Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

John R. Ziegler

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319997971
• eBook ISBN: 9783319997988
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces how The Walking Dead franchise narratively, visually, and rhetorically represents transgressions against heteronormativity and the nuclear family. The introduction argues that The Walking Dead reflects cultural anxiety over threats to the family. Chapter 1 examines the destructive competition created by heteronormativity, such as the conflict between Rick and Shane. Chapter 2 focuses on the actual or attempted participation of characters such as Carol and Negan in queer relationships. Chapter 3 interprets zombies as queer antagonists to heteronormativity, while Chapter 4 explores the incorporation of zombies into the lives of characters such as the Governor and the Whisperers. The conclusion asserts that The Walking Dead presents both queer alternatives to and damaging contradictions within the traditional heterosexual family model, helping to question this model and to consider the struggle of queer American families. Overall, this study holdsspecial interest for students and scholars of queerness, zombies, and the family.

© The Author(s) 2018

John R. ZieglerQueering the Family in The Walking Deadhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

John R. Ziegler¹

(1)

English Department, Bronx Community College, CUNY, Bronx, NY, USA

John R. Ziegler

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.

Keywords

The Walking Dead Nuclear familyReproductive futurismZombiesQueer

End Abstract

A man explains to our hero that his group became cannibals out of desperation and poor hunting skills. They began with eating the “few kids” who were with them, after which “the thought of eating strangers was very easy to come to grips with” (c2:ch11:n65).¹ He maintains, however, that their situation is to blame, and “[i]f there were anything else we could do to get by—we’d do it” (c2:ch11:n65). Our protagonists, whose own group has been attacked by these hunters of fellow humans, respond by brutally murdering all of them “after taking their weapons” (c2:c11:n66). Our hero, Rick Grimes, later recalls “every bloody bit,” “broken bone,” and “bashed in skull” inflicted as they “mutilated those people. Made the others watch as we went through them … one by one” (c2:ch11:n66). Despite this guilt, he maintains that their actions were “justifiable” (c2:ch11:n66).

Searching for gas, Rick Grimes, who had lain in a coma through the onset of the zombie apocalypse, walks through a field of abandoned cars that once formed an encampment. The camera, implying Rick’s gaze, sweeps over detritus, including a stroller, and lingers as it passes on a soiled doll baby, on its back and suggestive of a corpse. The bunny-slippered feet that he spies looking under a car turn out to belong not to a living “little girl” in need of protection but to a zombie (“Days Gone Bye”; see Fig. 1.1). Her body flies dramatically backward when Rick reluctantly shoots her through the head as she advances on him with increasing speed and menace, and the show cuts to its first ever opening credits.

Fig. 1.1

Rick encounters a zombie child

On a desolate suburban street, the zombified wife of a man named Morgan walks up onto the porch of the house where she had stayed with him and their son, and in which she had died. She appears to try to see through the peephole and fruitlessly turns the doorknob on the locked door. Her behavior echoes the way that the zombie girl whom Rick had earlier met had stopped to pick up a teddy bear, as if she retained some aspect of her living identity. Explaining the situation with his wife, Morgan tells Rick, “I just didn’t have it in me” to “put her down” (“Days Gone Bye”).² Later, in juxtaposition with Rick mercy killing a decayed zombie missing her lower torso, Morgan has his wife in the crosshairs of his rifle (she seems to stare directly back at him), but, crying, cannot finally bring himself to pull the trigger.

Each of this trio of moments in the hugely popular The Walking Dead—the first from the comics and the second two from the television show—manifests an aspect of its moral universe that is important for examining how the franchise conceptualizes both the family and challenges to its traditional form and dominance. Both the cannibals and the way in which Rick and his group wipe them out with an extra dose of cruelty attest to what the show presents as the drastically altered ethics of a world overrun with the undead. The comics and the TV show both assert again and again that what is acceptable has changed profoundly. But does that apply to the family as well?

