Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

John R. Ziegler

Queering the Family in The Walking Dead “Ziegler thoroughly engages with both versions of The Walking Dead, uncovering the complexities—and failures—of the narrative in terms of human sexuality and familial relationships. This analysis is a must read for fans of the series, especially those interested in interrogating its depictions of sex, gender, and the apocalyptic family.” —Kyle William Bishop, Associate Professor of English, Southern Utah University “Ziegler delivers a riveting deconstruction of the heteronormative, nuclear-family image as it is infected, dies, and shambles along with other decaying paradigms like the sacrosanct Child, the nurturing Mother, and even the relative safety of Community. While the zombies rot, a different sort of deterioration is at work within the survivors, and often the real monsters turn out to be those who continue to evolve, becoming something new—something not quite in line with our comforting standards of humanity.” —Deborah G. Christie, Ph.D., Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human, Old Dominion University, VA

John R. Ziegler

Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

John R. Ziegler English Department Bronx Community College, CUNY Bronx, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-99797-1    ISBN 978-3-319-99798-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958514 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It is a widely accepted tenet that works of horror generally and zombie media in particular arise from and comment on social and cultural anxieties. The range of such intersections is of course immense, and this project focuses specifically on social and cultural anxieties associated with transgressions of heteronormative values as they are depicted in The Walking Dead. The zombie renaissance discussed by noted zombie scholar Kyle William Bishop in his 2015 book on How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture shows little sign of abating, and The Walking Dead continues to occupy a central role in that conquest. The modern zombie, born in the films of George Romero, is an American creation, and there exists also a perhaps fundamentally American notion of the family. This book intends to examine the interplay between The Walking Dead’s latter-day descendants of Romero’s undead monsters and its representation of the dynamics of and ideology that supports and reproduces the dominant mode of familial organization. Zombies are creatures, in most representations, including The Walking Dead, driven by desire rather than cognition. In direct contrast to the zombie horde, the family unit—its construction, boundaries, and functioning—has traditionally served as a locus of control over desires. The negotiation of different expressions of desire and family in the United States continues to be fractious, to say the least. Despite measurable social progress, practices such as same-sex or gender-nonconforming marriage and parenting and polyamory continue to fall under consistent cultural and political attack. Bisexuality similarly persists in being elided, even at times by putative allies. Such resistance to alternative sociosexual ­configurations often employs rhetorics of aberrance, unnaturalness, or irrationality, as well as invokes danger to (always v

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pure and innocent) children. Reading The Walking Dead franchise as directly participating in these social tensions and the discourses surrounding them, particularly given its extensive cultural reach, my project employs queer theory and cultural studies as its primary lenses in order to interrogate The Walking Dead’s resistance to nonnormative family structures (the normative unit being, of course, monogamous, heterosexual, and reproductive). Queer theory offers a productive way to analyze the zombie narrative’s relationship to this nexus of drives, desire, power, and control, while cultural study situates such analysis within its (American) sociohistorical context. This project, which builds on and expands an earlier articulation of its premise in essay form (Ziegler 2018), covers the first eight seasons of the television show and the first 144 issues of the comic book series. In doing so, it aims to fill in gaps in the academic conversation about The Walking Dead, while contributing to zombie studies as a whole. While queer theory has been increasingly applied to zombie media, there are still no book-­ length studies of sexuality, alternative or otherwise, in The Walking Dead, and comparatively little of the existing scholarship on the franchise deals with the comic books, despite the fact that graphic narratives are increasingly studied and taught academically. By considering the comics in conjunction with the television show, the project aims to produce a sustained, detailed analysis that will be of interest to scholars, students, and hopefully fans as well. In fact, average fans may be one of the most important groups that such a discussion needs to reach if it is to be anything more than (pardon the pun) an academic exercise. Like the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, one can only hope. While comics share narrative and representational elements with film, they give rise to distinct audience encounters. Thus, in addition to paying close attention to language and visual composition in both the television and comics incarnations of The Walking Dead, this project strives to acknowledge in its readings the unique materiality of comics. Bishop (2006) points out that the originary text of the modern zombie, Night of the Living Dead, was influenced not only by other films such as The Birds but also by comic books (199). He later claims that movies achieve a reality effect by presenting images synchronically, which can be true of comics as well, if the reader so chooses, but comics also have a unique mode of communicating meaning that is different from those of film and television, and which I endeavor to account for in this project (201). My close ­reading of individual pages or panels acknowledges, for instance, the way in which a panel must use a snapshot to represent a larger action, as well as how it creates meaning, especially emotional meaning, through facial

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expressions; the distances, reciprocities, and vectors of bodies; and “symbolic resources, such as … sweat drops to represent surprise or anxiety” (Feng and O’Halloran 2012, 2069, 2081, 2072, 2074). Readers of comics must also fill in the narrative gaps within and between panels, constructing interpretations using both the “unfolding discourse” and “more abstract semiotic levels, such as context, style, or genre” (Bateman and Wildfeuer 2015, 185). Context, in this process, includes structural relationships among groups of panels, including the entire page as a unit of meaning (190, 193, 202).1 Keeping these various levels of meaning-­ making in view will more usefully elucidate how Robert Kirkman’s creation, like much apocalyptic media, represents and, arguably, reinforces the “profound durability” of our social hierarchies (Gurr 2016, 166), but, in doing so, simultaneously helps us to question them and imagine other, counterhegemonic modes of being and relationality. Bronx, NY, USA

John R. Ziegler

Note 1. Bateman and Wildfeuer argue for a more complex interpretive relationship

among panels on a page than that of linearly arranged moments in time (197, 200).

References Bateman, John A., and Janina Wildfeuer. 2015. A Multimodal Discourse Theory of Visual Narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 74, 180–208. Bishop, Kyle [William]. 2015. How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. ———. 2006. Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Nonliterary Origins of Zombie Cinema. Journal of Popular Film and Television 33(4), 196–205. Feng, Dezheng, and Kay L. O’Halloran. 2012. Representing Emotive Meaning in Visual Imagery: A Social Semiotic Approach. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 2067–2084. Gurr, Barbara. 2015. Afterword (Afterward). In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 165–168. New York: Palgrave. Ziegler, John R. 2018. ‘We can’t just ignore the rules’: Queer Heterosexualities. In The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics, ed. Elizabeth L.  Erwin and Dawn Keetley, 142–153. Jefferson: McFarland.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to everyone who has heard or read pieces of this project since its inception and played a part in its development: audiences at the Bronx Community College English Department Faculty Lecture Series, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Conference; Dawn Keetley and Elizabeth Erwin; Shaun Vigil, Glenn Ramirez, and everyone at Palgrave; Steven Reilly, Bethany Holmstrom, and Shannon Proctor. I wish especially to thank Leah Richards, my partner in all senses of the word, and our small household of feline editorial assistants: Perdita, Renfield, Trey, and Benny.

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Contents

1 Introduction   1 Part I Living Families  19 2 That Is My Wife: Reproductive Futurism and Patriarchal Competition  21 3 Insane Proposals: Beyond Monogamy as Beyond Rationality  43 Part II Living/Dead Families  63 4 What Happens in the Barn Stays in the Barn: The Family and the Zombie as Sinthomosexual  65 5 Out of the Barn: Alternative Families and the Undead  85 6 Conclusion: A Terminus 107 Index 113

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Rick encounters a zombie child Rick reclaims his family unit Rick and Shane’s moonlight standoff Rick looks down on Lori Negan makes Dwight wait Hershel reveals the contents of his barn Carnage at Hershel’s barn The Governor kisses Penny The Governor with a beribboned Penny

2 25 29 48 55 70 78 93 96

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

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 family • Reproductive futurism • Zombies • Queer 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 © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_1

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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. 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

Fig. 1.1  Rick encounters a zombie child

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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

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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

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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 menace to reproductive futurism and its perpetuation through the family inherent in all zombies. Morgan’s undead wife (or, as he identifies her to Rick, the mother of his child), then, threatens to unsettle the boundaries of the heterosexual reproductive family. The “non-forceful” way that she attempts to open the door suggests that she seemingly desires to return to rather than feed on her husband and son (Reed and Penfold-Mounce 2015, 133–134), which opens up the possibility of a disruptively hybridized family. Altering the conventional configuration of the family amounts to dangerous subversion because familial and sexual relationships configure the wider social fabric, and these relationships are in turn configured by the hegemonic ideology of reproductive futurism. Jeffrey Sconce (2000) identifies the nuclear family as the center of life in the postwar United States (139). Its dominance as the organizing unit of American social and sexual life only intensified as, “[i]n flight from the nation’s urban centers and severed from a whole nexus of earlier community relations, the nuclear families of white suburbia suddenly stood in self-imposed isolation as their own primary network of personal identity and social support” (147). This shift “restructured many Americans’ engagement with both the social world and the family circle, providing each member of the family with a new social role to internalize and obey” (147). The influence of familial roles as they developed during that period has endured, as their ideal instantiation continues to default to a monogamously heterosexual mother and father who together produce a child or children. Louis Althusser (1994) has noted that ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practices, and that these apparatuses include the family (110). In this capacity, the traditional nuclear family works to naturalize certain ideologies, among which is heteronormativity. Such naturalization is essential to ideology, which “contrives to have no memory; it other

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words, it extends the lie to the lie itself, to what it believes, lying as it believes, and has no memory of its contriving” (Smith 2015, loc. 228). Heteronormativity has been long and successfully naturalized in this way, and this ostensibly natural order has fundamentally influenced the structure of American society at all levels, thereby touching most aspects of culture and society and shaping the trajectory of individual citizens’ lives. The disruption of such a persistently powerful organizing force, one that, again, provides the comforting illusion of a stable, inherent order and hierarchy, proves unsurprisingly frightening to many. Thus, the challenge to this apparently natural system posed by almost half of the contemporary families in the United States that fail to adhere to the traditional nuclear model provokes great consternation in a portion of its citizenry. Increased acceptance, practice, and visibility of alternatives to the heteronormative family have produced a corresponding resistance, manifested, for example, in individuals’ refusals to issue same-sex marriage licenses or in discourses that position transgender, polyamorous, bisexual, or homosexual individuals as deviants, unfit parents, or dangers to children using the restroom. The Walking Dead can help us to think through what underlies the stubborn resistance to these alternative sociosexual structures and ways of being. Tracing how the franchise represents the transgression of heteronorms narratively, visually, and rhetorically will reveal how the patterns and recurring elements of those representations and, by extension, reproductive futurism itself, function, to varying degrees of success, to normalize, naturalize, and police sociosexual ideologies. Despite far-reaching, if not quite apocalyptic, sociocultural changes in the United States, the prevailing conception of the family continues to be the “patriarchal, biological, nuclear one, of all available models the most oppressive, neurosis-breeding, and insular, the enemy of true community” (Wood 2003, loc. 430). Although there exists “no necessity whatever” for marriage, heterosexual cohabitation, monogamy, or even for children to be raised by their biological parents (Wood 1998, 79), the ideological force accrued to these ideas disguises their constructedness, as well as the means by which they are perpetuated and adherence to them enforced. As part of this attempted enforcement, reproductive futurism often positions challenges to the dominant paradigm as irrational and unthinkable, a mechanism that we see play out repeatedly in The Walking Dead. In Wood’s formulation, horror presents the threatening of normality by a monster, where normality consistently means the monogamous heterosexual couple, the family, and the institutions that “support and defend them”

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(Wood 2003, 71). In The Walking Dead, however, the traditional family persists even in the absence of any state apparatus, its support and defense carried out through ingrained ideology. It is instructive to consider the contrast in the franchise’s portrayal between actions that (would) undermine the traditional nuclear family and actions that depart from other currently accepted norms. When Rick and his group murder and mutilate the cannibals in the comics or when, in the television episode “Not Tomorrow Yet,” members of Rick’s group preventively execute members of the rival Saviors while they sleep, we are meant to see such deeds as unfortunately thrust upon the protagonists by the necessities of postapocalyptic survival. While such acts may provoke questions about the characters’ ethical struggles, sometimes from the characters themselves, their actions are consistently presented as justified by their situation, as the unavoidable corollary to being “strong” or making the “hard choices.”5 This is a new world and thus requires a new morality. The conceptualization of the family, however, seems to escape such profound reimagining. The sweeping changes in other areas of postapocalyptic behavior and social organization only highlight more strikingly by contrast the persistent dominance in The Walking Dead of the monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear family. In The Walking Dead franchise, that continued dominance propels efforts to contain possibilities for alternative family structures, which repeatedly and challengingly arise. Queerness—specifically queerness as an oppositional force against the social obsession with reproductive futurism, at the center of which stands the Child—offers the most useful approach to examining the potential for alternatives to “the central unit of our society,” the traditional heteronormative family (Wood 1998, 22). Lauren Berlant (2004) writes, “Reproduction and generationality are the main vehicles by which the national future can be figured, made visible,” and heterosexuality thus “function[s] as a sacred national fetish beyond the disturbances of history or representation” (58, 76). Within reproductive futurist ideology, “the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political can be thought” (Edelman 2004, loc. 64). One of the effects of this political logic is the “uncritical relationship” in zombie media generally and The Walking Dead in particular to a patriarchal narrative that holds women and children to be in need of protection and, relatedly, holds hope to be inseparable from the “circuit” of reproductive futurism (Canavan 2010, 444). The same logic seeks to produce a particular type of individual subject (thereby also reproducing itself): in Wood’s (2003) description, the “‘ideal’ inhabit-

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ant of our culture is the individual whose sexuality is sufficiently fulfilled by the monogamous heterosexual union necessary for the reproduction of the future ideal inhabitants” (64). Those future ideal inhabitants are themselves then socialized to desire their own children, and Americans who choose not to have children are consistently regarded less favorably and as psychologically unsatisfied or poorly adjusted (Ashburn-Nardo 2017, 394).6 The “moral outrage—anger, disgust, and disapproval”—that accompanies this perception helps to perform ideological boundary work (398). In zombie narratives, the survivors embody the ideal citizen, and The Walking Dead has received criticism for that embodiment being most often white, heterosexual, and male, with women serving as symbols of domesticity and, vitally for futurism, fertility (Baldwin and McCarthy 2013, 75). In contrast to this ideal, queerness represents death drive of the social order and does not assume that society must or will continue to exist (Edelman 2004, loc. 73). According to Chris Boehm (2014), one function of the death drive “is to clear away outmoded symbolic forms that have failed to conceal the disturbing ‘gaps’ in the socio-symbolic network,” and reproductive futurism, of course, attempts to suppress and counteract such negation (loc. 1590). Thinking about humanity outside of the frame of continued existence opens up the possibility of thinking about ways of continuing existence differently, but reproductive futurism attempts to maintain “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman 2004, loc. 64). In The Walking Dead, the reproductive “heteronuclear family” retains that privilege “even in a postapocalyptic world that in many ways might seem to require a more expansive and heterogeneous network of kinship and community” (Hannabach 2014, loc. 1951). Bishop (2015) observes that zombie cinema has always to a large degree been about the structure of the family, whether literal or symbolic, and The Walking Dead continues that big-screen tradition both on the small screen and on the page (43). (Bishop [2011] notes elsewhere the familial focus of the show’s opening season [9].) The zombie narrative also typically expresses “anxieties regarding the world’s future. It is an incarnation of anxiety about the future as such” (Berger 2015, 151). Queerness functions antagonistically to the reproductive family and to the future, including to the family’s symbolic guarantee of the future. I employ queer in this project in its more “spacious” usage, as a term that signifies “a deviation from the normal” but “derives also from its association with specifically

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sexual alterity” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, x). In its deviation from the normal, queerness acquires force toward the kind of queer utopianism described by José Esteban Muñoz. For Muñoz (2009), queerness “is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world (1).”7 Paul Kelleher (2004) offers a useful way to define the contours of queerness when he outlines how the figure of the child in danger, like Edelman’s Child a “figure of no child in particular,” allows for the contradistinctive construction of “perversion, with all the psychological and social phenomena it purports to describe (‘homosexuality,’ for one, but also any nonreproductive forms of sexuality, as well as any nontraditional forms of intimate, social, or political life)” (151, 152). Conceptualizing queerness in these ways allows us to trace how queer resistance to the heteronormative family and its future in The Walking Dead comes from both from the living and the undead, most often to be suppressed or neutralized. The Walking Dead’s living characters primarily push back, intentionally or unintentionally, against heteronormative dictates through different types of non-monogamy (such as Lori’s infidelity and Carol’s desire for polyamory) and through embracing, to varying degrees, zombies as family members (such as Hershel keeping undead family members in his barn or Lizzie’s failed plan to make her sister into a zombie). Zombies can themselves be read as queer figures, although I am not, to borrow from Judith Halberstam’s (1995) discussion of vampires and Othering, arguing for “a deliberate and unitary relation between fictional monster and real queer person” (92). Zombies’ queerness inheres in their existence outside of the regime of sexual reproduction, of which the traditional nuclear family forms an integral part. Via their asexual reproduction, threatening of (human) individual and social futures, and undisguised pursuit of drives, they function with the negating force of Edelman’s sinthomosexual. Steven Zani and Kevin Meaux (2011) argue for a threat to undo meaning itself as the core of zombie narratives (101). Edelman, meanwhile, coins the term sinthomosexual by joining the Lacanian “sinthome,” the part of the “knot” of subjectivity that refuses or is beyond meaning, and “homosexual” (loc. 576); and he posits the sinthomosexual as the antagonist to reproductive futurism.8 In this antagonism, zombies open up ways of being outside of “hetero and homonormative ideologies of the good, coupled life” (McGlotten 2011, loc. 3867).9 Wood (2003) reads Romero’s initial pair of zombie films as removing “progressive potential” from zombies in order to transfer it to the human characters, but The Walking Dead tends to frustrate

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­ rogressiveness in its human characters, leaving disruptive force to inhere p primarily in its undead (102).10 In themselves, as members of hybrid family groups composed of the living and undead, and especially as children— those linchpins of heteronormative futurism—zombies, as “a fundamentally American creation” (Bishop 2010, 12), stand in fitting opposition to the patriarchal nuclear family that occupies the center of American social and sexual organization. This book similarly opposes a focus on living families in the next two chapters to a focus on hybridized living/dead families in the subsequent two chapters. Chapter 2 examines the constricting dynamics of competition over and perceived ownership of romantic partners engendered by the centrality of the hetero-reproductive family and played out most vividly in the conflict between Rick and Shane over Lori and Lori’s children, Carl and Judith, in both the comics and TV show. That Rick’s and Shane’s coincidental desires to occupy the position of husband and father in the Grimes family result in conflict and violent death rather than a cooperative adjustment of the familial structure demonstrates the tenacity of both “the absurd and essentially obsolete patriarchal notion that fidelity can or should be measured in terms of sex” and the “ideology of the couple” as one of the “deepest and most resistant layers” of dominant ideology (Wood 1998, 340, 78). We see that ideology at work in the way that Rick, Shane, Lori, and even Carl do not consider queer potentialities in their situation but instead live by and defend the tenets of heteronormativity literally to the death. They enact the observation that marriage “hampers rational advancement and the not-yet-imagined versions of freedom” against which normative culture militates (Muñoz 2009, 30). The competition over Lori and her children also foregrounds the significance of the Child, who is worth killing and dying for and who even has the power, in the television series, to redeem the seemingly irredeemable Governor, a process that comes to an end only when he beheads the head of another heterosexual family. Chapter 3 examines living characters who, in contrast to Shane and the Grimes family, actively participate, or attempt to, in queer forms of sociosexual practice. The comic book version of Carol provides the most striking example of such an attempt when she asks Rick and Lori to enter into a polyamorous marriage with her. Rick and Lori of course reject her proposal, framing her request as irrational, and she ultimately commits suicide by allowing a zombie to bite her, an action that embraces the negation of futurity. Negan, in contrast, successfully engages in non-monogamy,

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­ ossessing a number of wives simultaneously. His polygamy, however, p functions merely as another way to mark him as a villain: his practice is misogynistic, competitive, and oppressive rather than collective and liberatory; and in the comics, his follower Dwight helps to bring about his downfall because Negan had made Dwight’s wife his own, and thus inaccessible to Dwight. The franchise does include some positive depictions of queerness in its gay characters and couples, such as Jesus, Aaron and Eric, and Tara and Denise. Significantly, however, Eric and Denise are both killed, removing those ongoing homosexual relationships from the franchise, and Denise’s death in the television show actually takes the place of the death of Abraham, a heterosexual white male, in the comics. Television-­ Abraham later dies too, but not before his demise is set up to be more tragic for his decision, after having wished to kill himself, to instead set his sights on a reproductive future by coupling and having a child with Sasha. With the fourth chapter, my focus pivots to the undead and their performance of queer antagonism toward reproductive futurism. Abraham exists in what Muñoz would call “straight time,” in which the “only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction” (Muñoz 2009, 22). Zombies, however, obliterate not only the state but also the promise of a reproductive future, adding instead to their own ranks through nonheterosexual reproduction. The Other, writes Robert Booth (2015), uncontrollably threatens social and bodily order, and zombies can be understood as a queer Other (18). Zombies, in many ways, threaten the social order through their disruption of bodily order. Their asexual reproduction, focus on present drives instead of future outcomes, and, in the Walking Dead’s mythos, status as an eventual or potential mode of being for every living person set them outside of and against the prevailing hetero-reproductive social structures and practices.11 As might be expected, then, the franchise casts conceptions of the undead such as those held by Hershel Greene and Lizzie Samuels that grant zombies continued humanity as misguided at best and fatally dangerous at worst. The unacceptability of their outlooks is intensified by their regarding zombies as part of the family, which has catastrophic consequences in both their cases, including, in television-Hershel’s case, the discovery that the long-lost Sophia has been zombified and has been living in Hershel’s barn. Her disturbing amalgam of child, Child, and sinthomosexual is speedily, and from the point of view of reproductive futurism, necessarily erased by Rick’s revolver.

