of the Dead, of course, Romero’s zombies became explicitly progressive, even revolutionary figures. The Walking Dead makes no such actively positive identification but rather features zombies as agents of subversive energies.
- 11.
Zombies disrupt even the gender binary, rendering, as Jessica Murray (2013) notes, gender progressively illegible as they decay (5).
- 12.
Ohi (2004) specifies that saying that all children are queer is not the same as saying that all children feel same-sex desire.
References
Althusser, Louis. 1994. Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 100–139. New York: Verso.
Ashburn-Nardo, Leslie. 2017. Parenthood as a Moral Imperative? Moral Outrage and the Stigmatization of Voluntarily Childfree Women and Men. Sex Roles 76: 393–401.
Baldwin, Martina, and Mark McCarthy. 2013. Same as it Ever Was: Savior Narratives and the Logics of Survival in The Walking Dead. In Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means, ed. Murali Balaji, 75–88. Lanham: Lexington Books. Kindle.
Berger, James. 2015. Propagation and Procreation: The Zombie and the Child. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 149–164. New York: Palgrave.
Berlant, Lauren. 2004. Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material). In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 57–80. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P.
Bernini, Lorenzo. 2017. Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory. Translated by Julia Heim. New York: Palgrave.
Bishop, Kyle [William]. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
———. 2011. The Pathos of The Walking Dead: Bringing Terror Back to Zombie Cinema. In Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 1–13. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle.
———. 2015. How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
Boehm, Chris. 2014. Apocalyptic Utopia: The Zombie and the (r)Evolution of Subjectivity. In We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 2158–2827. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
Booth, Robert A. 2015. Organisms and Human Bodies as Contagions in the Post-Apocalyptic State. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 17–30. New York: Palgrave.
Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley. 2004. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, ix–xxxviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Canavan, Gerry. 2010. ‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative. Extrapolation 51 (3): 431–453.
Castillo, David R., David Schmid, David R. Reilly, and John Edgar Browning. 2016. Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle.
Gurr, Barbara. 2015. Introduction: After the World Ends, Again. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 1–14. New York: Palgrave.
Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP. Kindle.
———. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle.
Hannabach, Cathy. 2014. Queering and Cripping the end of the World: Disability, Sexuality and Race in The Walking Dead In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 1896–2210. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
Heckman, Christine. 2014. “Roadside ‘Vigil’ for the Dead: Cannibalism, Fossil Fuels and the American Dream.” In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 1940–2223. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
Kelleher, Paul. 2004. How to Do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the ‘Child in Danger.’. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 151–171. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McGlotten, Shaka. 2011. Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality. In Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, loc. 3859–4101. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Kindle.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Kindle.
Murray, Jessica. 2013. A Zombie Apocalypse: Opening Representational Spaces for Alternative Constructions of Gender and Sexuality. Journal of Literary Studies 29 (4): 1–19.
Ohi, Kevin. 2004. Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Masie Knew. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 81–106. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P.
Pokornowski, Steven. 2014. Burying the Living with the Dead: Security, Survival and the Sanction of Violence. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc 846–1144. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.
Reed, Darren, and Ruth Penfold-Mounce. 2015. Zombies and the Sociological Imagination: The Walking Dead as Social-Science Fiction. In The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture, ed. Laura Hubner, Marcus Leaning, and Paul Manning, 123–138. New York: Palgrave. Kindle.
Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press.
Smith, Phil. 2015. The Footbook of Zombie Walking: How to Be More than a Survivor in an Apocalypse. Axminster: Triarchy Press. Kindle.
Wood, Robin. 1998. Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond, Expanded and Revised ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Kindle.
Zani, Steven, and Kevin Meaux. 2011. Lucio Fulci and the Decaying Definition of Zombie Narratives. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 98–115. New York: Fordham University Press.
Episodes Referenced
“The Big Scary U” (season 8, episode 5, 2017)
“Days Gone Bye” (season 1, episode 1, 2010)
“Not Tomorrow Yet” (season 6, episode 12, 2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ziegler, J.R. (2018). Introduction. In: Queering the Family in The Walking Dead. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99797-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99798-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)