Much existing scholarship on zombies, including on The Walking Dead, examines the living dead in the context of post–9/11 anxieties.³ Steven Pokornowski (2014), for instance, surmises that cultural inundation with fears of terrorism may have driven the zombie’s resurgent popularity (loc. 1095).⁴ John Edgar Browning identifies 9/11 as the point after which zombie films began to emphasize “urban violence” and an “ambulatory impulse” in contrast to the Romero-inspired defense of a “survival space” (Castillo et al. 2016, 26). Kyle Bishop (2010) sees zombies’ current ascendency as partly a result of the close post–9/11 echoes of the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s (25). While these observations identify a significant early driver of the twenty-first-century resurgence in zombie media and importantly inflect zombie studies, I propose in this book to trace in The Walking Dead’s zombie narrative a different strain of twenty-first-century cultural anxiety and conflict: the question of what constitutes a socially and politically acceptable family unit.

Bishop’s comparison of the contemporary American sociopolitical climate to contentious destabilization of the 1960s and 1970s is arguably even more accurate now than when he wrote it in 2010. Currently, setting aside the disruption of governmental norms, the sociopolitical landscape is riven by deep, seemingly entrenched, and often partisan divisions, including fresh, sometimes state-sponsored, attacks, frequently under the guise of so-called religious freedom, on progressive gains and positions. With this in mind, Robin Wood’s comments on the social politics of the horror film offer a useful way to think about the degree of progressivism in The Walking Dead’s engagement with family. Wood (2003) identifies the family as central to American horror and the 1970s as its subversive period, in which a “crisis in ideological confidence temporarily released our culture’s monsters from the shackles of repression” and produced a “recognition … that the monster is a product of normality,” which is itself “monstrous” (85). The 1980s then ushered in a regressive movement toward reactionary politics (Wood 2003, 168). These politics include tying the nuclear family to financial stability in the face of cuts to the social support network, even as the majority of such family units come under increasing economic stress (Halberstam 2011, loc. 1377). At the risk of oversimplifying, and though some amount of diversification has occurred since then, I would suggest that this conservative orientation—perhaps resurrected, or merely reaffirmed, by the post–9/11 anxieties that have become a critical commonplace—remains dominant in the horror genre, and The Walking Dead hews fairly closely to its normative impulses. In some ways, its politics are closer to those of European zombie movies of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the real monsters are those who “dare” to defy the precepts of “family, nation and body,” and “who are becoming a new kind of human” (Smith 2015, loc. 1507). If, as Wood argues, in Romero’s early films, the family itself is monstrous, and the threat comes from within, the threat in The Walking Dead is once again primarily from outside the family, to it rather than from it, a threat of destruction or conversion, not only from zombies but also from other, nonnormative family units.

In No Future, Lee Edelman (2004) implicates the family in the ideology of what he names reproductive futurism. By providing the fantasies, enacted by figural and linguistic means, that structure and maintain social reality, reproductive futurism enforces the dominant, monogamous heterosexual paradigm (loc. 130–138). The most important figure is the Child, which is fundamental to how society conceives (of) itself and serves as a presumed guarantee of its future. A body politic requires a fantasy of its own future existence in order to maintain cohesion, and a sense of stability inheres in the premise, propped up by the Child, that social reality will survive beyond any particular individual (loc. 543). Thus, the cannibals’ destruction and consumption of children function not merely to mark them as outside the ethical pale (while at least partly justifying Rick and his group’s violent revenge) but also as an attack on what continue to be the most basic underpinnings of social organization, even in the apocalypse. Rick’s encounter with the teddy bear–clutching zombie girl represents an encounter with a kind of anti-Child, a figure that stands in opposition to reproductive sexuality and its promise of a future. Her very existence, with the “insecurity indicated by the corruption even of children, the bedrock of futurity, undermines the most basic assumption” of a society like ours that it will remain more or less stable and static (Heckman 2014, loc. 2128). A corrupted child could interfere with the steady transmission of the social order into the future. A zombie child, however, represents merely a more extreme version of the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Living Families
• Part II. Living/Dead Families
• Back Matter