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While Lizzie never fulfills her desire to become friends or family with a zombie, and Hershel warehouses his undead family and neighbors against the hope of a future change in their condition, others accept zombies in more intimate ways, as Chap. 5 explores. In the comics, Jessie, Rick’s romantic partner in Alexandria for a time, in an extremely short-lived but emblematically powerful action, holds on to both Carl and her own zombie-­bitten son, refusing to let go of either. The Governor too, in both the comics and the television series, refuses to abandon his relationship with a zombie child, Penny. His case, however, unlike Jessie’s, is not one of momentary refusal but of an extended living arrangement in which he adapts his relationship with Penny to accommodate her undead state. Although there is certainly space to view his actions sympathetically, his incorporation of an undead child into his family life primarily acts as one of the ways in which The Walking Dead signals his villainy and moral turpitude, intensified in the comics with a suggestion of incest. A zombie child already represents a destabilizing queer agent, and a sexual child compounds this disruptive force, for such children “thwart … comforting self-recognitions” (Ohi 2004, 82). According to Kevin Ohi (2004), children (as opposed to the ahistorical fantasy of the Child) may always be regarded as queer and childhood as a “locus of impossibility, of murderous disidentification,” the denial of which enables the belief that “we know what adults are” because “we know what children are” (82).12 It is notable then that while Michonne kills Penny on-screen in the TV show, her fate in the comics is left open, as is the fate of Morgan’s zombified son, with whom he has been living and whom he releases rather than kills when he leaves to join up with Rick’s group of survivors. These undead children constitute some of the very few failures of queer containment in the franchise, which becomes especially striking when viewed in light of the Whisperers, who live with zombies and wear their skins, and who no longer abide by conventional sexual morality or organize themselves into nuclear families, but whose leader, Alpha, still, in the end, acts as a traditional loving mother and sends her daughter to live with Rick’s people, implicitly endorsing the superiority of the normative worldview with which he is associated. The consistent attempts to preserve this normative worldview loom large in the conclusion of this project, as it takes stock of an analytical journey that begins with a traditional heterosexual love triangle, winds through a variety of imagined and achieved configurations of the living and the undead, and ends with a hyper-violent collective whose members

 INTRODUCTION 

13

blend themselves with zombies but whose leader cannot entirely give up the idea of good parenting. Alpha’s choice to hand over her daughter to Rick brings us, really, full circle: many characters in The Walking Dead are much more capable of and comfortable with extreme physical violence than they are with radical ideological violence. The conclusion offers a closing summation and assessment of how these characters, both humans and, counterintuitively, zombies, help us to think about alterity and about other ways of sociosexual organization and being, about how heteropatriarchy is naturalized, and about how examining that process can reveal ways to resist it. Such an examination involves pointing to the reoccurring cracks, present to an even greater degree in the comics than in the television series, in the repressive apparatus deployed within the franchise. All of these considerations can push us to look at overarching structures rather than individuals, thus locating our criticisms at the macro level necessary to enact change.

Notes 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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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———. 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)

PART I

Living Families

CHAPTER 2

That Is My Wife: Reproductive Futurism and Patriarchal Competition

Abstract  The chapter examines the oppressive relational dynamics ­engendered in The Walking Dead by reproductive futurist ideology. This dynamic of competition and ownership plays out in the conflict between Rick and Shane over Lori and Lori’s children. That this competition results in conflict and death rather than a cooperative adjustment of familial structure demonstrates the tenacity of heteronormative ideology. Even Carl ignores queer possibilities, and the competition over Lori and her children also foregrounds the significance of the symbolic Child, worth killing and dying for and able to temporarily redeem even the Governor. Occasionally, Rick briefly seems willing to reimagine family relationships, and the adherence of many characters to patriarchal norms repeatedly causes violence and death, even as the franchise frequently aligns itself with these norms. Keywords  The Walking Dead • Nuclear family • Reproductive futurism • Patriarchy • Heteronormativity A pillar of the construct of the traditional nuclear family is the formulation of a spousal relationship as a relationship of property ownership. Because the Western nuclear family is an inherently patriarchal structure, this perception of partner as property is especially enacted by males, and its encouragement of competition rather than cooperation ties it to other received models of masculinity. Such competition, arising from the nuclear family’s © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_2

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f­ oundational tenets, is at best unnecessary and at worst damaging. A relational system predicated on monogamy and intrafamilial child-­rearing requires that some individuals are claimed by other individuals, placing them offlimits, as it were, so that anyone who desires a sexual or romantic relationship with such a person must compete with and/or replace whoever acts as that individual’s current owner. In short, spousal relations in a capitalist society are competitive because they are property relations, and so they create a rigid, zero-sum conception of sexual and familial relations. Wood (1998) links the rise of private property to the rise of patriarchy, asserting that “[p]rivate ownership brings with it the institutions of marriage, monogamy, the patriarchal family,” and he further links the “cultural commitment to living in couples” to “the ideology of romantic love and the ideology of the family, both of which function as major instruments of oppression” (18, 79). Historically, challenges to these constructs are represented as dangerous and unnatural. As Melissa F. Lavin and Brian M. Lowe (2015) observe, the depiction of societal collapse by The Walking Dead in its televised form “resonates with conservative anxieties about twenty-first-century social change, which includes but is not limited to changing attitudes and evolving laws regarding marriage” (114). In both the television and comic book versions of The Walking Dead, the competition between Rick and Shane over Lori provides the most important early example of patriarchal competition and its foreclosure of alternative ways of being. While the tension and, eventually, violence caused by Rick’s rejection of Shane’s desire for Lori could be avoided by Rick and Shane sharing a similar position within a single family group, they never regard this as a viable possibility; in order to conform to socially permissible structure and practice, one of the two men must eliminate or otherwise replace the other. This resistance to opening up the family structure intersects with the primacy of children and the Child. Ensuring that the futurist paradigm remains intact is paramount. Competing with Shane for the position of family patriarch is a matter of power over not just Lori but also over Rick’s son, Carl, and his then-unborn daughter, Judith, whose questionable paternity provides another challenge to received notions of masculinity and family. Conflicts over the traditional family in zombie media are not unique to The Walking Dead. Precedents for expression of these particular anxieties may be found, for instance, in George Romero’s foundational zombie films. Kyle William Bishop (2010a) suggests that Romero’s work can in turn be situated within the classical Gothic tradition, one concern of which was the dynamics of the family (26). He observes both that in Night of the Living

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Dead, Romero locates the majority of the action within “the symbolic confines of what was once a traditional family home, which has become something of an ‘antiquated space,’ one could say, in 1968” and that the behavior exhibited by the characters within that symbolically charged setting “illustrates the erosion of conservative social and family structures” (121). Mrs. Cooper’s death in the film, for instance, stems from her inability to act contrary to her role as mother (Christie 2011, 78–79). As Bishop (2010a) explains, the 1960s witnessed challenges to the conventional bourgeois nuclear family and the power of patriarchal authority (215), challenges that continue to be the sites of social and political struggle today, as reflected in The Walking Dead. Thus, the house in Night of the Living Dead acts as “a whitewashed façade that conceals repressed anxieties and secrets about the American family” (125). Phil Smith (2015) observes that the tensions around family are not contained by or limited to Romero’s initial zombie film. He writes that, in Night of the Living Dead, the “ghoul that lurked in the cellar of the farmhouse, waiting for the new recruits to its infection, was Family. It’s there again at the beginning of the [2004] ‘Dawn’ re-make, and though she runs and drives furiously from it[,] the other Ana in ‘Dawn’ cannot escape it in the mall, where it spawns a zombie child” (loc. 381). While zombie children are an important topic to which we will return later in the context of The Walking Dead, what is significant here is the history of zombies being used to express anxieties around and about the monogamous, patriarchal family. The original Dawn of the Dead (1978) also displays the way in which members of traditional heteronormative relationships (both romantic and familial) are regarded as male property: “As Peter is introduced to the others, he asks Fran if Stephen is her man—this exchange, along with the groups refusal to share cigarettes with another group of fleeing police officers, begins to establish how they perceive everything in terms of ownership and commodification” (Bishop 2010a, 143). Bishop (2010b) elsewhere extends this observation to Fran’s pregnancy: “From the beginning of the film, Fran and Stephen are perceived as belonging to each other, and their unborn child is even portrayed as an object belonging to Stephen” (244). Here, too, the Child is paramount: Bishop (2010b) adds that Fran’s pregnancy makes her the “only one with any telos at all” and the only one “living for the future” (243, 244). However, Robin Wood (2003) points out that she also refuses the rings that signal traditional marriage and avoids “restoration of conventional relationship patterns” at the end of the movie (107). Thus, he awards Romero’s film the distinction of being “perhaps the first horror film to suggest—albeit very tentatively—the possibility of

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­ oving beyond apocalypse. It brings its two surviving protagonists to the m point where the work of creating the norms for a new social order, a new structure of relationships, can begin” (107). When The Walking Dead enters popular culture (the comics in 2003 and the television show in 2010), it overwhelmingly reinforces rather than subverts these norms but in doing so also depicts the damage caused by efforts to uphold the existing paradigm of patriarchal heteronormativity and its emphasis on ownership and competition. Competition between Rick and Shane over what can be regarded as ownership of Rick’s family members (both Lori and her children) comprises a major structural feature of the early portions of both the comics and television show and reflects reproductive futurism’s stubborn entrenchment. This struggle for ownership of the Grimes family plays out as a contest for the role of patriarch. Rick’s claim to that position is initially signified by his reclamation of his wedding ring. In the comic series, Lori returns Rick’s wedding band to him upon their being reunited, and Rick is relieved to regain his status as husband and father, saying that he felt “naked” without the ring (c1:ch1:n3). The panel prior to this confession shows Rick outside the tent that he, Lori, and Carl are sharing, contemplating his ringed hand in the moonlight, which he continues to do in the next panel. The first panel, framed as a medium shot with Rick off-center and the only other visible person a silhouette further in the background, adds to the suggestion that Rick’s ring represents a contrast to isolation and, by extension, death. For Rick, his previous loss of the ring signified the loss of his place in the family and the family’s promise of a/the future. After the conclusion of the conversation about Rick’s wedding ring, an entire page is dedicated to five panels of the Grimes family in the tent. In the first two panels, Rick is asleep with Carl between him and Lori, by the middle panel his visible eye is open, and in the fifth panel, his hand rests on his sleeping wife’s cheek (see Fig. 2.1). While this gesture can of course be seen as affectionate, it also, especially with Rick’s reaching over Carl and obscuring him, creates an image of possession, of reclaiming the family (as a) unit. However, in Rick’s absence, his friend and colleague Shane has usurped the position of patriarch, possibly impregnating Lori.1 Kim Paffenroth (2011) writes that the “most serious threat in The Walking Dead is from those men who threaten the established family units,” and that the one thing that the survivors “cannot overlook [is] intrafamily violence or unattached males who threaten to disrupt” those units (227, 228). Even if

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Fig. 2.1  Rick reclaims his family unit

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Shane and Lori’s disruption of the nuclear family unit occurred inadvertently, it nonetheless gives rise to conflict, and Lori’s pregnancy itself can be read as a punishment, which suggests that even accidental transgressions cannot be tolerated. This punishment is additionally suggestive of lingering remnants of the condemnation of or disdain for divorced or even remarried individuals that held sway into the second half of the twentieth century. Tellingly, Rick’s attitude toward having stolen guns from the police station—that Shane shouldn’t be “so worried about the rules,” since they have been, in all likelihood, irreversibly changed by the apocalypse—does not extend to the “rules” for the composition of a family (c1:ch1:n3). Shane and Rick compete rather than cooperate because a family with two fathers and a mother is classified as unthinkable within reproductive futurism. As a result, they compete for ownership not only of Lori but also of Carl and of Lori’s unborn offspring, both embodiments of the Child. When Shane tries to comfort Lori while Rick and Glenn are foraging for guns in Atlanta, she invokes the rules of the traditional family, shrugging off Shane’s hand on her shoulder as they both stand in the rain, leaving him standing symbolically behind her, and telling him that he has “to stop. Rick is back now. … And he’s my husband” (c1:ch1:n4). Shane later brandishes a gun at Rick because Rick’s reclamation of his place in the Grimes family has rendered Shane “nothing” (c1:ch1:n6). The proximate cause of this turn into physical violence appears be Lori’s calling Shane a “lunatic” and telling him to stay away from Rick following an argument over responsibility for casualties in a zombie attack on their camp (c1:ch1:n6). The panel following her admonition shows Shane’s shocked, speechless face in closeup (as do three more panels in the subsequent two pages), underscoring the significance of this moment as a final declaration of Lori’s choice of monogamous partnership with Rick—a partnership that also carries the preexisting social sanction of legal marriage. An enraged Shane believes that, because a nuclear family can have only a single patriarch, murdering Rick constitutes “the only way” to return to when “[e]verything was so perfect” (c1:ch1:n6).2 Instead, Shane dies at the hands of reproductive futurist Child Carl, preserving the heteropatriarchal family unit. Rick and Shane’s patriarchal rivalry is even more prominent in the televised version of The Walking Dead than in the comics. The first episode of the show almost immediately flashes back to a conversation about Rick’s marriage. Bonding over fast food and Shane’s mocking of the tendency of “chicks” to leave too many lights on, the two men discuss Rick’s feeling that Lori is always mad at him lately for reasons that he doesn’t understand.

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Significantly, the most troubling thing, to Rick, is that his wife criticized him in front of their son: the real difference between men and women, he says, is that he would never say something seemingly cruel to Lori, and “certainly not in front of Carl” (“Days Gone Bye”). Clearly, the protection of the Child supersedes even the health of the parents’ relationship. As a male child, Carl is a symbol both of futurism and of “the generational transfer of patriarchal power” that is a part of the projected future (Simpson 2014, loc. 682). Through at least the show’s first two seasons, this dual status is reflected in the gendered division of labor around Carl: “While men are held responsible for protection, surveillance, physical power, and decision-making, women in The Walking Dead are held accountable for the safety and care of children. Even as Shane and Rick vie for fatherly control of Carl, male parenting takes the form of mentoring Carl—not as a child, but as a future male defender of the group” (Lavin and Lowe 2015, 120). The transfer of power and position from father to son is under threat of disruption, however, as the same episode also establishes that Shane has taken over the missing Rick’s position in the Grimes family: playing the role of protector of family and futurism, Shane reprimands Lori for walking away alone from an argument (itself about her endangering herself) and instructs her that she must stay out of danger for Carl’s sake, even if for no one else’s, including her own. He insists that she agree to his position, and after she does, his demeanor softens and they kiss each other, while the following scene pointedly begins with a close-up of a snapshot of Rick and his family on the visor of Rick’s patrol car. In a later episode, Shane’s statement to Carl that he is “the key in all this” applies to much more than their plan to drive some frogs into a net. “You and me,” he says, speaking as a substitute father, “Shane and Carl” (“Tell it to the Frogs”). However, the father for whom Shane wishes to substitute has reassumed his position. As in the comics, Rick reclaims his wedding ring along with his role in his family, during a scene in which he and Lori are shot mostly in close-up in bed together in their tent. The symbolic return of the ring is preceded by Rick tucking in his son and replacing a family photo in the album that Lori produces and is followed by Rick and Lori engaging in marital sex (Lori assures Rick that Carl won’t wake up), all of which can be seen as Rick reasserting his right to wife, child, and heterosexual reproduction. Thus, when, later in the frog-catching episode, Lori tells Shane, “From now on, my family is off-limits to you,” she is not merely reacting to the fact that Shane had told her that Rick had died; she is also invoking the boundaries of the heteronormative family.3 Marginalized and isolated,

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Shane quickly moves to considering the murder of his longtime friend Rick. When Rick proposes, “If it was your family, you’d feel differently,” Shane is incensed: “What did you say to me? I kept ’em safe, man. I looked after them like they were my own” (“Wildfire”). However, heteronormativity dictates that Rick’s family cannot simultaneously be Shane’s family. Their conflict over ownership of that family becomes at the same time a conflict over who can better protect the future, embodied in Lori and, most importantly, in Carl. When Rick confronts Shane over his role in the death of Otis, a hand on Hershel’s farm who, in James Berger’s (2015) words, “is sacrificed” when Shane “shoots him and gives him to the zombies in order to escape with the medicine that saves Carl,” Rick frames the conversation through a reassertion of his masculinity and his fitness as patriarch, both relative to Shane (158). He asks whether Shane doesn’t think that he would have done the same thing, made the same sacrifice at the altar of the Child. Shane’s actions also function as a sacrifice to his desire to supplant Rick in the family structure, demonstrating his absolute dedication to Carl and his superior abilities as a father. Much of this is filmed in alternating close-ups of the men’s faces as Rick gets extremely close to Shane and Shane casts his eyes downward rather than meet Rick’s aggressive gaze, emphasizing the struggle for dominance. During this scene, Rick both reveals that he considered breaking Shane’s jaw and teeth when he figured out that Shane and Lori had been having sex and uses the related discourses of ownership and reproductive futurism.4 “That is my wife. This is my son. That is my unborn child,” he insists, adding, “I will stay alive to keep them alive.”5 (Lori had similarly rejected Shane’s claim to the gestating child and the role of the father in an earlier episode, saying, “even if it’s yours, it’s not gonna be yours” [“Pretty Much Dead Already”].) These pronouncements derive from and depend upon heteronormative ideology: according to its tenets, Shane cannot possibly love Lori, who belongs to another man; he must be mistaken. Rick, in fact, explicitly casts Shane’s romantic and fatherly feelings (he says, for instance, that Lori and Carl kept him alive, not the other way around) as just such an error: “I love her. You don’t love her. You think you do, but you don’t” (“18 Miles Out”). Later, Lori expresses a similar sentiment, claiming that “things got … confused” and diminishing her relationship with Shane as “[w]hatever the hell happened between us, whatever we thought it was” (“Better Angels,” emphasis mine). Again, labeling alternatives to monogamous couple-hood as indescribable (if something is unthinkable, then it follows that it cannot be described) functions as an attempt to contain them.

