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Killable hordes, chronic others, and ‘mindful’ consumers: Rehabilitating the zombie in Twenty-First-Century popular culture

Killable hordes, chronic others, and ‘mindful’ consumers: Rehabilitating the zombie in Twenty-First-Century popular culture
Killable hordes, chronic others, and ‘mindful’ consumers: Rehabilitating the zombie in Twenty-First-Century popular culture
American zombie fiction responds to discourses on immigration and viropolitics in two main ways. In one strand, the zombie presents a de-humanised metaphor for groups of people considered distasteful to regular citizens (immigrants, enemy combatants, the poor, etc.). In another, increasingly popular strand, we find zombies who are able to contain their otherness, and are partially reintegrated with society. The narrator of the 2010 novel Feed struggles with the discrimination she faces as the carrier a dormant version of the zombie virus. The 2013 film Warm Bodies tells the story of a zombie who unites the dead and the living through his love for a human girl. In the CW series iZombie (2014-2016) a zombie’s ability to absorb the memories of the dead by eating their brains helps her to solve crimes. Each character is a potential disease vector, but each manages to manage their illness and make a valuable contribution to human society.
Drawing on work by Margrit Shildrick and Donna Haraway, this chapter explores how the metaphor of disease is employed in these ‘friendly zombie’ texts to offer a reading of the politics of belonging they articulate. These stories are not only metaphors for living with disease and disability, but also for life in a multicultural world. Rather than dehumanising the other outside the community, horror is directed inward, to a ‘monster’ that cannot be destroyed or ignored.
zombie, monsters, contemporary fiction, horror, neoliberalism, desire, infection, contagion, virus, biopolitics
159-178
University of Wales Press
de Bruin-Molé, Megen
50c0d19d-e9c9-4ad4-9b14-8645139e1ef9
de Bruin-Molé, Megen
50c0d19d-e9c9-4ad4-9b14-8645139e1ef9

de Bruin-Molé, Megen (2021) Killable hordes, chronic others, and ‘mindful’ consumers: Rehabilitating the zombie in Twenty-First-Century popular culture. In, Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse. (Horror Studies) University of Wales Press, pp. 159-178. (doi:10.16922/contagion).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

American zombie fiction responds to discourses on immigration and viropolitics in two main ways. In one strand, the zombie presents a de-humanised metaphor for groups of people considered distasteful to regular citizens (immigrants, enemy combatants, the poor, etc.). In another, increasingly popular strand, we find zombies who are able to contain their otherness, and are partially reintegrated with society. The narrator of the 2010 novel Feed struggles with the discrimination she faces as the carrier a dormant version of the zombie virus. The 2013 film Warm Bodies tells the story of a zombie who unites the dead and the living through his love for a human girl. In the CW series iZombie (2014-2016) a zombie’s ability to absorb the memories of the dead by eating their brains helps her to solve crimes. Each character is a potential disease vector, but each manages to manage their illness and make a valuable contribution to human society.
Drawing on work by Margrit Shildrick and Donna Haraway, this chapter explores how the metaphor of disease is employed in these ‘friendly zombie’ texts to offer a reading of the politics of belonging they articulate. These stories are not only metaphors for living with disease and disability, but also for life in a multicultural world. Rather than dehumanising the other outside the community, horror is directed inward, to a ‘monster’ that cannot be destroyed or ignored.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 4 May 2020
Published date: 1 April 2021
Keywords: zombie, monsters, contemporary fiction, horror, neoliberalism, desire, infection, contagion, virus, biopolitics

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 441036
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/441036
PURE UUID: e7c6ac6a-034c-4ff4-b831-d40ebe07b285
ORCID for Megen de Bruin-Molé: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4243-1995

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Date deposited: 28 May 2020 16:30
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:49

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