Abstract
This chapter examines the actual or attempted participation of living characters in The Walking Dead in queer modes of relationality. In the comics, Carol proposes a polyamorous marriage to Rick and Lori, and their rejection frames her request as irrational, a common rhetorical tactic of reproductive futurism. Carol ultimately commits suicide, an act of queer negation. Negan’s polygamy is misogynistic, competitive, and oppressive rather than collective and liberatory; and it contributes to his defeat. The franchise does include positive depictions of queerness in gay characters and couples. However, Eric and Denise are both killed, and Denise dies in the television show in place of heterosexual Abraham in the comics. Television-Abraham’s death is positioned as more tragic because of his recent embrace of a reproductive future.
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Notes
- 1.
The show returns to this strategy of Othering Jadis in the episode “The King, the Widow, and Rick,” in which she is shown working on a wire sculpture while wearing nothing but a heavy-duty apron (a male figure in the same state of undress passes by the camera at the end of the shot, seen partially and from behind, inviting the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about why this is the case). In the following episode, “Time for After,” it continues this trend when she photographs a nearly naked Rick so that she can sculpt him “after” (after what, we never learn, but it at least echoes Carl’s dying contention that there must be something after, an evolution from their current situation).
- 2.
Jadis also tells Morgan at the end of season 8 to call her Anne, though I still refer to her throughout this book as Jadis, since that is the name she has been known by through most of her existence as a character and since it is as yet unclear whether she is lying or choosing another new name.
- 3.
Kay Steiger (2011) writes of Carol’s proposal: “Though a plural marriage doesn’t seem traditional, it’s clear that Carol is desperate to cling to Lori and Rick, who she views as fulfilling a more traditional gender dynamic” (105). Even if this is true, however, and she does want to marry them because Rick as a “traditional male leader” and Lori as “a mother and caretaker are comforting” to her, what she proposes goes far beyond not “seem[ing] traditional,” as evinced in Rick and Lori’s reactions (105).
- 4.
Andrea answers Dale similarly when he tells her that he won’t mind if she has sex with Tyreese , a younger and more able-bodied man. She, like Rick, cannot separate love and monogamy, replying, “Oh, stop it … I love you” (c1:ch7:n42).
- 5.
Later, Lori uses pregnancy and motherhood to excuse her behavior following Carol’s proposal: “I’m sorry if we’ve drifted apart. We were so close until recently. I’ve just, with the baby and the latter months of pregnancy” (c1:ch7:n40).
- 6.
Carol denies that her statement and gesture were meant sexually, but what is important here is that Lori is reacting to them as if they were.
- 7.
Reed and Penfold-Mounce note a similar dynamic in the first season of the television version, in which “various traditional relationship units—such as husband and wife, father and son, friendship and friend—play out time and again. Each individual is defined by either the presence or absence of explicit relational links” (132).
- 8.
Muñoz (2009) notes that queerness and “that particular modality of loss known as suicide seem linked,” especially as an act performing “radical negativity” (168).
- 9.
On the page following this exchange, Dale explicitly denies to Rick any sexual relationship with Amy or Andrea. In some ways, the sisters’ living with Dale recalls the once widespread pre-war practice of living with extended family that is discouraged by contemporary capitalism.
- 10.
Wood (2003) observes that, in horror films, “the relationship between normality and the Monster” often takes the form of “the doppelgänger, alter ego, or double,” but Carol, in becoming a zombie, becomes her own double—as all characters in The Walking Dead always carry their own monstrous alter ego within them (see Chap. 4 for further discussion) (71).
- 11.
Negan answers Carl with almost exactly these words in the TV episode “Sing Me a Song,” when Carl asks him if “all of those women are actually” his wives.
- 12.
Negan is also suggesting the superiority of his leadership to Rick’s, and thus, symbolically, his superiority as a patriarchal figure. The TV version makes this comparison more explicit, with Negan saying to Carl after intimidating one of the Saviors with sexually explicit banter that men “breaking each other’s balls” is the kind of thing “your dad’s supposed to be teaching you” (“Sing Me a Song”). Later, he holds and bounces Judith on his lap.
- 13.
Hannabach does read Andrea and Michonne’s relationship in season 3 as sexless but “visualized through tropes associated with romantic and sexual coupledom” and Andrea’s relationship with the Governor as participating in the “offensive stereotype” of the “supposed ‘straight girl’ who leaves the supposed ‘real lesbian’ for a man” (loc. 2124).
- 14.
At the same time, Sasha overhears the exchange, and so when Maggie tells Jesus that it is worth trying to get close to people, even if it doesn’t last, it becomes an admonition to Sasha (the camera cuts to her soon after Maggie begins to speak) to give a heterosexual relationship with Abraham a chance. It is perhaps worth asking how much relationships like Jesus’s represent “ homonormativity ,” “a heteronormative approach to gay identity and experience” particularly associated with white homosexual men (Cocarla 2014, loc. 1078).
- 15.
- 16.
The show does have to work hard to justify Denise going on the scavenging run on which she dies, having her unreasonably insist that she needs to feel like she is helping, despite acting at the settlement’s doctor, threatening, “I’ll go alone if I have to” (“Twice as Far”).
- 17.
The episode “Knots Untie” emphasizes this by intercutting scenes of a naked Abraham and Rosita in bed together with scenes, representing Abraham’s thoughts, of Abraham talking to Sasha.
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Episodes Referenced
“Always Accountable” (season 6, episode 6, 2015)
“The Big Scary U” (season 8, episode 5, 2017)
“The First Day of the Rest of Your Life” (season 7, episode 16, 2017)
“Hostiles and Calamities” (season 7, episode 11, 2017)
“The King, the Widow, and Rick” (season 8, episode 6, 2017)
“Knots Untie” (season 6, episode 11, 2016)
“The Lost and the Plunderers” (season, episode 10, 2018)
“Not Tomorrow Yet” (season 6, episode 12, 2016)
“The Other Side” (season 7, episode 14, 2017)
“Sing Me a Song” (season 7, episode 7, 2016)
“Still Gotta Mean Something” (season 8, episode 14, 2018)
“Time for After,” (season 8, episode 7, 2017)
“Twice as Far” (season 6, episode 14, 2016)
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Ziegler, J.R. (2018). Insane Proposals: Beyond Monogamy as Beyond Rationality. In: Queering the Family in The Walking Dead. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_3
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