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At various points, both Rick and Shane kill others in order to preserve the Grimes family. Lest we interpret these actions merely as selfless, P. Ivan Young (2014) points out that “Rick kills not out of moral necessity but out of self-interest (his family as an extension of self)” (loc. 1323). In the end, the struggle for ownership that results from the centrality to heteronormative male identity of the role of sole father and husband plays a central part in Rick and Shane’s final, fatal face-off in an atmospherically moonlit field. A dialogue-free wide shot of the characters in silhouette and separated enough to divide the frame roughly into thirds provides a handy visual evocation of the state into which their inability to reconceive the family has brought them (see Fig. 2.2). Rick reminds Shane, who believes that Lori and Carl will get over Rick, that the role of patriarch is exclusive: “Screw my wife? Have my children—my children—call you daddy? Is that what you want?”(“Better Angels”). These questions are followed by a brief echo of the silhouette shot, from an even further distance, and, after Shane questions Rick’s manliness, he asserts his superior qualifications for the position that Rick holds: “I’m a better father than you, Rick. I’m better for Lori” (“Better Angels”). Ultimately, after using the idea of returning to Carl and Lori as part of a distraction, Rick succeeds in killing Shane and removing his competitor. Philip L. Simpson (2014) sees this murder as intimately tied to patriarchal conceptions of power and hierarchy. Of the second season, he writes: “Dale’s agonizing death dramatizes the shift away from humanism to a more authoritarian regime implemented by Rick, who, for a while, had wavered between the poles represented by Dale on one side and Shane on

Fig. 2.2  Rick and Shane’s moonlight standoff

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the other. He comes down definitively on Shane’s side in the moment when phallic power is symbolically transferred between them, when Shane is penetrated by Rick’s knife and dies” (loc. 682). In the comics, Carl follows Rick and Shane into the woods after they have a fistfight and fatally shoots Shane as Shane himself is preparing to shoot Rick; there, the action is framed as a child protecting his father, with Carl crying out, “Don’t hurt my daddy again” after pulling the trigger (c1:ch1:n6). Altering Shane’s killer from Carl to Rick shifts focus to the patriarchal competition over child and family. Carl does, however, come on the scene following the stabbing and shoot zombie-Shane, which reinforces Carl’s position both within the nuclear Grimes family and as a future version of Rick, a patriarch-to-be. Carl, holding a gun, initially sees Rick astride a prone Shane and appears confused and upset; then for a couple of brief shots, the camera’s perspective makes the audience think that Carl is pointing his gun at Rick. Shane had very recently referred to Carl as a “weak boy” while arguing with Rick, but raising a gun toward adult men contrasts this assertion in a way that conforms to traditionally masculine ideas of strength (“Better Angels”). Young positions this moment as a sort of passing of the torch that confirms different types of successful self-reproduction on the part of both of the father figures present (literal in the case of Rick, symbolic in the case of Shane’s initiation of Carl into masculine violence): Rick turns literally to an image of himself: his son, in essence, is the younger (and more innocent?) version of Grimes. As the audience entertains the possibility that Carl will shoot Rick, we must recognize the corrosive effect that witnessing his father kill has upon the boy. Indeed, Carl mirrors his father’s act of violence; he literally kills Shane a second time. He has taken his place within the cycle of violence; he has killed the man who taught him to kill. (loc. 1340)

One can read in this killing the culmination of a process that Berger argues presents the end of Carl’s childhood: “When Rick and Lori reluctantly give Carl his own gun, he is effectively no longer a child. He has left the past, slid back from the future, and now lives in the present. Sophia is gone, and Carl the child is gone too” (158). An additional layer is present, however. While the adults in Rick’s group may have failed to protect Sophia and what she represents as a Child, Carl here embodies a Child who is not in need of protection but is instead proactively defending the

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family unit, and thereby defending the future with which it is so closely associated. When he kills zombie-Shane, he chooses between fathers, as emphasized by Rick’s impression that Carl is aiming at him, and making rather than refusing this choice reinforces rather than challenges the paradigm of the two-parent family.6 If he is leaving childhood, then part of that transition is the understanding that the nuclear family and reproductive futurism demand the highest priority, and that their preservation justifies actions up to and including murder. While Shane’s death puts to rest the conflict over the ownership of Rick’s family, it does not remove the question of whether he is the biological father of Lori’s unborn child, another Child and symbol of reproductive futurism.7 In the comics, the survivors’ uncertain reaction to news of Lori’s pregnancy prompts Rick to insist that it is in fact “good news” (c1:ch2:n8). The layout of the page containing the pregnancy announcement creates a separation between the parents-to-be and the rest of the group, with the former occupying two rows of three panels framing two single-panel rows depicting the group from Rick and Lori’s points of view. The first of these single panels is the wordless twin of the second, emphasizing the shock of the Grimeses’ announcement, but because the center panels look down on the seated group from the standing Rick and Lori’s viewpoint and because the final panel at the bottom of the page offers a close-up of Rick’s contented face and his assurance that they will be fine, the reader is encouraged to side with Rick and Lori. “‘Congratulations’” has, Rick says, invoking a pre-apocalyptical tradition dominated by reproductive futurism, been the accepted response “for years.”8 The unclear parentage of the child, however, conflicts with the monogamy required by heteronormativity. Dale points out that the timing could mean that the child is not Rick’s, a possibility that is rapidly classified, as Carol’s later proposal of polyamory will be, as unthinkable.9 Rick, his face now drawn in ominous half-shadow, employs such rhetoric in an effort to contain this disruptive alternative to his own biological fatherhood: “It’s all I’m thinking about. … I’m trying not to think about it. If I dwell on this I’ll lose my mind” (c1:ch2:n8). In Rick’s rhetoric, the irrationality of him and Lori raising Lori and Shane’s child (which he refers to only obliquely) might not merely make him lose his own mind, or abandon rationality, but might prove fatal: “This [birth] could kill Lori. … And I—the other thing could kill me” (c1:ch2:n8).10 In the very next panel, Dale apologizes while hugging Rick and agrees that everything will be fine, again banishing challenges to Rick’s point of view within the space of a page.

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In the television version of the conflict around Lori’s pregnancy, Lori considers terminating it. Her request for morning-after pills is framed as selfish because Glenn and Maggie end up in a dangerous situation while procuring them. When they return, Maggie refuses Lori’s request to go inside her tent for privacy, berating her as she throws the items retrieved, one by one, into the dirt, ending angrily with “And here’s your abortion pills” (“Secrets”). However, Lori quickly expresses ambivalence about her anti-reproductive plan. When Glenn comes to Lori’s tent to make amends, he asks if the pills will even work, and Lori responds not only that she doesn’t know but that she doesn’t know if she wants them to. Her inability, emphasized by a shot that tracks up to and pushes in on her face, to suppress a smile when she holds the prenatal vitamins that Glenn reveals that he has also brought her further suggests that she will decide in favor of reproduction. Indeed, while she eventually takes the pills, she then throws them up. Dawn Keetley (2014), discussing deliberative decision-­making as a marker of human consciousness, interestingly argues that Lori’s decision about her pregnancy is an example of The Walking Dead asserting that not all choices are conscious and thus not “reliable markers of our difference from zombies” (loc. 3218). She continues: “It’s significant, for instance, that in the highly-politicized moment when Lori faces her ‘choice’ between pre-natal vitamins and abortion pills, she ‘chooses’ to take the abortion pills but then reflexively vomits them back up (“Secrets”). Who, or what, ‘chooses’ here?” (loc. 3218). If reflexive, an instance of the body overcoming rationality, her choice is actually a lack of choice indicating the worryingly thin line between human and zombie. Additionally, if we do read this as the body somehow “choosing,” then that marks reproduction as powerfully “natural,” comprising a potent endorsement of reproductive futurism. Viewed in the context of the show’s depiction of larger existential conflicts, self-preservation is subordinated to species preservation, as adapting to a dangerous current reality is to acting according to tradition. Moreover, the containment of challenges to reproductive futurism enacted by Lori’s failure to terminate, whether interpreted as reflex or rational action, is compounded by the fact that her plan could not have succeeded even if she had decided to go through with it because even large doses of the morningafter pill will not cause a miscarriage (Ryan 2011).11 Rick confronts Lori about the empty pill boxes in an encounter that begins with him aggressively closing the space between them (not unlike the final, close-quarters argument with Shane), upset, as patriarch, over being kept in the dark regarding the pregnancy. As the disagreement

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e­ scalates into Rick and Lori yelling at one another, Rick uses a common tactic for policing alternatives to heteronormativity: classifying them as irrational. He incredulously dismisses the anti-reproductive proposition that a baby might live only a “short, cruel life” by wondering how “can you think like that?” (“Secrets”). He returns to this perspective when he later adds, “I still don’t understand why.” Further, although Rick claims that whether to have the baby is Lori’s decision, he also sees the fact that she threw up the pills as a sign that she “want[s] this baby” and asserts: “Not even giving it a chance isn’t right, either.” In this exchange, the couple touches for the first time upon Lori’s infidelity, and Rick, while not meeting her gaze, answers her unfinished “Shane and I…” by saying that he knows. However, although Rick seems here to have come to some sort of terms with Lori’s actions, her death in childbirth in the following season, like her unplanned pregnancy itself, functions in part as a symbolic ­punishment for violating heteronorms.12 From another angle, though, her death is at the same time if not a punishment for then a damaging effect of ultimately adhering to heteronormativity. Lori dies so that Judith might be born, which can be read as directly related to both her violation of the nuclear family and her contemplation of killing a Child by terminating her pregnancy (on the Internet, the character was also attacked for that violation through a proliferation of meme variations mocking her as a “slut” and a poor parent).13 Simpson describes her death both as intensifying narrative endorsement of the primacy of the child and as a silencing of Lori’s voice in the matter: Her story … ends in tragedy when she demands the emergency C-section that she knows will kill her but save her baby—an even more radically pro-­ life moment than that of the second season. She appears intermittently throughout the rest of the season as a ‘ghost,’ a silenced woman seen only by Rick as a manifestation of his own guilt. Tellingly, she is mute, or at most, uttering unintelligible sounds over a telephone to Rick. (loc. 739)

In privileging Judith’s life and silencing Lori, “the violent birth of the child and death of the mother,” as Berger discerns, “strangely reinstalls the generational and procreative norms that Sophia’s death had wrecked” (158).14 Part of this return to the norm occurs through Carl’s involvement in his mother’s death, which echoes and intensifies his encounter with zombie-Shane, his alternative individual and communal father figure: “If Lori is the group’s ‘First Lady,’ as Carol calls her, then Carl is potentially

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its future ‘President’—a patriarchal heir-apparent who comes into his own as a hard-line member of the group in season three, dramatically illustrated by his shooting his reanimated mother after she dies during an emergency C-section and then fatally shooting a frightened Woodbury soldier who was about to surrender” (Simpson 2014, loc. 699). Status accrues to Carl, who, representing at once Child and potential future patriarch, defends Judith, Child and potential reproductive woman, while the non-­ monogamous parent is removed from their heteronormative nuclear family. In the comics, Andrea eventually replaces Lori as mother (and Rick’s monogamous sexual partner) in the Grimes family. Under reproductive futurist ideology, however, this new family is acceptable in part because it is still a traditional nuclear unit, but primarily because, unlike with Shane co-parenting with or replacing Rick, paternity, monogamy, and traditional family roles aren’t threatened. Rick’s is the foremost but not the only narrative to reinforce the primacy of the reproductive nuclear family, and especially of the Child. Parts of the narrative of the Governor—murderous and morally bankrupt, yet also a double of Rick—do so as well. In the comics, for example, he is ultimately killed because of his role in the deaths of Lori and Judith in his raid on the prison where Rick’s group has been living.15 The television version complicates the Governor’s death, while still inextricably linking it to his relationship to family and children. Leading up to the climactic mid-­season assault on the prison, the show flashes back to the Governor meeting a woman named Lilly (who shares a name with the character, discussed briefly in Chap. 5, who kills him in the comics, but not much else); her sister, Tara; her daughter, Meghan; and her sick father, David. The beginning of the episode “Live Bait” establishes the Governor’s lack of investment in whether he lives or dies, depicting him, for instance, adorned with an overgrown beard, silently watching as a zombie crawls toward him through his campfire until someone else shoots it. When he meets Lilly and the others, he surrenders his gun, dropping it to the floor in a symbolic renunciation of the violence that he has previously practiced. Tara quickly warns him, sounding just like Rick (even claiming to be an Atlanta police officer), that she is heavily armed and will “put [him] down” if he “mess[es]” with her family. Further suggesting his apparent change, still mostly silent, he gives the family a name that he had seen painted on a wall and eats pet food instead of the SpaghettiOs that he is given, seemingly as a kind of penance. Lilly and Tara’s father asks the Governor if he has children, and states that having children was when he “finally figured out what it was to be a man.

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You know, a real man”; thus, he links the fulfillment of traditional masculinity to reproductive futurism. Soon enough, the Governor is putting himself in danger in order to help Meghan, who has not been eating or talking and will smile only around David: he accedes to requests to scavenge another apartment for a backgammon set for Meghan and a nursing home for oxygen for David, and between these excursions, he contemplates a pre-apocalypse picture of himself and his wife and daughter, before folding it to obscure his face. Lilly takes on the feminine-­coded role of nurse after the Governor’s visit to the nursing home, and tells him that Meghan “thought you were her dad” from afar. He begins to bond with Meghan, pinky swearing and joking, with the alteration in his character symbolized by a shave and a haircut. After David dies, the Governor takes to the road with Lilly, Tara, and Meghan, and in doing so embraces rather than attacks the nuclear family. He assumes the position of husband and father, including having sex with Lilly and risking his life to save Meghan from a group of zombies, after which he promises—in a statement that again sounds like Rick—that he will never let anything happen to her. He will, in other words, fulfill his role as masculine protector of the Child and the future that she represents. Because of his reintegration into a heteronormative nuclear family, the Governor seems to be headed for redemption. His past, though, reappears in the form of Martinez, a man who was a member of the Governor’s community at Woodbury, leading a new group of survivors. Martinez accepts the Governor into his group, but tells him that he is accepted only because of the others whom he is traveling with, particularly the child; and, immediately following this statement, Martinez connects the Governor’s evolution to his involvement with Meghan by saying that the Governor seems “different now. Changed” (“Dead Weight”). The Governor later murders Martinez because he both raises the possibility that the Governor could lose his new nuclear family and desires that the Governor return to a leadership position (and, thus, symbolically, to his previous persona, which he left behind with Woodbury and his massacre of his own people). Shortly, however, much as Shane killed Otis to protect Carl, the Governor also kills Martinez’s replacement, whom he believes will put the camp, and thus his new family, in danger. Protection of his family is also positioned as his motivation for subsequently developing a plan to take over the prison. Echoing Rick’s “I will stay alive to keep them alive” in “18 Miles Out,” he tells Lilly, who objects to potentially killing people, “I’m gonna keep you alive. I’m gonna keep Meghan alive. The only judgment on me I care

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about is whether you two are still breathing” (“Dead Weight”).16 The standoff between his and Rick’s groups at the prison builds to a moment of crisis that, in an echo of the ultimately fatal conflict between Rick and Shane, requires the Governor to make a choice between cooperating and competing with Rick, his double as patriarch of family and community. He chooses competition and the ideology of ownership, asserting that he and Rick will never be able to live together and that he is willing to kill other people’s children “[b]ecause they aren’t mine” (“Too Far Gone”). He justifies his decision by invoking protection of the family, responding to Rick’s offer to all share the prison: “I don’t think my family would sleep well knowing you’re under the same roof ” (“Too Far Gone”). Having rejected communalism and cooperation, he decapitates Hershel, a “good father” figure, and thus another potential version of the Governor. Once he decides to attack rather than to preserve the nuclear family, the loss of his own family is immediately revealed to him. As he looks up from killing Hershel, he sees Lilly carrying a deceased Meghan, who has been killed by a zombie while he was absent from their camp. The loss of his child brings about the loss of his potential for moral behavior, and he urges his followers to “Kill ’em all” (“Too Far Gone”).17 In a departure from the comics, it is Maggie, Hershel’s daughter, who fatally shoots the Governor, avenging his violence against her family unit. Three seasons later, Rick does deviate from a model of family marked by competition and ownership. In a discussion with Michonne, with whom he is having a sexual relationship, he reveals to her how Shane took care of Lori and Carl and says: “I know Judith isn’t mine. I know it. I love her. She’s my daughter. But she isn’t mine. I had to accept that. I did. So I could keep her alive” (“Service”). He expresses that he hopes to “raise her and protect her and teach her how to survive” (“Service”). He similarly admits in the comics, head lowered and face in shadow, “I’m almost certain that my daughter was actually Shane’s” (c2:ch13:n76). In these moments, the child/Child and its guarantee of the future holds more importance than maintaining traditional heteronorms. Although Rick’s acceptance of Shane’s status as biological father does not negate the dominance of reproductive futurism, it does show a willingness on Rick’s part at least to reimagine his role in and relationship to a family and a child. Overwhelmingly, the dominant concept of family presented in The Walking Dead—except for moments such as the one just discussed in which Rick accepts Judith as his no matter her biological paternity—is a conservative construct. The same dynamic also applies to Rick’s group of survivors,

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a kind of family unit writ large (in fact, Rick discusses Judith’s parentage with Michonne in order to convince her that she must accept a new way to live as a community, under the Saviors, as he accepted a new way to live as a family, with someone else’s child as his own). Examining Rick and Shane’s earlier conflicts, Lavin and Lowe maintain that they become the two candidates for leading the group because they embody a hegemonic masculinity whose ideals are strength, heterosexuality, and whiteness (118). In this struggle for (male) leadership of the group, we see heteronormative conceptualization of the family reproduced in larger-­scale social organization. Here, too, the communal falls victim to the competitive: “In light of this whittling-down of leadership dominance potentials to just two powerful men, the second season of The Walking Dead denies the viability of a more communal approach to survival. Even Dale never truly poses a collective or communitarian alternative to strongman rule” (Simpson 2014, loc. 699).18 The reproduction in larger social arrangements of the dominant rules governing family arrangements suggests that the family is a potential site of radical change (and therefore also of anxiety about radical change). In the United States, for example: [R]adical queer groups such as Against Equality, who argue that the social, economic, and legal privileges conferred only via marriage should be available to all people regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or economic status. Advocating for access to the institution of marriage as it is currently constructed, these groups argue, only reaffirms the conservative perspective that family is defined through monogamous legal commitment between two adults. (Missari 2015, 93)

This critique points in the direction of more liberatory forms of family, which would have much more porous boundaries that would allow sexuality and child-rearing to be enacted as a malleable network of shifting, consensual alignments. In considering what such forms might look like, it is also worth considering that, viewed from another angle, the adherence of many of The Walking Dead’s characters to patriarchal (and capitalist) norms repeatedly results in violence and death, even as, overtly, the franchise frequently aligns itself with these norms. Again, one could read Lori’s death in childbirth, for example, as much as the consequence of failing to adapt heteronormative ideology as it is a punishment for her transgressions. With these competing countercurrents in mind, the following chapter will interrogate how The Walking Dead represents queer challenges posed to heteronorms through non-monogamy and same-sex coupling.

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Notes 1. Carol’s observation in the comics that Lori’s pregnancy may be more advanced than she thought implies that Rick may not be the father (c1:ch3:n14). 2. Shane similarly upbraids Rick in the TV series: “You come back here and destroy everything” (“Better Angels”). 3. Lori’s asking if Rick wants the wedding band back appears related to the possible relationship issues implied in the series’ first episode rather than to any sort of rethinking of the monogamous family. 4. Rick does categorize the fact that he restrained himself from violence as a strength rather than a weakness, which arguably complicates the notion of masculinity represented, but, at the same time, the implied threat contained within his very disavowal of violence and the fact that it is presented in terms of a contest of strength and weakness both conform to traditional constructions of the masculine. 5. “18 Miles Out.” 6. One could also read this choice in Freudian terms: it seems as though Carl will kill the father, an expectation that signals the audience’s latent acceptance of the Oedipal conflict, but he instead kills the (other) competition for the mother. 7. Shane in fact dies twice, first as a human and then as a zombie. If we read his metamorphosis into a zombie as a movement into queerness, then his death as a human represents his repositioning outside of the social order, becoming the “nothing” that he feels Rick has made him and experiencing the “loss of self, of coherence, of life, and of heirs” that Edelman ascribes to queer figures who stand in opposition to reproductive futurism (loc. 1432). 8. Edelman argues during an examination of Hitchcock’s film The Birds that “the Child means ‘meaning’ for adults, who can only attain it by virtue of participating in the labor of giving (it) birth” (loc. 1904). (Craig Fischer [2011], significantly, sees The Birds as a “proto-zombie film,” and raises the possibility that Shane’s desire for Lori may function as “the male sex drive displaced into the wholesale Thantos of zombie cannibalism” in the way that Lydia’s desires are connected to the “reality-shifting apocalypse” in Hitchcock’s film [68, 76, 78].) Edelman’s analysis helps to explain both the fact that Glenn and Maggie, in both the comics and TV series, conceive a child, and the fact that the completely positive reception of Rosita’s announcement in the comics (c3:ch24:n141) that she and Eugene are having a baby marks the increased ability of the survivors to live as they did prior to the apocalypse. The limits of that ability intrude in the fact that

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Eugene has agreed to raise the baby while knowing it is not his (c3:ch23:n133) and in that Rosita is decapitated by the Whisperers while still pregnant (c3:ch24:n144). 9. See Chap. 3 of this volume for a discussion of Carol’s proposal of a polyamorous marriage and its rejection. 10. Dale repeats this idea, telling Lori that Rick must never know if the baby is Shane’s because “[i]t’ll kill him. It’ll be the one last thing it takes to make him crack” (c1:ch2:n10). If we associate the negation imposed by death with queerness, then the rhetoric that disruption to accepted roles in the family unit could kill Rick accrues additional resonances. 11. In the same season, Beth follows a similar arc: after critiquing Lori’s pregnancy (“How could you do that?”) and denying its illusion of meaning (“It [life’]s just so pointless.”), she chooses life and a future by choosing not to commit suicide (“18 Miles Out”). 12. Trevor Grizzell (2014) adds that Lori’s death and the aftermath of Judith’s birth denaturalize the tenets of reproductive futurism: “Rather than a symbol of society’s continuation and naturally unending reproduction of itself, then, the Child (figured here as Judith) in this world becomes a marker of society’s inability to reproduce itself without intense cultural, physical, and emotional work” (loc. 2349). 13. Quickmeme.com, to take only one of many, many examples, features a category dedicated solely to “The Walking Dead—Lori is a Slut.” 14. See Chap. 4 for a discussion of the ways in which the undead Sophia acts as a disruptive sinthomosexual. 15. See Chap. 5 for a more detailed discussion of this moment and its relationship to queer family arrangements. 16. In another parallel, the Governor’s reasoning in this scene that it acceptable for self-preservation to kill “killers” and those associated with them is repeated by Rick in his decision for his group to kill numerous members of the Saviors in their sleep in season 6. 17. In a sympathetic echo of these events, in the episode “Bury Me Here” in season 7, Richard’s loss of his daughter in the apocalypse appears to motivate him to try to sacrifice himself to force the Kingdom to fight the Saviors. In the same episode, Morgan, after he kills Richards, mistakenly refers to the young man Benjamin, who has accidentally been shot and has died instead of Richard, by Morgan’s own dead son’s name. 18. Simpson also points out a deleted scene in which the Vatos, a group of Hispanic men in Atlanta who cared for the sick and elderly, are shown to have all been killed: “Assuming one accepts this deleted sequence as part of the narrative, the communal, utopian possibility represented by the Vatos is thoroughly discredited as hopelessly naive, just as Dale’s progressive philosophy is toward the end of the season” (loc. 699). Alternatively, one can view the fact that the scene was cut as less definitively foreclosing progressive possibilities.

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References 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. Bishop, Kyle [William]. 2010a. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010 Kindle. ———. 2010b. The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor. The Journal of Popular Culture 43 (2): 234–248. Christie, Deborah. 2011. “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie.” In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-­ Human, Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 67–80. New York: Fordham University Press. Fischer, Craig. 2011. Meaninglessness: Cause and Desire in The Birds, Shaun of the Dead, and The Walking Dead. In Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 67–79. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Grizzell, Trevor. 2014. Re-Animating the Social Order: Zombies and Queer Failure. In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 2217–2516. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Keetley, Dawn. 2014. Human Choice and Zombie Consciousness. In We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 3123–3487. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Lavin, Melissa F., and Brian M. Lowe. 2015. Cops and Zombies: Hierarchy and Social Location in The Walking Dead. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-­ Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 113–124. New York: Palgrave. Missari, Stacy. 2015. Queer Resistance in an Imperfect Allegory: The Politics of Sexuality in True Blood. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 87–98. New York: Palgrave. Paffenroth, Kim. 2011. ‘For Love Is Strong as Death’: Redeeming Values in The Walking Dead. In Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 217–230. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Ryan, Erin Gloria. 2011. The Walking Dead Is Spreading Icky Morning-after Pill Myths. Jezebel. http://www.jezebel.com. Accessed on March 21, 2018. Simpson, Philip L. 2014. The Zombie Apocalypse Is upon Us? Homeland Insecurity. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 565–841. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle edition. Smith, Phil. 2015. The Footbook of Zombie Walking: How to Be More than a Survivor in an Apocalypse. Axminster: Triarchy Press. Kindle. “The Walking Dead—Lori is a Slut.” Quick Meme. http://www.quickmeme. com. Accessed on March 21, 2018.

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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. Young, P. Ivan. 2014. Walking Tall or Walking Dead? The American Cowboy in the Zombie Apocalypse. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 1152–1391. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.

Episodes Referenced “18 Miles Out” (season 2, episode 10, 2012) “Better Angels” (season 2, episode 12, 2012) “Bury Me Here” (season 7, episode 13, 2017) “Cherokee Rose” (season 2, episode 4, 2011) “Days Gone Bye” (season 1, episode 1, 2010) “Dead Weight” (season 4, episode 7, 2013) “Live Bait” (season 4, episode 6, 2013) “Pretty Much Dead Already” (season 2, episode 7, 2011) “Secrets” (season 2, episode 6, 2011) “Service” (season 7, episode 4, 2016) “Tell It to the Frogs” (season 1, episode 2, 2010) “Too Far Gone” (season 4, episode 8, 2013) “Wildfire” (season 1, episode 5, 2010)

CHAPTER 3

Insane Proposals: Beyond Monogamy as Beyond Rationality

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. Keywords  The Walking Dead • Polyamory • Polygamy • Negan • Queer The relationship triangle in The Walking Dead involving Rick, Lori, and Shane, as discussed in Chap. 2, adheres to and reproduces heteronormative ideology, with deadly consequences for two of its three members. Elucidating how this reproduction occurs allows for exploration of the “assumptions of ‘post-structural’ attitudes to socially (and structurally) sanctioned relational bonds” and highlights both the dominance of the © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_3

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nuclear family unit—which functions through competition and a kind of biological territorialism rather than collectivity—and the violence that results when the position of patriarch is challenged (Reed and Penfold-­ Mounce 2015, 130). Further, Carl and Judith help to show the role of reproductive futurism in maintaining that dominance. Building on these readings, the current chapter will examine how the queer sexualities, including non-monogamy, of several characters and couples present another type of challenge that heteronormative reproductive futurism must contain. A brief exchange in the seventh season of the television show handily encapsulates this dynamic. The leader of a group of survivors called the Scavengers, a woman named Jadis, asks Michonne, with a tilt of her head toward Rick: “Yours?” When Michonne responds that she and Rick are “together,” Jadis continues, “I lay with him after. You care?” (“The First Day of the Rest of Your Life”). Rick and Michonne’s confused discomfort is evident in their individual reaction shots, and they walk away with the excuse that they need to get back to work, while the scene ends with a close-up of Jadis looking back over her shoulder toward the departing Michonne and raising her eyebrows in an amused shrug, as if to say, “Well, why not?” The proposition provides a moment of levity, but it also serves to make Jadis seem strange and potentially immoral, a possibility that is confirmed when she and her people betray Rick’s group in the same episode; and Rick and Michonne’s reactions—that the possibility of such nontraditional sexual practices is too much to deal with—disrupt the minor resistance to the paradigm of relationships as ownership underlying Michonne’s deliberate answer that they are “together” rather than that Rick belongs to her.1 The Walking Dead is hardly the first zombie-centered media to engage queer sexualities. Zombie films have a long history of representing, textually or subtextually, sexual relationships that fall outside of accepted norms. To take one example, Chera Kee (2014) argues that zombie films ranging from early examples featuring the pre–Romero Caribbean version of zombies to recent examples such as the Romeo and Juliet–inspired Warm Bodies present and, often, ultimately suppress interracial sexuality, which was long considered nonnormative (and, in some quarters still is). Kee observes that the “symbolic racialization of zombies in either type of film is important because it helps us understand the ways in which these films can toy with fantasies of miscegenation without explicitly dealing with the subject” (177). Simpson (2014) sees a similar pattern of subversion and containment in The Walking Dead’s treatment of gender norms: “The storytelling strategy of invoking then renouncing strong female agency

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allows the show’s creators to suggest, at least, subversive or alternative social structures through the camouflage of allegory, but also to undermine nontraditional values for those viewers who may, otherwise, be offended” (loc. 756). Gender roles are of course closely tied to expectations about sexual behaviors and practices, and if The Walking Dead closely regulates heteronormative sexuality—Lavin and Lowe (2015) point out that, in the TV show, “Andrea is killed off after becoming sexually involved with a villain” (121)—it takes an even more overwhelmingly conservative position toward nontraditional, nondominant sexualities. Barbara Gurr (2015) hypothesizes that apocalyptic narratives serve to: [I]llustrate that our safety and ability to survive as a human collective rely upon the strength of … conservative ideologies; heteropatriarchal gender and race hierarchies survive after the apocalypse not because we are too afraid or too exhausted to create something different, but because they are our best hope, our best strength. … Or perhaps these stories imply that our previous hierarchies and behaviors are so easily reinstated because they are, after all, “natural,” and when the world around us is reduced to a primitive state, we too can drop our social pretensions and return to who we are meant to be. You know: Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. (2)

In the universe of The Walking Dead, it is not only Adam and Steve that represent a threat to reproductive futurism but also Adam and Steve and Eve, or any other such nonnormative combinations or arrangements. The most significant of such threats occurs in the comics, when Carol proposes a polyamorous relationship with Rick and Lori. Her reimagining of the heteronormative family structure as a triad that rests on communality and not competition is forcefully repudiated as insane and illogical, not to mention detrimental to children. As a result of this rejection, Carol commits suicide-by-zombie, embracing a negation of self and future associated with queerness, particularly a figure that Edelman terms the sinthomosexual, a figure who rejects the defense against contemplating the end of the self that is enabled by reproductive futurism’s fantasy of propagating an unbroken social order. The abject failure of Carol’s attempt at a new kind of family might seem surprising, given its setting. In The Walking Dead most of the social order no longer exists, so its apocalypse might be anticipated to provide sufficient freedom to enact new sets of affective practices and structures. One could reasonably object that enough time has not passed within the narratives for radical ideological change to occur. However, survivors have

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already embraced organized cannibalism (the citizens of Terminus), large-­ ­ scale indentured servitude (the Saviors), feudal monarchy (the Kingdom), and living as skin-wearing nomads (the Whisperers), not to mention that the junkyard-dwelling Scavengers all chose to communicate purely in sentence fragments as part of becoming “something new” (“The Lost and the Plunderers”).2 In this context, significant changes to sociosexual practice would seem less than impossible. Emma Vossen (2014) believes that the postapocalyptic world of the comics allows sexual encounters almost completely without regard “to heteronormative socio-sexual customs,” “represent[ing] their liberation in all facets of life” (loc. 1734, 1766). Nonetheless, while there is certainly, for instance, plenty of unmarried sex, that does not mean that The Walking Dead fulfills this liberatory potential, including and especially for new kinds of families. In both its drawn and televised incarnations, queer family arrangements are habitually contained when they emerge, as we see with Carol’s desire to join the Grimes family. The Grimeses’ rebuff of the idea of a polyamorous triad is previewed in two brief incidents, one between Carol and Lori and one between Carol and Rick. During the prison arc in the comics, Carol, who is worried that the missing Tyreese, with whom she is having a sexual relationship, might be dead, is sharing a cell with Lori. A series of four panels begins by ­depicting them sitting close together, with other survivors sleeping in the ­foreground, and focuses more tightly and in greater close-up on them in each panel, as Lori consoles Carol and Carol says that she doesn’t know how to thank her and Rick, culminating in Carol kissing Lori in a wordless fifth panel. The reader sees the side of Carol’s face in this panel, eyes closed and streaming tears, and the front of Lori’s, the better to focus on Lori’s wide-­eyed expression of surprise. Carol instantly apologizes in the next panel, and in the final panel on the page, Lori tells her: “It’s okay … it’s okay. You’re going through a lot right now. Don’t even think about it” (c1:ch3:n16). The frame of Carol’s tears and Lori’s reaction presents Carol’s expression of desire as a misguided expression of weakness and trauma, not appropriate to be considered. An almost identical later incident with Rick provokes a much stronger rejection. Rick gets into a fistfight with Tyreese, over, among other actions, Tyreese’s cheating on Carol with Michonne, which caused Carol to attempt suicide. Carol visits Rick as he recovers in a bed from his injuries, and during their conversation, she unexpectedly kisses him. The panel in which she does so appears at the top of a left-hand page, positioning an

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event for which readers are unprepared in the first place where most will look after turning the page, and thereby replicating in the audience the same surprise shown by Rick himself. After this wordless panel, a close-up of both characters’ heads, with Carol’s eyes closed and Rick’s wide in shock, Rick verbalizes his confusion in a panel that shows Rick’s face but only the back of Carol’s head, inviting the reader to identify with his point of view as he exclaims, “Carol!! What are you--?! What was that?!” (c1:ch4:n24). She tells him that she is grateful that he stood up for her, and as he says that he is glad to have helped, he appears to be wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if to remove the stain of non-­ monogamy. In the next and final panel on the page, Carol, her embarrassment communicated by her hand on the back of her neck and the oblique turn of her head, acknowledges that she has violated heteronorms: “Listen. I’m not going to tell Lori if that’s what you’re worried about.” Rick says that he will tell Lori himself and then explains that “she’s my wife and I love her,” appealing to the codification of his sexual relationship with Lori within an accepted framework and telling Carol that there must be “tons of men left” somewhere from whom she could choose. Significantly, while claiming to understand her action, he also theorizes, as he literally looks down on her that “maybe you’re a little light-headed from blood loss or something.” In his view, a view reinforced by his taking up more space in and being placed higher within the frame of the page-wide panel relative to Carol, whose head is positioned vertically and horizontally at its center, there can be no rational reason to challenge the existing sexual structures (see Fig. 3.1). Subsequently, Carol attempts to counter Rick and Lori’s dismissals of her kissing them as error or aberration, which results in yet stronger repudiation. She tells the pregnant Lori, “I kinda want to marry you.” “Not just you,” she clarifies, “you and Rick. Just hear me out—it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I mean, I’ve been thinking about what Rick said, y’ know— about how things are never going to go back to the way they used to be and how we need to just make a new life for ourselves” (c1:ch5:n26). She anticipates that her unconventional request will be labeled “crazy,” or, to use a term of Edelman’s (2004), “unthinkable,” even in the zombie apocalypse (loc. 64); and the close-up drawing of her face as half in shadow, head tilted down and eyes closed, suggests the difficulty of her admission. Carol wishes to repurpose an existing form, heteronormative marriage, as a vehicle for a new relational mode, suggested in her phrase “a new life.”3 She further claims that such repurposing is indeed rational: “This just

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Fig. 3.1  Rick looks down on Lori

makes sense to me. I love you both and we could all raise Carl and Sophia and the new baby together. I know it seems weird now but we don’t have to follow the old rules, we can make new ones” (c1:ch5:n26).4 Her reimagining of existing family structures aligns with Vossen’s claim that the “apocalypse essentially offers utopian escapism. Yet, we cannot imagine a new world, a better world, without first imagining the end of the one in which we currently live” (loc. 1639). However, while this claim is not inaccurate regarding the world of The Walking Dead, its sexual norms prove more consistently resistant to utopian refashioning than such a statement implies. In Vossen’s reading of the comics, “[s]ocial constraints that currently inhibit sex and relationships are typically tossed off by The Walking Dead characters” (loc. 1766). However, any increase in sexual freedom occurs only within already existing traditional heteronormative social frameworks. It is significant that Vossen writes that “bachelors and bachelorettes make themselves readily available to each other almost

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entirely without any hesitation or heed to heteronormative socio-sexual customs” (loc. 1737). Notice that the additional freedom accrues specifically to unattached people, “bachelors and bachelorettes.” Some things can’t be transgressed, but an uptick in unmarried sex does not pose any structural threat to the reproductive futurist family. Polyamory, however, does. Thus, Lori’s reaction to Carol’s proposal of a queer heterosexuality proves that Carol is right to fear being labeled crazy. I do not mean to argue that Rick and Lori cannot express their own individual desires, or that those desires must align with Carol’s; however, the specifics of their rejection, its rhetorical and emotional particulars, are significant and indicative of the mechanisms by which reproductive futurism positions alternatives as invalid and indefensible. After focusing the reader’s attention on Lori’s shock through a large cliffhanger panel of her face in close-up, the comic shifts to another storyline before returning to the conversation, a detour that assumes that Carol’s statements are sufficiently shocking to build suspense by delaying the presentation of their fallout. That presentation begins with Carol remarking that Lori is “speechless.” She continues: “It’s a simple offer, Lori. I think I want to be with you—you and Rick. I mean, it’d be like we were married, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony or anything. That’d be too weird”  (c1:ch5:n27). It is noteworthy that she couches her queer challenge to conventional marriage as not too challenging, attempting to situate it as remaining somehow within acceptable bounds. The layout itself creates visual boundaries between the two women, and by extension their ideological positions, by not depicting them in the same panel together for over a page (excepting a bit of Carol’s hair in one close-up of Lori’s face). When they are again shown together, they are seated on a bunk with at least a person’s worth of blank space marking the division between them. Here, Lori defends the heteronormative family via the kinds of “old rules” that characters keep claiming no longer apply—that they need to know each other better, that she grew up in small-town Kentucky, and most significantly, by equating the queer with the irrational in referring to Carol’s “insane proposal.” Carol and Lori’s debate closes with a return to the central figure of reproductive futurism: the Child. Lori’s final objection is almost predictable in its appeal to the imagined innocence of children. “What would our children think? Can you imagine how a living arrangement like this would scar them for life?!,” she cries, asking if Carol even thinks about Sophia, the child in her care, anymore.5 However, while there are certainly actual children among the survivors, Lori’s appeal to “our children” derives

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from the discourse of reproductive futurism and its “image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children” (Edelman loc. 200). The image of the Child, according to Edelman, “serves to regulate political discourse—to prescribe what will count as political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never ­permitted to acknowledge” (loc. 200). That this collective future is a function of ideology rather than reality might be thrown into relief by the zombies’ destruction of the social order and threats to human reproduction, but Lori’s use of the Child to place Carol’s proposal outside of discourse that “counts” works toward maintaining the illusion. Lori’s commitment in the face of queer alternatives to both reproductive futurism and the heteronormative family unit that supports it surfaces again in a moment when she expresses her anxieties to Carol over Rick’s having been missing (captured, unbeknownst to her, by the Governor). She worries that it will be hard enough to raise Carl and a new baby “in this world as it is … without worrying about doing it alone” (c1:ch5:n30). To counter this anxiety about a lack of traditional family structure, particularly for her children, Carol offers collectivity. “You don’t have to be alone,” she suggests, in a panel showing a close-up of her laying a hand on Lori’s leg above the knee. Far from taking solace in this gesture, Lori leaps to her feet and cries, “Jesus Christ, Carol! I thought you’d given up on that! I can’t— I— What the hell is wrong with you?!” Lori again classifies an alternative to the nuclear family as irrational, something “wrong” with Carol, so incomprehensible that language fails her in her attempt to articulate it (“I can’t— I— ”).6 (This failure takes on additional resonance if viewed from the position of some scholars that language itself is a patriarchal system.) Lori angrily drags a reluctant Carl away, presumably to remove her child from Carol’s corrupting presence. After Judith’s birth, Rick advocates forgetting “the weirdness with” Carol, but his reasoning employs the boundary-setting between rational and irrational common to reproductive futurist ideology even while claiming that such boundaries no longer exist. “We gotta keep reminding ourselves there’s no rules out here,” he says. “The way people react to things—their behavior. It’s going to be damn erratic. … [H]er advances on us, as uncomfortable as it makes us—maybe we should just forget it” (c1:ch7:n41). Instead of seeing the apocalyptic breakdown of the state and social order as allowing, as David A. Reilly puts it, empowering choices about how best to survive, Rick sees

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it as engendering “erratic” thinking and practices that are best deflected and ignored by right-thinking people (Castillo et al. 2016, 85). Vossen maintains that contemporary zombie narratives often anticipate the apocalypse because of its possibilities for liberation, and she observes this anticipation in The Walking Dead comics and ties it to the characters’ personal affective bonds: Apocalyptic anticipation is … demonstrated by the characters themselves who are living full, satisfying lives, as opposed to characters in other zombie narratives who are impelled by the most basic fight for survival. Instead of simply attempting to survive for the sake of living, Kirkman’s characters only live—only desire to survive—if they have someone for whom to live. (loc. 1625)7

In her attempt to form a polyamorous family with Rick and Lori, Carol seeks exactly this kind of motivating interpersonal bond. But her proposal having been spurned and having admitted that she “can’t handle” being alone, she turns to queer negation (c1:ch7:n41). Edelman’s neologism sinthomosexuality signifies a queerness that stands in opposition to futurity, against its promises and its propagation (loc. 537). Taking such a stand, Carol initiates a final, nonreproductive sexual encounter with Billy, another survivor; and then, in a “radical move” that “refuse[s] the demarcation between life and anti-life altogether” and negates both the social subject and its future, she goes into the prison yard and offers herself to a captive female zombie (Canavan 2010, 450).8 David Pagano (2008) views zombie attacks as having the ability to unsettle the line between human and zombie by rendering the bodies of the living fragmented or incomplete similarly to those of the undead (77). Such fragmentation, he continues, causes “living time,” which has orientations to the past and, importantly, the future, to “converge” with “zombie time,” which lacks these orientations (77). Before inviting this fragmentation, though, Carol converses with the zombie, confiding that “Everyone thinks I’m crazy” and noting admiringly how much less judgmental than her human cohabitants the zombie appears to be (c1:ch7:n41). Her invocation here of ­judgment ironically recalls Lori’s response when survivor Donna criticized Dale, Andrea, and her sister, Amy, for “carrying on in front of God and everyone” in what she mistook for a polyamorous threesome (c1:ch1:n5). “It’s unchristian,” she adds, at which Lori pushes back: “So’s being judgmental if I remember correctly.” As Donna walks away offended, Carol

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approvingly compliments Lori: “Good one.”9 Lori’s earlier attitude likely intensifies Carol’s sense of betrayal when she later asks Lori to act on her apparent open-mindedness. As the zombie bites into Carol’s throat, her final words are “Oh, good … you do like me,” which, when juxtaposed to her earlier statement to Lori that she is “going to find a man to throw myself on,” carry an ambiguity that collapses sex partner and zombie.10 Kee writes that zombies are “threatening because they stand as evidence not only that supposedly fixed boundaries can be transgressed but also that there might be pleasure gained from doing so” (179); and the illustrations of Carol being bitten (one full page and one subsequent panel) show her with eyes closed, lips parted, and chin upturned to allow better access to her neck, a pose that might in other circumstances suggest eroticism. While it is frequently the genitals that are imagined “as points of toxicity, leakage, or a general openness to other organisms,” Carol’s eroticized death emblematizes how “the queer (re)productive potential of the zombie extends our understanding of the body as a point of contact and intimacy with other bodies, creating what seems to be an excessive openness” (Grizzell 2014, loc. 2445). If “what powers the [zombie] mythos is an expression of life in surplus …, of the potential for collectivity to threaten everything else” (Smith 2015, loc. 532), then the narrative of The Walking Dead excises the queer collectivity that Carol represents (and within which zombies too arguably operate), along with its threats to the traditional, competitive family structures adhered to by Rick, Lori, Carl, and Shane. While Carol does briefly attain subjectivity outside of the existing social order when she resurrects as a zombie herself, Andrea soon shoots her, removing once and for all her potential for subversion. To date, Negan’s harem of wives is the only sexual arrangement in The Walking Dead franchise that is even somewhat analogous to Carol’s proposed polyamory, and it clearly signifies his villainy. In the comics, Negan’s wives first appear in a panel, marked as significant by occupying three-­ quarters of a page, that shows five women in a room containing scrolled furniture, including chaise lounges, and other décor that suggests a stereotypical old-fashioned brothel. Importantly, Negan’s explanation of this arrangement closely echoes Carol’s plea to Lori that “we don’t have to follow the old rules, we can make new ones” (c1:ch5:n26). He says that it is no longer necessary to “settle down with just one” woman: “I see no reason to follow the old boring rules. Let’s make life better. Why not?” (c3:ch18:n105).11 While his and Carol’s statements on non-monogamy

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appear almost identical, they are far from equivalent, and not just because Negan’s is meant as a boast-cum-temptation for a boy, Carl, by someone who has been established as immoral, while Carol’s advocates to consenting adults for an egalitarian relationship.12 More importantly, Negan’s collection of wives functions as the type of misogynistic polygamy, with a single male collecting sexual access to women as a show of and reward for his own power, that more typically appears in American pop culture and is, further, often associated in the popular imagination with Others such as Mormons and Muslims. In what is also a demonstration of power in front of Carl, Negan reprimands one of his wives, the recently unfaithful Amber, by reminding her that her position is “completely voluntary” and that she, if she wishes, can return to her previous partner and job with the Savior group while forfeiting her “privileges,” but that she absolutely “can’t fucking cheat” (c3:ch18:n105). Amber chooses to retain her position as Negan’s wife, but despite his verbal assertions of her free will and his claims that he doesn’t “want anyone here if they don’t want to be,” the visuals tell a more threatening story: a row of small panels includes him looming over Amber, extending twice as high in frame as she does, and holding her chin and then cheeks in his black-gloved hands, while she cries in the final three panels on the page. The punishment for her infidelity falls on the man with whom she had sex, whose face Negan brands with a hot iron. Branding in this way serves as the standard penalty in this situation, and Negan, perhaps ironically given his dismissal of what he calls the old rules, argues that he has no choice but to carry out the punishment. The rules of the Saviors, “no matter how small, or insignificant” must “be followed” because, his followers repeat in unison, “The rules keep us alive” (c3:ch18:n105). Negan’s non-monogamy is competitive, not collective— only he can participate in it at all, and only he can have sexual access to the women whom he claims as wives, as belonging to him—and based on a model of exchange and payment rather than a free expression of desire. As he tells Carl, “When I choose a new wife, the process is completely voluntary. It’s an honor to be with me, to no longer have to earn points to trade for goods and services. But it comes with a price … total devotion” (c3:ch18:n105). Negan’s polygamy not only casts non-monogamy as evidence of personal immorality, but also, while very different from Carol’s proposal of polyamory, retroactively strengthens the association of non-­ monogamy with abnormality and even insanity. Negan’s eventual defeat by Rick only reinforces this association. As the Governor is brought down because he violates the primacy of the Child,

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Negan is brought down through violating patriarchal monogamy when Dwight, one of the Saviors, betrays him as revenge for Negan having made Dwight’s wife Sherry the first of his wives. Dwight tells Rick they thought it would “make our lives easier” but didn’t “realize how much we needed each other until we were apart,” and Dwight was branded when they were caught together, after which Dwight obeyed Negan as a “good soldier” and a “coward” (c3:ch18:n108). Dwight’s instrumentality in Negan’s eventual capture, at the risk of his own life, stems from competition over possession of a woman, recalling the conflict between Rick and Shane over Lori and displaying the continued dominance of the paradigm of monogamous ownership. Similarly, on the television show, Negan’s violation of monogamous relationships also contributes to Dwight’s betrayal of him, which again factors in his downfall, although to a lesser extent than in the comics. When Negan boasts to Carl that he is “not gonna have time to screw any of my wives today,” he adds, looking meaningfully at Dwight, “I mean, maybe one” (“Sing Me a Song”). Negan’s wives, who make their debut in a scene similar to their introduction in the comics, similarly associate Negan’s polygamy with his iniquity, but they evince more resistance. Negan emphasizes their sexualization in contrast to the women Carl is used to being around and encourages him to “look at their titties. It’s cool. I won’t mind. They won’t mind. Knock yourself out” (“Sing Me a Song”). He overtly objectifies them, treating them not as partners but as resources to be shared (only to a point, of course—he still demonstrates his intolerance for any of his wives having sex with another man by chastising Amber for cheating on him with Mark, using some of the exact words and physical gestures and assigning the same punishment to Mark as in the comic). Unlike in the comic, however, the scene ends with Negan publicly humiliating Dwight after he enters by ostentatiously making him wait until Negan finishes kissing Sherry (see Fig. 3.2). Sherry, partly as a tribute to who Dwight “used to be” and likely partly from guilt over confirming Amber’s infidelity to Negan, helps Daryl to escape from his imprisonment by the Saviors before fleeing herself (“Hostiles and Calamities”). Later, a trio of Negan’s remaining wives, sent to spend time with Eugene to help convince him to fully embrace living as a Savior, return again the next night of their own volition to attempt to convince Eugene to make pills to help Amber commit suicide as an escape from her role as wife. In actuality, they wish to make an attempt on Negan’s life, to effect their own escape from his sexual control, a plan

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Fig. 3.2  Negan makes Dwight wait

that a cowed Eugene puts an end to when he discerns it. In contrast, when the show wishes to humanize Negan, it appeals to heteronormativity and concentrates on revelations such as his having worked with children prior to the apocalypse, his regret over cheating on his wife, whom he calls his “only real wife,” while she was sick, and even his having named his bat, Lucille, after his wife because she, he says, “got me through” (“The Big Scary U”; “Still Gotta Mean Something”). Commenting on the sexual politics of the television show, Lavin and Lowe assert that through the first four seasons, they “see no advancements regarding heterosexism and hetero-normativity; they remain unflinching throughout. Rigid hetero-normativity and latent homophobia are manifest in the creation of exclusively heterosexual characters and couplings” (121). Cathy Hannabach (2014) focuses a similar critique on the show’s complete lack of queer family structures through its third season: All of the groups represented as ‘families’ in the show are either heterosexual couples or children and parents related through heterosexual unions. While the entire group of survivors shares some of the affects and practices associated with ‘family’ in its heteronormative sense (economic interdependence, primary affective bonds, and shared domestic space, for example), heterosexual couples and child/parent units are guaranteed primacy over the group as a whole, leaving the heteronuclear family intact even in a post-­apocalyptic world that in many ways might seem to require a more expansive and heterogeneous network of kinship and community. (loc. 1952)13

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While these criticisms remain overwhelmingly accurate, The Walking Dead does eventually make some gestures toward queer inclusivity. In the comics, survivor Jesus is in a successful gay partnership, and he and his partner Alex are depicted cuddling in bed together, albeit fully clothed (c3:ch21:n122). (A more openly sexual moment in a later volume devotes three-quarters of a page to a close-up of the two kissing [c3:ch23:n136].) Near the end of the seventh season of the TV show, Jesus reveals to Maggie that he had always “found it hard getting close to anyone—neighbors, friends … boyfriends” (“The Other Side”). Maggie reacts with a silent smile of acceptance of his confidence.14 The comics also include the gay male couple Aaron and Eric. They demonstrate a strong emotional bond (Aaron tells Eric that the “Only place I feel safe is in your arms” [c3:ch18:n106]) and kiss openly in close-up in a horizontal strip panel during Eric’s recovery from a stabbing (c2:ch14:n79). Further, Eric’s death during a battle with the Saviors fuels Aaron’s desire for revenge (he tells Rick that he will not be ok until “every last one” of the Saviors is dead), which loosely parallels Dwight’s motivation for revenge against Negan (c3:ch20:n119). Despite this positive portrayal, when Aaron tells Heath that “Eric and I used to joke” about being the “last two gay men on Earth,” his feelings could stand as a description of The Walking Dead universe (c3:ch20:n119). The television version of that universe features Aaron and Eric as well, whose TV kiss was the subject of what one article called a “firestorm of offensive and angry reactions from fans” online, a real-world parallel to the reactions that Carol provokes in Rick and Lori when she asks to marry them in the comics (Whitney 2015).15 Such audience policing of heteropatriarchal boundaries, along with the relative lack of queer representation, is perhaps intensified by the historical centrality of the straight white male fan base in comics and horror. On television, The Walking Dead also added a lesbian couple, Denise and Tara, but neither of these same-sex couples has considerable longevity. Eric dies during an assault on the Saviors’ compound in season 8, sharing another televised kiss while he is wounded with Aaron, who witnesses him joining other zombies (or other zombie Others) after he has died. Aaron also carries away from this battle a baby that Rick rescued after killing the Savior who was her father (it is worth briefly pointing out that Rick shows pangs of conscience at killing a father here, in contrast to the many other killings of Saviors that he and his group carry out in and beyond this episode). But the implication that the child might in some way substitute for the loss of Eric or create the kind of family that the two men never had together is not followed through, at

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least through the end of season 8: Aaron turns the baby over at the Hilltop, and while she makes a couple of brief appearances afterward, these are unconnected to Aaron. Eric survives about a season and a half longer than Denise does, but both deaths reflect the dominance of heteronormativity. Denise is shot through the eye with an arrow by the Saviors in the same manner that Abraham, a straight, white male, dies in the comics, a substitution that some decried as “falling back in a well-established trope known as ‘Bury Your Gays’ or ‘Dead Lesbian Syndrome’” (Robinson 2016).16 Her death is linked to her relationship by occurring while she holds a soda that she intends to present to Tara as a token of love and during a speech in which she says of her: “I could’ve told her I loved her, but I didn’t because I was afraid” (“Twice as Far”). Notably, television-Abraham’s arc in the season involves moving past a desire for suicide to a desire to be part of a heterosexual, and thus potentially reproductive, couple with Sasha. When he decides that he, like Rick’s Alexandria settlement, does in fact have a future, that “things are gonna go on for a while,” he tells Sasha, “I believe I’d like to get to know you a whole lot better” (“Always Accountable”). He makes this decision while he is still sleeping with another woman, Rosita, demonstrating an excess of traditional masculinity.17 However, in order to remain on the right side of heteronormativity, he must subordinate this excess to the rules of monogamy, and so breaks up with an anguished Rosita because, he says, he knows now that she is not, as he felt when he first met her, “the last woman on Earth” (“Not Tomorrow Yet”). By the time he is captured by the Saviors, to be killed by Negan, Abraham has moved from telling Sasha that he “can’t stop thinking about Maggie having a pup” because of how badly things can go in this “new world” to asking her, with optimistically sun-dappled trees in the background, if she too now feels that she could do something “as big as” having a child with him (“Knots Unite,” “Last Day on Earth”). On the one hand, that his death coincides with his newfound desire to reproduce, as well as with the murder of father-to-be Glenn, can be read as rendering his death more tragic and Negan’s crimes worse because they directly affront reproductive futurism. On the other hand, however, the timing of his death can be read instead as a rare subversion of the supremacy of monogamous reproductive futurism, a moment of ambiguity that unsettles its ideological dominance. Vossen views sexual and romantic fulfillment as central to the protagonists’ concerns in The Walking Dead: “Sex is emphasized in The Walking Dead as that which separates ‘the living’ from ‘the dead.’ The survivors’

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primal sexual urges and desire for personal companionship separate the living from the monstrous ‘other’” (loc. 1695). However, as Carol’s rejection, suicide, and zombification prove, living characters can also become Othered for their sexual and affective choices, stigmatized, or even transformed into a literal monster. Furthermore, such Othering may serve only to highlight the insufficiency of the boundaries that it creates. As Toby Venables (2015) comments, “Fear of the zombie … is not merely of their otherness, but fear of a breakdown of all categories—of there being no distinction between one and the other, us and them” (215). In The Walking Dead, then, the zombies themselves represent the purest embodiment of queer challenge to the categories that sustain reproductive futurism and the heteronormative family. As the following chapter will explore, zombies remove familial boundaries altogether, they increase their numbers without the need for sexual reproduction, and the more they increase their numbers, the closer looms the end point of the human future that reproductive futurism promises to extend indefinitely. And, to make those threats worse, everyone is always already perilously close to joining their ranks.

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

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­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

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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. While this reaction recalls the Internet’s policing of Lori’s sexuality mentioned in Chap. 2, there was also a substantial positive online reaction to reveal in a later season that Jesus is gay, as discussed, for example, in Patterson 2017. 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.

References 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. Cocarla, Sasha. 2014. A Love Worth Un-Undying for: Neoliberalism and Queered Sexuality. In Warm Bodies, in Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 923–1307. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP. Kindle. Grizzell, Trevor. 2014. Re-Animating the Social Order: Zombies and Queer Failure. In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 2217–2516. Jefferson: McFarland. 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. 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

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Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 1896–2210. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Kee, Chera. 2014. Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys: Toying with Miscegenation in Zombie Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television 42 (4): 176–185. Lavin, Melissa F., and Brian M. Lowe. 2015. Cops and Zombies: Hierarchy and Social Location in The Walking Dead. In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-­ Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr, 113–124. New York: Palgrave. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Kindle. Pagano, David. 2008. The Space of Apocalypse in Zombie Cinema. In Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, ed. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette, 71–86. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Kindle. Patterson, Stephen. 2017. This Huge Moment in ‘the Walking Dead’ Season 7, Episode 14 Has Left the Internet Literally Praising Jesus. Movie Pilot. www. moviepilot.com. Accessed on June 20, 2017. 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. Robinson, Joanna. 2016. The Walking Dead’s Latest Gruesome Death Is Part of a Troubling TV Trend. Vanity Fair. www.vanityfair.com. Accessed on March 24, 2018. Simpson, Philip L. 2014. The Zombie Apocalypse Is upon Us? Homeland Insecurity. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 565–841. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Smith, Phil. 2015. The Footbook of Zombie Walking: How to Be More than a Survivor in an Apocalypse. Axminster: Triarchy Press. Kindle. Steiger, Kay. 2011. No Clean Slate: Unshakable Race and Gender Politics in The Walking Dead. In Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 99–113. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Venables, Toby. 2015. Zombies, a Lost Literary Heritage and the Return of the Repressed. In The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture, ed. Laura Hubner, Marcus Leaning, and Paul Manning, 208–223. New York: Palgrave. Kindle. Vossen, Emma. 2014. Laid to Rest: End of the World Sexuality and Apocalyptic Anticipation in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 1572–1890. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Whitney, Erin. 2015. ‘Walking Dead’ Fans Upset over Gay Kiss, Tweet Homophobic Comments. HuffPost. www.huffingtonpost.com. Accessed on March 24, 2018. Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond. Expanded and Revised ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Kindle.

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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)

PART II

Living/Dead Families

CHAPTER 4

What Happens in the Barn Stays in the Barn: The Family and the Zombie as Sinthomosexual

Abstract  This chapter interprets The Walking Dead’s zombies as sinthomosexuals, or queer antagonists to reproductive futurism. They act as queer Others through asexual reproduction, focus on immediate drives, and the presence of the infection in every living person. These zombies figure as alternatives to reproductive futurism, and their mere existence troubles heteronormative hegemony, as do the recurring transgressions by living characters, particularly Hershel and Lizzie’s questioning of the line between the living and the living dead and their willingness to view zombies not just as people but as family. Zombie-Sophia in the TV series represents a disturbing amalgam of child, symbolic Child, and sinthomosexual, and control must be sought by destroying the zombies that encroach on the categories of human and family and suppressing viewpoints that enable such encroachment. Keywords  The Walking Dead • Sinthomosexual • Zombie • Queer • Hershel As we have seen in narrative threads such as Rick and Shane’s competition over Lori and Carl, the containment of Carol’s polyamorous desires, and the linkage of Negan’s immorality with his polygamy, in The Walking Dead, the organizing unit of the traditional, patriarchal, heterosexually reproductive family nearly always preserves its dominance in the face of repeated challenges. As we have also seen, these challenges nevertheless © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_4

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arise with regularity, and an even greater threat to the reproductive futurist paradigm emerges from the zombies themselves, particularly when their presence creates an adapted, queer version of the family. The traditional nuclear family produces and protects the child/Child, acting to symbolically assure society’s survival. The ideological means used to achieve this assurance results in an oppressive attempted enforcement of norms that ascribes queer family arrangements to irrationality or immorality. The queerness of family units in The Walking Dead that incorporate zombies is subject to the same strategies of containment applied to the living families, and potential families, discussed in earlier chapters. How can zombies operate as queer figures—in other words, as figures who function not necessarily as stand-ins for homosexuality but more broadly as those outside of or in opposition to the paradigm of reproductive futurism? To begin with, the zombie undermines the promise of the social future signified by the Child. As Cory James Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman (2011) write, “Zombies, as an abject reflection of our individual mortality, and harbingers of societal decay, force the viewer to consider the dark possibilities of a meaningless existence” (loc. 148). Thus, zombies, which “can be a dominating culture’s figures for groups against whom violence and exclusion are systematically performed” (Cohen 2012, 405), can be identified with queerness, and particularly with Lee Edelman’s sinthomosexual. Edelman (2004) defines the sinthomosexual as the antagonist to reproductive futurism and “the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction” (loc. 1745). As James Berger (2015) asks, in Edelman’s “terms, does queerness not resemble above all the zombie—that absolute, inhuman other that demolishes any social order present or future?” (154).1 Kevin Boon (2011) sees the zombie in the post–nuclear age as symbolizing the self’s “greatest fear” of absorption into the Other (55); and according to Bishop (2010), science fiction and horror are apt vehicles “to explore cultural concerns of alienation and marginalization because of their ability to quite frankly and literally represent the Other as strange or alien— and the zombie narrative tradition is a quintessential example of such fiction” (99). This method of representation occasions what David Schmid critiques as the “excessive visibility of monsters, the way in which most monsters … are immediately recognizable as such” (Castillo et al. 2016, 98). The Walking Dead represents the marginalized figure of the sinthomosexual in the uncanny bodies and procreation of the zombie, at once embodying the fear that threatening queerness inheres in everyone and

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rendering manifestations of that threat clearly, comfortingly visible. The Other comprises both an external and, paradoxically, an internal menace, needing only the right stimulus (here, death) to remake the individual from within in its own image. As part of this representation, The Walking Dead also portrays the frustration of attempts to incorporate that Other into the family, particularly in the actions and attitudes of Hershel and Lizzie, as well as in the zombification and (second) death of the child Sophia. The Walking Dead’s zombies can be read as occupying the role of sinthomosexuals in two primary ways. First, and especially significantly, they reproduce without heterosexual coupling, increasing their numbers through their own deaths as living beings or by infecting others. By multiplying in this way, Steve Jones (2011) argues, zombies show “the violent potential of the Other that overpowers the accepted system, inevitably dominating via an unstoppable reproductive regime” (loc. 738).2 Because the zombie is also always already inside us, this type of reproduction (zombies increase the number of zombies) is simultaneously a metamorphosis (a human transforms into a zombie). Second, zombies pursue the immediate satisfaction of their urges rather than an individual or social future. In Cathy Hannabach’s (2014) words, “the compulsory sexual norms structuring U.S. society no longer bind the zombies nor shape their desires, even as the human survivors cling to them” (loc. 2000). Within reproductive futurism, “the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity” adds a veneer of “meaningfulness” to human reproductive behavior (Edelman 2004, loc. 244). Because of how they propagate, the living dead strip away such justifications, denaturalizing the associated rules of sociosexual organization, and instead represent a disturbingly unrestricted expression of drives. The Governor says as much in the comics while describing what he has learned from observing the zombies: “The thing you have to realize is that they’re just us—they’re no different. They want what they want, they take what they want and after they get what they want—they’re only content for the briefest span of time. Then they want more” (c1:ch5:n28). The zombie’s ceaseless consumption mirrors the sinthomosexual’s figuration of “the continuous satisfaction that the drive attains by its pulsions and not by its end” (Edelman 2004, loc. 1354). Eruptions of the drive mark existence as “an eternal, tragic present” in contrast to the future as “the fantasy of a promise that can never be kept” (Bernini 2017, 68). For the undead, the drive to consume concurrently functions, if only as a by-product, as a drive to propagate, and both work against reproductive futurism.

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Furthermore, zombies’ particular method of unchecked asexual reproduction ironically entails its own end, as it could eventually spell the end of reproduction for humans and therefore for the undead. As a result, zombies serve as “emblems of our anxieties concerning procreation and futurity” (Berger 2015, 155). If zombies completely wipe out humanity, then, obviously, human reproduction will cease, which will in turn halt the creation of new zombies. In The Walking Dead, zombies sometimes eat animals, but animals cannot become zombies. The TV show has also made a point of depicting the existing undead as continuing to decay over time. Thus, were there to be no more humans, whether the living dead need to consume or not, whether they starved or rotted, they would be unable to create more zombies and would ultimately die off. Furthermore, in Berger’s distillation, the “zombie apocalypse is a story of procreation. It condenses the problem of the future to an opposition between the zombie and the child” (153); and, within that opposition, undead procreation decisively undercuts not only the Child’s centrality but also its assurances of sexual meaning and futurity. The undead collapse the distinction between consumption and propagation, exposing heterosexual reproduction as merely another drive rather than a guarantee of a social future. Thus, the asexual method of zombie reproduction is threatening because it provides a future that promises termination rather than ongoing stability. Its menace to reproductive futurism is intensified by the fact that, in The Walking Dead, anyone who dies for any reason will become a zombie, which means that every single living person represents a potential sinthomosexual and so may at least briefly become a queered subject. Deborah Christie (2011) posits that the undead set up a problem of recognizing similarity and difference simultaneously (77); and Cohen writes that zombies are “a danger from without that is already within” (403), as we see in the overlay of reproduction and metamorphosis.3 In the comics, Carol dies from a danger that is within in multiple senses: she is bitten by a zombie allowed within the protective boundaries of the prison, creating the opportunity for it to transform her into the Other that waits inside her; and that transformation represents her choice of queer (self-)negation.4 According to Cohen (1996), “The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself ” (loc. 341). Carol does both. She steps outside of the official space of heteronormativity, which leads eventually to her encounter with a monster

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that represents what lies beyond that space, and in that encounter, she becomes the monster (within) herself. As a consequence of the zombie’s multifarious threats to reproductive futurity, just as modifications to the traditional nuclear family proposed by the living must be ruthlessly policed, so must modifications that incorporate the undead. In both the comics and television show, Hershel initially insists on the continued humanity of the zombies. In his barn, he assembles something like an extended family of zombified relatives and neighbors, whom he regards as temporarily rather than permanently sequestered from their place in society.5 In the comics, during a conversation in which Hershel reveals that he grew up on his farm and inherited it from his father, thereby associating it with the continuities of reproductive futurity and patriarchal inheritance, Rick inquires about his group staying in the barn. Hershel answers matter-of-factly, “That’s where we keep all our dead ones,” the revelation emphasized by the panel in which it occurs taking up about three-quarters of the page, with Hershel’s face foregrounded in profile and partly in shadow, immediately marking as suspect his point of view and use of the familially coded space of the farm (c1:ch2:n10; see Fig. 4.1). He adds (again, in a drawing that places his face half in shadow) that “we’ve been keeping them in the barn until we can figure out a way to help them” and is apoplectic to discover that Rick’s group has been killing them, his reaction once more emphasized by a vertically oriented half-­ page panel depicting him yelling in bold lettering with outstretched arms that appears on a left-hand page, increasing its impact by injecting the brief pause necessary to turn the page between Rick’s admission and Hershel’s response (c1:ch:n11). Hershel quickly divulges that he began keeping zombies in the barn after his son Shawn was bitten, acting, as he sees it, to protect his child—specifically, one of his male heirs—just as Rick does. Momentarily taken aback, Rick swiftly pivots from commiserating over endangered children to asserting, “That thing in the barn … it’s not your son.”6 Hershel violently rejects this position, arguing, “We don’t know what they’re thinking—what they’re feeling,” and holds out the possibility of the zombies’ recovery (c1:ch2:n11).7 In contrast to Hershel’s upfront admission in the comics, his television counterpart does try to keep the goings-on in the large, rust-encrusted barn a secret because he worries about whether all the members of Rick’s group are people “of conscience” (“Secrets”). Here, Dale is the first to confront Hershel, who makes much the same argument as in the comics, comparing the zombies to paranoid schizophrenics and insisting, “We

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Fig. 4.1  Hershel reveals the contents of his barn

don’t shoot sick people” (“Secrets”). He continues to classify zombie ­relations by their roles as family members: “My wife and stepson are in that barn. They’re people” (“Secrets”). His daughter Maggie similarly objects that those barn-dwellers whom Glenn places into the undifferentiated

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c­ ategory of “walkers” should be identified individually, as “Mom, Shawn, Mr. and Mrs. Fischer, Lacey, Duncan” (“Secrets”). Jeff May (2010) pinpoints in the moment in which characters become zombies “an important shift, as familiar loved ones turn quickly into the polarized other, creating fissures in the supposedly rigid ‘us’ definition” (289).8 Hershel and Maggie, however, refuse to recognize this polarization, pushing back against any such destabilizing of self (and family) by absorbing the undead “them” into the definition of the living “us.” When Rick’s entire group finds out, Shane’s reaction to such redefinition is its familiar displacement into the irrational: “The man,” he says, “is crazy” (“Pretty Much Dead Already”).9 Angus Nurse (2014) comments that “Hershel’s group arguably fares better through its proactive policy of containment” than Rick’s group has before arriving at the farm (loc. 1538); however, since Hershel’s modification of the definition of family must be shown to be unsustainable, his attempt to keep the undead at least nominally part of his family ends in disaster. In the comics, after Hershel is knocked down while opening the barn door to put another zombie inside, his son Arnold is bitten from behind by his undead brother Shawn, and his sister Lacey is overwhelmed a few panels later. Maggie hands Hershel his gun—a symbol of patriarchal power, as if he were about to act now as a proper father—and he is forced to shoot Shawn and Arnold in the head, apologizing as he does so. After all of the zombies from the barn have been killed, he holds the gun to his own head while again saying “I’m sorry” but is prevented by Rick from pulling the trigger (c1:ch2:n11). Having paid the price of permanently losing more of his family, Hershel confirms the change in his convictions suggested by shooting his reanimated sons when on the following page, he tells Rick, “You were right” (c1:ch2:n11). Hershel’s ideological defeat here is highlighted by the relative smallness of his head in the close-up drawing, taking up about a quarter of the panel in comparison to the half of the panel occupied by the side of Rick’s face and collar. Later, when Hershel demands that Rick’s group leave the farm, Lori is infuriated and blames the turn of events on Hershel’s own stupidity, but his reasoning nevertheless sounds much like Rick’s often does. Abandoning hybridity and collectivity, he advocates instead for a family-first worldview, saying that others are “Not. My. Problem. I’ve got to look out for my kids” (c1:ch2:n12). He echoes Rick too in his willingness to use violence, almost shooting Rick in a confrontation. That this is a change accompanying his change in attitude toward the undead is signaled in his reaction to having “almost killed a man”: “I think I’ve lost my mind” (c1:ch2:n12). The fact

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that this is the same fear that Lori and Rick express about what would happen to Rick were he to confirm that Judith was Shane’s baby demonstrates the recurrence of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms though which reproductive futurism is naturalized. Although in the television version, the farm inhabitants are given far less immediate reason to kill the zombies, the same outcome is reached. Here, the carnage kicks off at Shane’s insistence rather than by any accident or casualties among the living, emphasizing his bid for the role of patriarch of both the Grimes family and the larger group. Maggie, as a result of being attacked by zombies while securing morning-after pills for Lori (discussed in Chap. 2), has already quickly shifted to seeing the undead as a threat to be eliminated rather than as family and has used “walkers” in a conversation with her father (“Pretty Much Dead Already”). Shane’s determination to break open the barn and destroy the zombies inside takes its motivation in part from a conversation with Lori about her pregnancy: because he believes that he is the father, he feels it necessary to protect the child/Child and her/the future by terminating the captive zombies, which his competitor for the positions of father and leader, Rick, has so far failed to do. When Hershel, Rick, and others return to the farm with newly captured zombies, Shane agitatedly resorts to violence to prove his point, shooting one undead woman in her vital organs to little effect in order to demonstrate that zombies cannot be categorized with the living. After shooting this female zombie in the head, Shane then smashes open the barn while a dazed-looking Hershel kneels in the farmyard dirt. During the slaughter that ensues, Maggie gives her explicit permission to Glenn to participate in gunning down her former neighbors and family members. Protecting living families, we see, entails the destruction of the hybridized family. Lizzie Samuels extends a much more far-reaching sympathy to the undead, not merely seeing no need to cure them, as Hershel does, but also murdering a family member to turn her into a zombie. Lizzie comes to see zombies not just as acceptable but as representing a desirable state of being. She undergoes a more extreme version of the shift in perspective that Hershel was first forced to adopt by circumstances and then forced to abandon by Rick’s group. Her more radical departure from the norms, however, is ultimately more radically and permanently contained. In her first appearance, Lizzie, her sister, Mika, and some other children are assigning names to zombies at the fence of the prison where the survivors are staying. Carl was reprimanded by Rick earlier in the episode for naming the group’s pigs, which he must now see only as food. Now, Carl

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tells Lizzie that the zombies, like the pigs, can no longer bear individual names, their conversation echoing the process by which the zombies that Hershel kept in the barn like livestock were ultimately no longer considered individual subjects. Lizzie denies the absolute division that Carl asserts, sounding like Hershel on his farm in her response that “they’re not [dead]. They’re just different” (“30 Days Without an Accident”). To Carl’s objection that zombies kill and eat people, Lizzie retorts that people also kill people, and they still have names, again challenging Carl’s neat division between living and undead. Lizzie is paralleled in this episode by a mysterious woman, Clara, whom Rick meets in the woods and who leads him to where she and her husband, Eddie, have camped. It turns out, however, that Clara has guided Rick there not for his help but in order to feed him to Eddie, who is undead and, she says, “starving.” She tells Rick that she knows that keeping Eddie (who gets to retain his name) is “wrong” but that she “couldn’t be without him,” and she asks Rick not to stop her becoming a zombie before she stabs herself in order to join her husband in undeath. (Ironically, it is Hershel who later comforts Rick by saying, “Some people are too far gone” to help.) Clara spends her screen time completely begrimed to the point where she resembles a zombie herself, and she speaks with a non-American accent, both of which serve to Other her, to distance her from our protagonists. Interestingly, though, Rick does not kill her (after she kills herself) or Eddie, perhaps because, he tells Hershel, he came close to her state (positioned as irremediable insanity) and believes that he still would if he lost his children, reducing the distance between zombie and person that he, Carl, and Hershel otherwise work to establish. In the following episode, Lizzie’s father dies after being bitten by a zombie, and Lizzie requests that she be allowed to stab him to prevent his turning, but she is unable to go through with it, hyperventilating instead and leaving the task to Carol. She later expresses her anger over these actions, crying, “He was special and now he’s dead. Why’d they kill him? Why’d they kill Nick [the named zombie outside the fence]?” (“Infected”). Her sister labels her “stupid” and “messed up” for the attitudes to the undead that this reaction implies, and when Carol finds the sisters again gazing out through the fence at a cluster of zombies, she insists, “Lizzie, those are walkers. Nick was a walker” (“Infected”). Carol pushes Lizzie to accept the same replacement of individual names with an estranging categorical nomenclature that Hershel and Maggie had to embrace regarding their relatives in the barn. While Lizzie makes some signs of capitulation

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here—accepting a flower and taking a knife from Carol—she also never turns her body away from the fence and the zombies beyond. Her continued commitment to rejecting a strict division between the living and undead is confirmed in a later exchange with Carol. She believes that many people will die because of the sickness sweeping the prison, about which she says, “Makes me sad, but … at least they get to come back.” When Carol maintains that when they come back, “people aren’t who they were,” Lizzie counters, “Yeah, but they’re something. They’re someone” (“Indifference”). This conversation is shot from the characters’ shoulders and up against a background of complete darkness, which visually suggests both that it presents a conflict of ideologies and that this conflict is dangerous. The potential to incorporate, or even become, rather than destroy, the enemies of procreation and the social future is framed as something that simultaneously leads to darkness (the end of the current social order) and must be kept in darkness (kept hidden, repressed, and presented as outside the bounds of rationality). Seen another way, the fact that everyone is already infected means that the zombie Other is already incorporated into the self. Lizzie’s worldview extends personhood beyond the accepted parameters and stresses the (queer) fluidity of the individual subject. She employs the analogy of a child growing up: “I’m little now. If I don’t die, I’ll get big. I’ll be me, but I’ll be different. It’s how it is. [pause] We all change. We all don’t get to stay the same way we started.” Her argument here, lent weight by its being in voiceover, opens the possibility that the futurist child can modulate over time into the anti-futurist zombie, a terrifying prospect for heterofamilial social and sexual organization (which Carol staves off by saying it is more complicated than that and emphasizing again the need to kill.) The longer Lizzie clings to her view of zombies as “different” people, the more radical that view becomes, the more it is shown as a danger to herself and others, and the more, finally, she herself merges with and embodies that danger. In “Internment,” Lizzie is almost bitten when she trips while leading a zombie who has died of illness through the prison by calling to him by name: “Come on, boy. Come on, Henry.” Afterwards, she appears not only upset but also confused, explaining wonderingly, “I called him nice. He didn’t scratch Glenn. I thought maybe he listens.”10 In the episode “Inmates,” in the aftermath of the attack on the prison by the Governor, an event during which she shot two people, Lizzie is walking through the woods with her sister and Tyreese, who leaves them to investigate some noise that they think may be walkers. While he is gone, Lizzie

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puts her hand over Judith’s mouth and pinches shut her nostrils in order to keep her quiet, her sinister expression implying that Judith will shortly join the undead. Lizzie, aligned with the sinthomosexual figure of the zombie, threatens the Child in the absence of the substitute father’s protection, and she is prevented (offscreen) from transforming the Child into a zombie, its own antithesis, only by the arrival of the substitute, future-oriented mother, Carol. Lizzie is further marked as immoral and irrational when, alone with Tyreese and Judith, she comes upon a zombie who is stuck in the railroad tracks and prevents Tyreese from killing it. Tyreese has been warned by Carol that Lizzie is “confused” about the walkers because she “thinks they’re just different,” and here she proclaims that it is sometimes but not always necessary to kill zombies (“The Grove”). Carol’s role as substitute mother, which she initially resists, begins when Lizzie, who has fallen ill in the prison, hugs Carol and asks her to tuck her in (Carol cries after Lizzie leaves, like Michonne cries when holding Judith, a lament for the lost role of mother and the larger reproductive system with which it is associated) and is reinforced when Lizzie accidentally calls her “Mom” instead of “ma’am” (“Indifference”).11 Not, however, until Tyreese joins them and Mika do they form a makeshift nuclear family, even occupying a rustic house that they stumble upon in the woods. While the adults first search this domestic idyll, Lizzie argues with Mika, upset that any zombies found will be killed. Mika rebuffs her, insisting that they “aren’t people,” but Lizzie holds fast, sweepingly pronouncing, “you’re wrong. All of you” (“The Grove”). Lizzie becomes even more upset when Mika has to shoot a zombie that stumbles out of the house, but refuses to share what she knows are regarded as her unacceptable ­reasons. Later in the episode, her repression receives a visual symbol as we hear her laughing over a tight shot of the bottom of a kettle that Carol is heating on the stove, which transitions to Carol seeing Lizzie through the window frolicking with “Griselda,” a walker whom Carol immediately kills over Lizzie’s screamed objections. Griselda’s death incenses Lizzie, who explodes, “She was playing with me. She wanted a friend” (“The Grove”). Lizzie believes that killing zombies and killing people constitutes the “same thing” and that Carol doesn’t “understand,” but it is Lizzie whom the show indicates is dangerously irrational in and during this escalation of her desire to incorporate the dead into the life of the living.12 At the same time, the sheer amount of time devoted to Lizzie’s storyline gives greater representation to the very transgressive irruptions whose containment it ostensibly endorses.

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Lizzie’s worldview subsequently reaches the extreme of elevating the zombie over the human, and thus queer negation over reproductive futurity. As Lizzie feeds a mouse to the zombie on the tracks (as she had also been feeding zombies at the prison), she claims to Mika, “I can hear them.” “They just want me to change. They can make me be like them” (“The Grove”). Although this trajectory is briefly interrupted when all four members of the constructed family group shoot a group of smoldering zombies together, suggesting that violent repulsion of the Other preserves their unity, Lizzie continues the movement from zombie as friend to zombie as self, stopping first at zombie as family member. That night, she informs Carol that she knows what she has to do now, which turns out to be, as Carol and Tyreese find out upon returning to the house the next day, stabbing her sister to death without hurting the brain, so that she can come back, and about to make good on her statement that “Judith can change too” (“The Grove”). The substitute mother, this time joined by the substitute father, partly prevents and partly fails to prevent Lizzie from converting the future-guaranteeing children into their nonreproductive, futurity-negating opposites. Tyreese’s subsequent report of Lizzie having murdered a rabbit, pulled it apart, and nailed it to a board as a means of, she claimed, “just having fun” doesn’t seem to connect to her motivations, as they are laid out over her narrative arc, for “changing” her family members, but it does align her with serial killers, making sure to categorize her as insane and immoral and working against audience sympathy for her position. As a result of Lizzie’s acting upon her belief that zombies are just “different,” Carol, under the pretense that they are picking wildflowers to give to Mika when she comes back, which Lizzie anticipates happily, brings Lizzie a relatively short distance from the house to shoot her. Executing Lizzie also pushes Carol to confess to killing two sick people at the prison, completing the destruction (perhaps exacerbated by it being an assembled rather than “natural” family like the Grimes) of this adopted family unit and its plans to live out a sort of bourgeois pastoral existence in the home in the woods. The fact that Carol’s murder of a child, rendered even more transgressive by her position as acting mother, is portrayed as the unquestionably correct course of action establishes just how great a threat embracing queerness—as embodied in the categorical fluidity and drive to negation of the zombies—poses.13 In “The Grove,” Carol foreshadows Mika’s death when she connects Sophia and Mika by describing both as not having a mean bone in their bodies, an association that also returns us to the massacre of the zombies

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Hershel kept in his barn before he abandoned the view of them as “different” people that Lizzie would not. Interestingly, and disruptively, the television incarnation of Sophia demonstrates that the centrality of the child/ Child in The Walking Dead can extend beyond death. As we have seen with Hershel’s and Lizzie’s subversion of the divide between zombie and human, “[a]mbiguous items that defy neat classification are dangerous due to the very ability to violate categories” (Booth 2015, 21), and this violation becomes especially complicated and significant when the item in question is a zombie child, a state that Carol’s adopted child Mika moves toward but does not reach but that her biological child, Sophia, does. The child, according to James R. Kincaid (2004), has long been weaponized against political and philosophical “substance” by replacing it with “negative inversions: innocence, purity, emptiness” (10), a process resisted by the child-aszombie. As a result of such potential disruption, zombie-­Sophia’s troubling combination of daughter/Child and zombie must first be hidden and confined to the extra-domestic space of the barn and then erased. Lauren Berlant (2004), enacting her own troubling of social categories, describes the figure of the “little girl” as “a condensation of many (infantile) citizenship fantasies. It is in her name as future citizen that state and federal governments have long policed morality around sex and other transgressive representation” in order that this symbolic child might pass into the “national heterosexuality ‘adult’ Americans generally seek to inhabit” (60).14 Sophia’s zombification thus represents a failure of such policing, a failure that it is vital to contain of the child to evolve into the reproductive mother. The attempt at containment is carried out as the culmination of the slaughter of Hershel’s zombies, when Rick guns down Sophia, who had been missing until she emerges from the barn after the rest of the undead have been disposed of. The presentation of her final demise invests it throughout with significance, beginning with a very wide overhead shot, framing the carnage of the barn shootings and the distance, both literal and symbolic, of Dale, the group’s conscience, from the rest of the survivors (see Fig. 4.2). The camera then teases an unseen final zombie from both outside and inside the barn before first focusing from the knees down on a pair of slowly shuffling child’s legs. Once Sophia exits the barn, she at first appears, sympathetically, more unsure than aggressive, and the musical score rises as Rick steps forward to meet her, gun raised in his extended arm. The camera focuses once more on her face before Rick pulls the trigger and she becomes one more truly dead body among the rest in another wide overhead shot.

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Fig. 4.2  Carnage at Hershel’s barn

The gravity accorded Sophia’s final moments reflects the severity of the multiple loss of a child and a Child, first to the zombies and then as a zombie, as well as the multivalent implications of that loss for reproductive futurist ideology. The foreclosure of her individual future functions as a synecdoche for the foreclosure of the social future: As a child, she stands for a certain continuation of life associated with youth—for all the redemptive hopes that a parent may have when looking at his or her son or daughter. [Rick] Grimes quickly ends any belief that things may be better with the next generation. As a female, moreover, she also stands for the potentiality of begetting another generation that may sustain the belief that things will eventually progress. There is no ‘future’ in the clichéd, campaign-advertisement sense of the term any longer. (Boehm 2014, loc. 2650)15

Tellingly, to see a female as symbolizing the potential for life itself requires adopting a normative framework, and we glimpse that framework as well in Berger’s discussion of Sophia’s zombification. He characterizes it in the same way that The Walking Dead tends to characterize queer ways of thinking such as Carol’s polyamorous proposal in the comics: “We—both characters and viewers—cannot bear to think of our collective failure to protect her” (Berger 2015, 157; emphasis added). With her second death, “[z]ombie propagation negates human procreation” (Berger 2015, 157).

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However, that death is simultaneously necessary to preserve the dominant order. If children are “officially, tacitly” assumed to bear the “blissful promises of adult heteronormativity,” against which any queer “behavior reads as harmless play … or as a mistake that can later be corrected by marriage” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, ix), then a zombie child such as Sophia not only fails to fulfill those promises but also threatens their fulfillment on a totalizing scale. The destruction of Sophia as a zombie child thus represents the force deployed against the queer inclusion that Hershel and Lizzie contemplate. Even an erstwhile Child must be sacrificed to defend the dominance of the heteronormative, reproductive futurist family. Simultaneously, of course, one could read the failure to keep the child alive as a failure of these heteronorms. Adding a further dimension of anxiety to the subversive power of the queer/zombie child, the zombie infection parallels the paranoid discourse in the United States about a sinister “gay agenda,” believed especially to wish to corrupt the (assumed) heteronormativity of children. In America, “panic about … recruitment in gay and lesbian culture is rampant” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, xii); and this fear dovetails with fears of conversion typically associated with the zombie.16 The fear that everyone is a potential convert, a potential Other, appears, for instance, in Bishop’s (2009) examination of contemporary zombies’ relationship to terrorism (24). The living dead can be read as expressing anxiety about the spread of terrorism because “the transmission of the zombie infection is a symbolic form of radical brainwashing, as in the enslaved automatons of some early zombie films” (Bishop 2010, 29). Anyone can become a zombie at any time, so everyone is a prospective enemy. This “trope of enslavement” (Bishop 2010, 133) applies equally well to the queer: anyone can be “brainwashed” or “infected,” or, in Lizzie’s more positive term, “change.” “The zombie creature is, first and foremost, a metaphor that reflects prevailing social anxieties—such as oppression, violence, [and] inequality” (Bishop 2010, 207); and in The Walking Dead, zombies reflect the attempted suppression of alternatives to heteronormative reproductive futurity, of a queer negation that would do violence to the dominant sociosexual system of organization. In this role, “the zombie becomes a necessary evolutionary step in the re-organization of society. The zombie embodies the death drive’s destructive energy, doing the necessary work of clearing away an outmoded, frustrating way of life; at the same time, it creates the path for epochal shifts hitherto unthinkable within the parameters of late capitalism” (Boehm 2014, loc. 2692). Thus, the mere existence of the zombies troubles the heteronormative hegemony, as do the recurring

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transgressions by central living characters, and Hershel and Lizzie’s questioning of the line between the living and the living dead and their willingness to attempt to include the latter under the category not just of people but of family disrupt it further. “The categorical violations that induce anxieties in … post-apocalyptic narratives are ones that were not effectively contained, controlled, or policed” (Booth 2015, 27); and therefore control must be sought by destroying the zombies that encroach on the categories of human and family, as well as, in Lizzie’s case, those who enable that encroachment. However, as Chap. 5 will discuss, there are those within the universe of The Walking Dead who accept “the renewing potential of negativity” (Boehm 2014, loc. 2775) to an even greater extent than Lizzie or Hershel accomplish, refiguring the family to even more closely integrate the zombie and the queerness that it represents.

Notes 1. Leverette (2008), using the lens of Derridian undecidability, discusses the zombie as undergoing queering, but he focuses on “queering as a [terrifying] liminal Otherness” rather than on sexuality (187). 2. Kee (2014) similarly writes that zombie reproduction represents a loss of white, heterosexual, patriarchal control over procreation (180) and Paffenroth (2011) that zombies have been used to “examine sexual ‘others’,” including in the 2008 film Otto (loc. 405). 3. Extending such paradoxes, Bernini claims that queer zombies such as those in the films of Bruce LaBruce can embody the conflicts in LGBTQIA movements between “assimilation” and desire for recognition by society on the one hand and “contestation” and refusal of sociality on the other (106–107). 4. One can trace variations of this anxiety back to the earliest zombie movies, which link the loss of autonomy with “themes of transformation, transgression and personal bodily violation, fear of the Other, and fear of becoming the Other” (Booth 2015, 20). 5. If we read zombies as queer, we can also read this practice as analogous to conversion therapy, especially given Hershel’s Christianity. 6. Hershel takes up much of the panel in which he cries “My son is in there, God dammit,” while Rick appears as tiny (his “Your son?” too is much smaller) in the adjacent panel, but this visually suggested power imbalance does not extend beyond this moment. 7. He also says that they may “wake up tomorrow, heal up, and be completely normal again” (c1:ch2:n11). His desired outcome is always a full return to the normative.

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8. When Woodbury citizen Doctor Stevens is bitten in the comics, he troubles exactly this divide between human/living and dead/zombie, gasping, “I’m not dying … think of it … scientifically … I’m just … evolving … into a different—worse life form. I’ll still exist in some way” (c1:ch6:n32). In his discussion of the complex status of zombie personhood, Brendan Riley (2011) raises both this moment and Jim’s hope earlier in the series that when he comes back as a zombie, he may be able to reunite with his family if they too have reanimated. Riley argues that, more often than they acknowledge, “the survivors continued to see the zombies, at least partly, as the people they used to be” (85). 9. In the same episode, Glenn justifies his having told the group against Maggie’s wishes by saying that even if the zombies are merely sick people, they are dangerous, and he never wants Maggie to be in danger. In other words, he prioritizes his heterosexual partner over any larger group or collectivity, and viewers see him rewarded as the camera zooms in on their intimate kissing, initiated by Maggie. 10. Lizzie’s language here to and about Henry sounds very similar to how one would talk to and about a dog, which blurs the boundaries between human and animal in the same way that she blurs the boundaries between human and zombie. 11. The request to be tucked in occurs in “Isolation.” 12. There is even some insinuation that both sisters are too “weak” (a favorite word of Carol in this season) to live—Mika would rather eat peaches than shoot a deer and says that killing people is wrong. 13. Compare the presentation of Carol’s murder of Lizzie to Lori’s consideration of an abortion (see Chap. 2) in an earlier season, or, in the same season, even to the normally stoic Michonne’s reduction to tears from merely holding baby Judith. 14. It is worth noting here that the survivors are on Hershel’s farm in the first place because of danger to another child, Carl, who survives his gunshot wound and remains the future citizen and patriarch. 15. Heckman (2014) further links this loss to a loss of stable place through The Walking Dead’s use of “specific vehicles, roads, and Native American histories”: “When the Cherokees were ordered off their land, however, they lost ties to their future, both as a result of lands lost and children lost. Similarly, the forced exodus endured by the survivors of The Walking Dead costs them their own futurity, symbolized by the loss and subsequent death of Sophia” (loc. 1954, 2047). 16. I would extend “gay and lesbian culture” to “queer culture” more broadly, while acknowledging that other permutations of queerness have not yet acted as public flashpoints in the same way.

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References 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 Press. Bernini, Lorenzo. 2017. Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory. Trans. Julia Heim. New York: Palgrave. Bishop, Kyle [William]. 2009. Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance. Journal of Popular Film and Television 37 (1): 16–25. ———. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. 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. Boon, Kevin. 2011. The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post-Nuclear Age. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-­ Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 50–60. New  York: Fordham University Press. 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. Castillo, David R., David Schmid, David R.  Reilly, and John Edgar Browning. 2016. Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave. Christie, Deborah. 2011. A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 67–80. New  York: Fordham University Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, loc. 164–600. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle. ———. 2012. Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology). Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23 (3): 397–412. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 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

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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. Jones, Steve. 2011. Porn of the Dead: Necrophilia, Feminism, and Gendering the Undead. In Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, ed. Cory James Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman, loc. 701–1102. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Kee, Chera. 2014. Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys: Toying with Miscegenation in Zombie Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television 42 (4): 176–185. Kincaid, James R. 2004. Producing Erotic Children. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 3–16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leverette, Marc. 2008. The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or, How the (Un)Dead Get Their Groove On. In Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, ed. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette, 185–212. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Kindle. May, Jeff. 2010. Zombie Geographies and the Undead City. Social and Cultural Geography 11 (3): 285–298. Nurse, Angus. 2014. Asserting Law and Order Over the Mindless. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 1399–1620. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Paffenroth, Kim. 2011. Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat. In Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, loc. 390–570. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Riley, Brendan. 2011. Zombie People: The Complicated Nature of Personhood. In “The Walking Dead.” in Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 81–98. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Rushton, Cory James, and Christopher M.  Moreman. 2011. Introduction. In Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, ed. Cory James Rushton and Christopher M.  Moreman, loc. 27–151. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle.

Episodes Referenced “30 Days Without an Accident” (season 4, episode 1, 2013) “Indifference” (season 4, episode 4, 2013) “Infected” (season 4, episode 2, 2013) “Inmates” (season 4, episode 10, 2014) “Internment” (season 4, episode 5, 2013) “Pretty Much Dead Already” (season 2, episode 7, 2011) “Secrets” (season 2, episode 6, 2011) “The Grove” (season 4, episode 14, 2014)

CHAPTER 5

Out of the Barn: Alternative Families and the Undead

Abstract  This chapter explores the incorporation of zombies in The Walking Dead into characters’ domestic or family lives. Jessie emblematically refuses to let go of either Carl or her own zombie-bitten son, and the Governor cohabitates with and accommodates zombie child Penny. Notably, in failures to contain zombie children’s queer threat to reproductive futurism, Penny’s fate in the comics remains unresolved, as does Duane’s, the zombified son with whom Morgan has been living. The Whisperers live with zombies, wear their skins, and no longer abide by conventional sexual morality or nuclear family structure, but Alpha still sends her daughter to live with Rick’s people. Such breakdowns of zombie/human and queer/heteronormative boundaries, along with the repeated transgressions against reproductive futurism, demonstrate heteronormativity’s simultaneous durability and fragility. Keywords  The Walking Dead • Zombie child • Family • Penny • Whisperers In The Walking Dead, viewing zombies as anything like family members is condemned in order to attempt to protect the reproductive futurist model of family. As we have seen, Hershel and Lizzie each, to different extents, accord familial status to zombies, and each meets with forceful resistance. Both versions of Hershel change their perception of their zombie n ­ eighbors © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_5

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and relatives after they are all killed, and Lizzie herself is killed by Carol after stabbing her sister to death in order to change her into a walker. Additionally, as Sophia shows in the TV show, zombie children are especially threatening to the heteronormative order. However, while Hershel locks away zombies like Sophia in hopes of curing or outwaiting the plague of undeath, and Lizzie fails to bring her plans for a (largely adopted) hybrid family of the living and the dead to fruition, other characters actively construct and carry out new ways of living with the undead, incorporating them more closely into family units. “The existence of zombies as an ever-present challenge to societal norms—as well as the struggle to re-establish familial bonds after a traumatic event”—is “a key theme” of The Walking Dead, and some meet these challenges by rewriting societal norms in order to extend familial bonds to zombie relatives, while others refashion the family to more closely resemble the zombie horde (Nurse 2014, loc. 1431).1 Rick’s love interest Jessie and his nemesis the Governor represent examples of the former reaction, while Alpha and her followers, the Whisperers, evince the latter. In all three cases, alternative structures are repeatedly represented as misguided, dangerous, and even, outright, unremittingly evil. Jessie’s experience in the comics with an infected family member is extremely brief, yet symbolically significant. Her experience represents a failure like Hershel’s and Lizzie’s, but it takes place openly and treats a living and a bitten child equally, while graphically reinforcing both the swiftness with which Rick, as the hero-protagonist, stamps out this type of action and also demonstrates the tensions within his commitment to the biological nuclear family. His protection of the child/Child (and the child/Child’s mother) comes into conflict with the preservation of the family unit. Settled in Alexandria, Rick begins to create a new nuclear family with Jessie and her son, Ron. In a variation on Shane’s usurpation of Rick’s place as patriarch, Rick replaces Jessie’s abusive husband, Pete (a relationship that associates her with Carol). Rick hears that Ron has had a mysterious black eye, and Jessie admits that Pete has become occasionally violent toward her, so Rick eventually confronts Pete, punching him when he opens the door to his home and shouting, “Tell me you’re not hurting your family!” (c2:ch13:n75). Rick makes explicit that he is disciplining his inverted double as husband and father when he yells that he is “saving your wife and son!” (c2:ch13:n75). After being beaten by Rick, Pete is made to move into a separate house from his family, losing ownership of property that includes wife and son (in his newly assigned abode, he repeats “not my house” to himself over a page of panels in which he

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upends a coffee table and fixes his attention on a block of kitchen knives [c2:ch13:n77]); and later, he directs an accusation at Rick that closely echoes Shane’s displeasure at Rick’s reclaiming Lori and Carl: “Things were fine before you came—I had a wife—I had a son” (c2:ch13:n77). Notably, despite Pete’s violent behavior, and despite the fact that Rick himself eventually kills Pete, Rick, who argues for holding a funeral, says of the deceased, “I know he was an evil son of a bitch, but Pete was still that boy’s father … and now he’s gone” (c2:ch13:n78). Rick’s musing acknowledges the contradictions in his actions and, by extension, in the idealization of the traditional nuclear family. On the one hand, it is as if Pete’s merely being a (biological) father, head of a family unit, automatically confers a status that mitigates his attacks on that family. On the other hand, attacks on the family, even his own family, require punishment. In Rick’s navigation of these conflicting imperatives, we see the ideal conceptualization of the family promulgated by reproductive futurism collide with the messy reality of an individual family. Rick rapidly assumes Pete’s vacated role, as Jessie and her son come to stay with him and Carl in the wake of Pete’s death. Even as he takes a place in a new nuclear family, however, Rick continues to assert the primacy of his own biological offspring. Jessie tells Rick that he is amazing for helping others, but he casts his actions as ultimately driven by the self-interested preservation of his child (and patriarchal heir): “Everything I’ve done, for the good of my group … has always mostly been done to protect my family. That’s what’s important to me…. But don’t get me wrong, and I’m glad I helped you … but I was doing it to keep my son safe” (c2:ch14:n80). The possibility of creating a child that is biologically both Rick’s and Jessie’s arises when their relationship becomes sexual, after brief resistance by Rick in deference to his dead wife.2 The initiation of a new sexual partnership constitutes, like his confrontations with Pete, another facet of Rick’s endeavoring to uphold the heterosexual reproductive nuclear family: Steve Jones and Shaka McGlotten (2014) argue that human sex within zombie narratives helps to fortify fantasies of future generations: Allegorically, the nuclear family closes ranks and is arrayed against an encroaching horde (of foreigners or queers), and heterosexual propagation is presented as the ultimate goal that might save humanity. On the other hand, zombie procreation represents a powerful alternative to heterosexual breeding, one that de-naturalizes the relationship between heterosexual intercourse and propagation. (loc. 168)

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Viewed through such a lens, Rick and Jessie’s formation of a family and their potentially reproductive sexual encounters attempt to erect a barrier against such disturbing queer challenges to heteronormative primacy. When these excessively, alternatively procreating zombies flood the town through a breach in its walls, Rick proposes that he, Jessie, Ron, Carl, Maggie, and Sophie make a run for safety, but Jessie appeals to reproductive futurism in her objection that they can’t just leave the other residents because there “are families here … children” (c2:ch14:n82). Rick reminds her, however, that there is a hierarchy of families, that the “thing to keep in mind … about other people’s children … they’re not our children” (c2:ch14:n82). The last clause appears in a dramatic close­up of Rick’s partly turned head that occupies three-quarters of the page, emphasizing both his conviction and the ideological centrality of his maxim. He adds in a subsequent panel, “[I]f I have to choose between my child or someone else’s child … I’m going to choose mine every single time” (c2:ch14:n83). This pronouncement is followed by a wordless panel in which Maggie and Jessie, both looking shocked, each clutch a frightened-­looking child to them (Sophia and Ron, respectively). Their reaction does foreground one of the contradictions within reproductive futurism. Like the tensions exposed in his need to weigh Pete’s role as patriarch against his aggression toward his family, Rick’s choice here betrays the similar tension between protecting the future of one’s own family and protecting the future of the group. Jessie agrees to Rick’s plan, telling him, “I’d follow you anywhere” and embracing him in the next, dialogue-free panel, all of which nudges the reader toward accepting his stance (c2:ch14:n83).3 Rick is shortly forced to put his proclamations into practice, as Ron gets scared in the midst of a mob of zombies, attracts their attention with his voice, and is grabbed and bitten. Rick tries to convince Jessie to forsake her soon-to-be-zombie son: “You have to leave him! There’s nothing we can do now! Let go of his hand!” She refuses, exclaiming, “I can’t leave him!” before she too is bitten (c2:ch14:n83). Infected now herself, she will not release either Ron’s hand or Carl’s, and implores Rick not to forsake his adopted family members. As Rick’s biological son, Carl’s appeal (“Dad—she won’t let go!”) unsurprisingly carries more weight, and as Jessie, firmly in the clutches of the undead, screams “Don’t—leave—us—!” Rick uses a hatchet to chop off her hand at the wrist in order to release Carl (c2:ch14:n83). The amputation requires two blows over two panels, the second a close-up of a hatchet strike, followed by a panel in which we see Jessie being engulfed by—absorbed into—the

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zombie horde. Rick here violently separates himself and his son, literally cutting off the connection, from a mother who refuses to relinquish a child who will presently become a zombie, moving into a threatening queer state of negation. However, it also represents the preservation of Rick’s own biological family at the expense of the other family units within the group. Bishop writes of this scene that Rick’s “instinct to protect himself and his son at all costs has destroyed an entire family, a family that had trusted him with their safety, including a woman who had come to love him” (85). Rick’s decisions demonstrate the negative effects of the possessive model of family inherent in reproductive futurism, which here force a choice between biological and chosen family members. As biological family can be seen in some ways as more purely belonging to Rick, he acts according to that hierarchy. While Jessie’s refusal to abandon her bitten son, who thus occupies a state between human and zombie, is exceedingly short-lived, the Governor and Morgan each live with an undead child for an extended period of time—the Governor with Penny, who is his niece in the comics and his daughter in the television version, and Morgan with his son, Duane. Both men treat these zombie children as if they possessed some subjective continuity with their living selves and adapt their domestic life to them, incorporating into their queered hybrid families (the symbol of) their own negation. These reconfigurations of the boundaries of the family are presented as part of what marks Morgan as mentally unstable (at the time) and the Governor as evil, and correspondingly, these hybrid families must be, ideally, extirpated, or at least broken up. They are thereby contained in the manner of the other instances of transgressively inclusive handling of zombies that we have so far examined, yet, in some aspects, not contained as completely as one would expect. Acceptance by the living of a zombie child such as Penny or Duane subverts the ideological underpinnings of the heteronormative reproductive family. Living children themselves “are queer. Their sexual behavior and their sexual knowledge are subjected to an unusually intense normalizing surveillance, discipline, and repression of the sort familiar to any oppressed sexual minority” (Hanson 2004, 110). The child thus “becomes the bearer of heteronormativity, appearing to render ideology invisible” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, xiii). Zombie children markedly compound the child’s erotic unruliness and its resistance to discipline and repression. Trevor Grizzell (2014) enumerates the ways in which the zombie child operates as a deeply fundamental menace to dominant sociosexual norms:

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[T]he zombie child embodies desire, chaos, and the beginning of a radically new form of being. At every point that the social order’s Child is deployed to cover up realities of society or individual behaviors, the zombie child shows its instabilities. While Edelman’s Child lacks desire or passion, the zombie child is id uncompromised. Where Edelman’s Child is meant to remain a symbol for all that is pure, the zombie child destabilizes notions of children as pure and innocent, becoming a fully (re)productive subject …. When Edelman’s Child gets trotted out whenever the social order is being threatened in order to buttress a flailing social order, the zombie child serves as a marker of a radically different (and productive rather than reproductive) future. (loc. 2325)

Within the dominant images and stories of childhood in Western cultural discourse, the queerness of children exists always under “narrative pressure on producing the proper ending of the story (the heterosexual adult)” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, xiv), an ending decisively foreclosed by the zombie child. While Hershel preserves a separation from the zombies, including, in the TV show, the child Sophia, by restricting them to his barn while he attempts to reverse or outwait their altered state, the Governor adapts his own familial relationship to accommodate the changed Penny. He brings the anti-futurist, anti-Child-child, and her illusion-­shattering drives directly into the center of his domestic life. In the comics, we first see Penny following a page on which the Governor tells two running boys to slow down and listen to their mother and which includes a panel of him walking away from the three posed as a contented family unit, mother’s arms on children’s shoulders. The final panel on that page depicts the Governor entering his home while apologizing to someone unseen for being out late. When readers turn the page, they are greeted with a large panel of zombie-Penny leaping at him, its shock-value enhanced by the book’s layout and Penny’s introduction meant to be juxtaposed to living family on the recto. He corrects his niece’s poor manners by striking her and reprimanding her, “Behave yourself ” (c1:ch5:n29); and the next, small panel features a close-up of Penny’s face looking oddly chastened—it would be hard to tell that she is a zombie except for some sores or decay at the corner of her mouth and the ­suggestion of an unhealthy pallor in the slightly darker coloring of her flesh. That same suggestion of a tenuous boundary between her living and dead forms underlies his admonishing her, “I raised you better than this” (c1:ch5:n29).4 In a parody of convincing a living child to eat its broccoli,

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he returns a knocked-over bucket of human meat to her, and she spits out what she eats from it (because it has spoiled). Her uncle’s reaction foregrounds his acceptance of her alternative state of being: “Even fresh, I don’t see how you eat that stuff, really. I tried it—it’s horrible. May taste different raw. But I’m not going to try it raw” (c1:ch5:n29). The Governor reduces Penny’s consumption of human flesh to something on the level of a taste preference, like a vegetarian shaking his head at a family member who loves bacon cheeseburgers (another variety, to be fair, of dead flesh). He draws attention to the porous borders of zombiehood by having eaten as Penny eats, thereby displaying one of primary identifying characteristics of the undead. His behavior does not signify mere denial of the destabilization of the social order inherent in zombie children because he is adapting to her different way of existing and incorporating that into his own, making her family without eliding her difference. We later see additional evidence of the Governor’s commitment to being a good caretaker for his zombie niece, again through a parodic image of the ritual of feeding a living child (such feeding here stripped of its concealing rituals, exposing the child’s hunger as mere drive). He is down on his hands and knees, trying to cajole Penny to eat a foot that “was walking not two hours ago.” “It’s not that bad and it’s only going to get worse. You’ve got to eat now. C’mon,” he wheedles (c1:ch6:n32). It is at this point that Michonne breaks in, tussles with him, bites him (another small blurring of the line between zombie and human that Penny accomplishes by her very existence), and knocks him unconscious, all while Penny remains unhelpfully focused on her bucket of edible remains. When the Governor revives, Michonne tells him, “Don’t worry about the little girl—I put her in the back room—where you had all this junk. What are you doing—building a cage for your little—sex slave? Why do you have her here anyway?” (c1:ch6:n33). Her assumption that Penny must be some sort of sex slave underscores just how unthinkable it would be that Penny is a family member and, even more unthinkably, is treated as such.5 Furthermore, her reaction is ironic given that, as Brendan Riley (2011) sees it, Michonne herself has “complicated[d] the notion that zombies are empty shells operating on the hunger instinct alone” and helped to demonstrate that they can be “sated and even trained” by leashing and t­ raveling with her zombified boyfriend and his brother, whose jaws she had removed and whom she says had ceased to attack her (91). When two men break in to rescue the Governor, whom Michonne is brutally torturing, Penny escapes, leading the men to think that she is “outside the safe zone” and

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so “ain’t got a chance” (c1:ch8:n43). Their reaction, like Michonne’s, points to the gulf between how the Governor perceives Penny and how most other living people perceive her. This difference is reinforced when Penny does in fact return, and she tries to bite one of the men. As he is about to shoot her, the Governor saves her, managing to say, despite his grotesque and extensive mutilations: “Don’t touch—don’t fucking touch her—don’t—” (c1:ch8:n43). Were Penny a living child, his effort to preserve her life, even as his own is in danger, would demonstrate his nobility of character; as she is a zombie—a danger, both internal and external, to the nuclear family and the reproductive social order—it merely further marks him as a madman. The comics further undermine any positive view that readers might have of the Governor’s caring for Penny by introducing an erotic dimension. Michonne’s calling Penny a sex slave may be inaccurate, but it does prefigure a moment that carries the suggestion of incest between the Governor and his zombie-child charge. After the incidents with Michonne, he uses pliers to extract Penny’s teeth, for, as he says, “the good of our relationship” (c1:ch8:n43). Then he instructs her: “Give Daddy a kiss” (c1:ch8:n43). As he is not, in fact, her father, this statement becomes unavoidably sexualized, even if we grant that he has assumed the role of a father to her. This sexual undertone is confirmed in the full-page close-up of the kiss itself, depicting both characters with their eyes closed and their mouths open and about to meet (see Fig. 5.1). Were, say, Rick and Lori drawn in this pose, it would be clear that they were lovers. A series of small panels follow this splash page, showing their mouths locked, then showing the Governor pulling away with fluid connecting their faces, and then the Governor vomiting. The unknown fluid (blood and/or saliva?) provides an image of the distastefulness of their linkage, the unacceptability of their familial relationship within the dominant order. When the Governor vomits after the kiss, he apologizes: “Oh, honey … I’m sorry. Don’t think anything of it. I’m sure—with time, I’ll get used to the taste” (c1:ch8:n43). His dialogue here, like the illustration of him about to kiss Penny, could just as easily be read as occurring between lovers as it could between an adult relative and a child; and all of these implications of incest tie the Governor’s accepting behavior toward his child zombie relative to incest’s immoral, impermissible relationship model. Judith Butler (1999) describes (with some critiques) how, for Lacan, the prohibition against incest “initiates the structures of kinship,” as well as brings a coherent subject into being (55, 57). It is prohibition that

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Fig. 5.1  The Governor kisses Penny

regulates gendered identity and the “law of heterosexual desire” in a process that seeks to conceal itself and actually produces what it claims only to regulate (80, 82). The taboo against incest, along with the taboo against homosexuality, works to simultaneously produce and sanction heterosexuality and the distinctions between the culturally speakable and unspeakable (or the thinkable and unthinkable) (83–84). The unthinkable still exists within culture but is occluded specifically within dominant culture (99), and while the incest taboo, which Butler notes can and should be histori-

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cized, produces heterosexuality and discrete gender identity, it does so by also producing (and denying) transgressive homosexuality (97–98, 93). Like the potential zombie within every human, the queer is inextricable from the heteronormative. An “intelligible conception of homosexuality” must first be produced if it is to be repressed, and heterosexuality requires the repression of homosexuality in order to “remain intact as a distinct social form” (98). The incest taboo, then, is fundamental to heteronormativity, and incest undermines the very foundations of the traditional family. Incest with a zombie child compounds such violation, constituting a nonreproductive heterosexuality with a disturbingly asexually reproductive minor. With zombies, the “queer act of (re)production is not limited due to qualities of sex, gender, or even species as a standard sexual reproduction is; zombification as a process knows few limits other than necessitating a subject for infection” (Grizzell 2014, loc. 2286). That process is additionally complicated in The Walking Dead by the fact that the living already carry the infection, removing yet another of these few limits. The incest taboo also “ceases to be meaningful in a system in which children may (re)produce with parents or siblings may infect siblings with no extraneous consequences of consanguinity” (Grizzell 2014, loc. 2286). In eradicating the incest taboo, zombification demolishes a basic tenet that determines the shape of the conventional family. Therefore, the suggestions of incest that the comics introduce regarding the Governor’s relationship with Penny both point to another way in which zombies negate the order established by reproductive futurism and work to prevent any sympathetic response to the Governor’s queered family unit. Our final glimpse of Penny perhaps then complicates this preventative work. Before he leaves home for what will be the final time, the Governor attempts to ensure that she will be well taken care of and that anyone who dies will be fed to her. He bends down to her level, letting her know that he will be “back soon,” that she should not worry, and that she should “be good for Uncle Bob” (c1:ch:n43). He chooses to interpret her outstretched hands as a gesture of affection rather than of murderous intent, and reacts with “I know—I love you, too” (c1:ch8:n43). Most s­ ignificantly, he double-checks that “Uncle Bob” can perform what is expected of him, asking, “You sure you’re going to be able to do this? I’m serious—she means a lot to me” (c1:ch8:n43). While the reaction of the Governor’s men to Penny’s earlier escape (that she “ain’t got a chance”) may not bode well for her future, Bob’s response here that he is sober now and up

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to the task leaves open at least the possibility that Penny will indeed continue to be taken care of by a new “uncle,” and that there will continue to exist a space for this hybrid family. While the comics leave Penny’s story unresolved, there is no question as to the decisive containment of the Governor. He leaves Penny to assault Rick’s group in the prison, where he dies because Lilly holds him responsible for her killing Lori and Judith during the attack, calling him a “monster” (associating him with the zombies) and shrieking, “A baby! You made me kill a fucking baby!” (c1:ch8:n48). Lilly blames the Governor for the death of a Child, the linchpin of reproductive futurist ideology, and he has further transgressed by embracing a zombie child while causing the death of a living infant. His symbolic punishment for these decisions is delivered by Lilly shooting him in the back of the head and kicking his falling corpse into a mass of zombies to be consumed in a variation of his own feeding of Penny. In the television series, Penny dies, explicitly eliminating the threats that she poses as a zombie child. The Governor’s radical reconfiguration of the family resists both reproductive futurism and an easy division between the human/self and zombie/Other, embracing the “ontological liminality” that Cohen (1996) assigns to the monster (loc. 226). Penny’s monstrous liminality, especially in the context of the Governor’s acceptance of her as an undead family member, unsettles the borders of the family, of the subject, and even of death, and the TV show contains that disruption more aggressively than do the comics. Prior to her elimination, Penny’s relationship with the Governor (again, her father rather than uncle in the TV version) plays out similarly to its counterpart in the comics. We witness various efforts by the Governor to engage with Penny as if she were a living child. When she first appears, he is calmly brushing her hair until she becomes restless and he has to secure the arms of her straitjacket and tell her it is “nap time.” He reassures the restrained zombie (“Daddy loves you so much. You know that, right?”), dandles her, and kisses the cloth bag that he has put over her head (“Say the Word”). The scene ends with him spying, through the blinds, Michonne in the street looking up at his window, a staging that positions Michonne as potentially discovering evidence of his evil. The shots are followed by the opening title sequence, and then by a cut to a close-up of newborn Judith, creating a similar juxtaposition as in Penny’s first appearance in the comics of a zombie child to a living child. It later turns out the Michonne did not see Penny from the street, and she only sees Penny’s name on a list in a note-

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book by the time she confronts the Governor with the fact that she knows about Penny. When he says that if she knows about Penny, then she knows “that I loved her,” Michonne retorts, “Bet you say that about all the girls” (“Made to Suffer”). This quip both echoes Michonne’s calling Penny a sex slave in the comics and is as close as the TV show comes to suggesting any sort of sexual aspect to the relationship between Penny and the show’s more complexly sympathetic Governor. Arguably, some of that sympathy derives from how he is shown interacting with Penny. Viewers do not watch him, for example, feeding her a fresh foot. While he takes the reasonable precautions of a straitjacket and cage, he also puts ribbons in her hair, sings to her, and calls her “Baby” (see Fig.  5.2). The singing appears to calm her, but the Governor and audience realize that her food bucket is actually holding her attention, and the Governor becomes upset when she won’t look at him. Michonne ultimately discovers Penny and mistakes her for a living child because of the bag over her head, telling her, “It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you” (“Made to Suffer”). She quickly realizes her error and is about to run Penny through with her sword when the Governor enters and yells, “It’s me you want. There’s no need for her to suffer” (“Made to Suffer”). He lays down his gun, pleading, with shaking hands, “Don’t hurt my little girl” (“Made to Suffer”). Unfortunately for his hybrid family, he manages no more than to produce a wondering look on Michonne’s face before she stabs Penny through the head. The Governor weeps as he cradles Penny’s body, and Michonne is only prevented from killing him during the fight

Fig. 5.2  The Governor with a beribboned Penny

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that ensues by the arrival of Andrea, who dies later in the series as a punishment for her romantic interest in this character whose parenting his undead daughter defies the accepted purpose of romantic heterosexual relationships. Here, unlike in the comics, the Governor’s loss of Penny coincides with the loss of his eye, signifying a change in his outlook, a shift into a deeper immorality for which his opportunity for redemption will come through acting as father to a living child (see Chap. 2). Morgan’s living with his zombified son, Duane, is in some ways more transgressive than the Governor’s relationship with Penny, since Morgan is represented more sympathetically for very similar behavior. When Rick pays the man he met at the outset of his journey a visit with Carl and Abraham, he discovers immediately that Morgan has had Duane chained up in his home for the three months or more since Duane was bitten and turned. (While the comics do not specify who bit Duane, in the TV version he becomes infected when he fails to reject and eliminate a zombie family member, his mother, who bites him.) Rick’s gaze alights on scattered bones next to Duane’s sneaker-clad foot, and Morgan admits to him that he has fed four men and a “couple dogs” to his son (c2:ch10:n58). He cannot even definitively say that his murders were justified: “I could have been defending myself. It could have been self-defense. Could have been … I didn’t know what else to do. He was my son, Rick” (c2:ch10:n58). While we get the impression that the Governor funnels parts to Penny of people he would have killed or had killed anyway for various reasons, Morgan, it is implied, kills specifically to care for his zombie child and to strengthen their familial bond. Duane, he says, “would look at me differently after—like he did before—like he knew me. I just wanted that. I’m his father … I wanted him to act like he knew who I was” (c1:ch10:n58). In addition, after Rick gives him a speech, similar to how he argued with Hershel on his farm, about how zombie-Duane is not really his son and leaves Morgan in privacy to euthanize Duane, Morgan instead uses the gun Rick gave him to break Duane’s chain and then misleads the group about what happened, saying only, “It’s done” (c2:ch10:n58). Morgan then joins the group, under Rick’s rationale that everyone does “terrible things for the ones we love” (c2:ch10:n58). Morgan, then, murders for and fails to reject his zombie son (who stands outside staring after the group’s departing car in the final panel in which he appears), lies about it, and escapes any direct punishment, making up a member of Rick’s community for around 25 further issues before his own death. As with Penny, the comics thus, unlike the TV show, do not pretend to entirely foreclose

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the threat introduced by zombie children. If anything, Morgan presents more of a threat to the dominant order than the Governor does. While Morgan is clearly troubled by his experiences, he still convinces the gatekeepers of the dominant order to accept him without (though they don’t know this) entirely repudiating his undead family. Jessie, the Governor, and Morgan, to differing extents, refuse to excise zombie children from their family units. The comics provide one final example, however, of refiguring family and social structure that is in some ways more far-reaching than any that those three individuals enact. The survivors meet a group called the Whisperers, who have concluded that embracing their animal nature and living alongside hordes of zombies is the most efficient way to survive. In order to accomplish this, they have largely abandoned individual names, basically dissolved the family unit, and turned to living nomadically while wearing suits and masks of zombie skin to disguise them in the midst of the undead. The Whisperers’ social organization radically reduces the difference between human and zombie while participating (to a lesser degree than the zombies themselves) in the negation of individual identity that is otherwise restricted to the zombie Other. Their arrangement, like the Governor’s, signals a shift in what it means to be human that places their way of life comfortably outside the sphere of what a “rational” person (a person acting within the bounds set by reproductive futurism) would choose. Members of Rick’s network initially see a complete absence of difference between the Whisperers and the undead, believing in one of their first encounters the Whisperers to be zombies until they realize that these “zombies” are attacking them with knives. Even this is not enough to completely disrupt their categorization since, as one says, “[W]e’ve seen them hold tools before” (c3:ch22:n132). It is the additional fact that these zombies can speak (or, as one Whisperer says, “We whisper and the dead don’t mind”) that causes survivor Dante to investigate more closely (c3:ch22:n132). The presentation of his discovery that these zombies are actually people wearing the skin of the dead gives it immense importance: it unfolds over five mostly wordless pages in which he examines the corpses of some Whisperers, and one severed head in particular with its mask stitched closed at the rear, as his comprehension dawns. Details soon emerge about how this extremely territorial group organizes itself and its practices. Dante is told that the Whisperers’ numbers are “[m]any” (one survivor thinks thousands) and that they will now attempt to learn about his “people” because they “came into our land. Killed our

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kind” (c3:ch23:n133). The use of “kind” here creates a separation that echoes the (porous) separation between human and zombie. They see themselves as apart from other groups of survivors in the same way that most survivors see themselves as separate from zombies. None of these distinctions—human/zombie, Whisperer/zombie, Whisperer/other humans—however, is absolute. For instance, 16-year-old Whisperer Lydia, later taken prisoner, elaborates on their way of life during her captivity: “The skin makes the dead leave us alone. We travel with them. They protect us … and we protect them” (c3:ch23:n135).6 They have, in other words, fundamentally incorporated the undead into their social structure, adjusting it to facilitate communal existence with zombies, which, she says, “is all that is left for us in this world. For us to live and them to not. We live together or we don’t live at all” (c3:ch23:n135). In one example of just how closely they “live together,” the Whisperers’ leader and Lydia’s mother, Alpha, shows Rick an enormous horde of zombies with her “people among them, steering them” (c3:ch24:144). The adjustments that enable this communality include dismantling the family and removing, at least in theory, the Child from its position of centrality. Their basic social unit is not the nuclear family but something larger and not bounded by biological or romantic relationships. Lydia explains, “We never split up into anything less than a small group. Safety in numbers. Every now and then we’ll travel in twos … but even then we have the dead with us. They protect us. And they’re … I don’t know … comforting” (c3:ch23:n136). Habituated to and drawing comfort from living in proximity to zombies, she instead fears solitude. As she describes the Whisperers’ communal living, tears stream down her face, and she admits that she has never “been alone” before, as she is in the cell where she is being kept (c3:ch23:n136). Additionally, group life alongside the undead militates against the privileged status of children found in heteronormative social organization. Jesus questions Lydia on how she came to be captured: “Your group sends out children?” She responds, “There are no children anymore. Childhood was always a myth brought about by the illusion of safety” (c3:ch23:n135). Alpha similarly associates childhood with mythologizing an outdated ­paradigm, calling Rick’s people “children playing a game of make believe. You’ve built a shrine to a long dead world” (c3:ch24:n144). (Rick’s lack of immediate reaction—a panel showing the side of his face and a speech bubble containing only ellipses—intriguingly hints that he sees some merit in her criticism, although he pushes back forcefully against her views on the following page.) While Lydia at first defends her way of life to her

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interrogators, it is visually associated with her cell (invoking a lack of individual freedom), where she is usually drawn in darkness, often with a completely black background (invoking a lack of enlightenment). Thus, after Carl eventually negotiates her release, the doorway through which he leads her is a rectangle of pure white surrounded by a pure black background; in other words, he transports her out of the darkness of her Whisperer ideology, over a threshold, and into the light of Rick’s burgeoning new civilization (which primarily reproduces the old reproductive futurist one). The Whisperers’ thoroughgoing social reformulation extends to taboos around sexuality, although the results are far from progressive, since this type of fundamental restructuring must be portrayed as unthinkable. Dante sums up this viewpoint, commenting on the Whisperers, “It’s almost like they’re not human. Hearing them talk to each other … Hearing the way they think … It’s unnatural” (c3:ch23:n143). Unnatural is of course a favorite term for non-heteronormative practices, and Lydia’s affection for Carl sets up a contrast between what her people and his regard as natural. After she is released from her cell, she seduces Carl (fittingly, in a grassy natural area) and informs him afterward that it was “nice,” as opposed to her typical sexual encounters, which would occur even when she “wouldn’t want to” (c3:ch23:n138). In resistance to Carl’s pronouncement that such encounters are called rape, Lydia appeals to a natural order: “It’s not rape … that’s … we don’t recognize that anymore …. It’s a word we made up to convince us we’re not animals” (c3:ch23:n138). Alpha puts forth much the same claim when Carl protests to Rick that Lydia’s “mother lets” men have sex with Lydia, asserting that the act is “a part of nature far older than that terrifying word” rape (c3:ch24:n144). If the undead function in part as models for the Whisperers, and if “the cooperativeness of the living dead and … their seeking of flesh can be interpreted as expressions of ordinary but repressed human desires suddenly released from social controls like convention, competition, property and so on” (Smith 2015, loc. 770), then the Whisperers perversely transform the queer liberatory potential of the ­loosening of controls and reduction of competition associated with sexual desire into merely another form of oppression, thereby framing such an exercise as undesirable.7 Reinforcing this framing is the fact that the Whisperers, or at least Lydia and Alpha, incompletely adhere to their own (contradictory) social principles. A panel focusing on Alpha when she arrives to retrieve Lydia from

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Rick’s community encapsulates this tension. The illustration, which takes up two-thirds of the page, depicts Alpha in the midst of pulling her dead skin mask up and off of her head while announcing, “We only want one thing from you … my daughter” (c3:ch23:n138). The effect of that frozen moment with the zombie skin partially removed, in combination with the stated desire to recover a family member, implies that a person who operates under traditional guidelines, including as a mother, continues to exist beneath the outward “zombie” that repudiates the family and the child. The rejection of individuality that accompanies the rejection of family is shown to be similarly strained. When Lydia agrees to return to her people, she reverts to the language of the family: “I’m sorry Mom. Thanks for coming to get me” (c3:ch23:n138). “Mom” immediately disowns this role, correcting Lydia, “You call me Alpha, like all the rest” (c3:ch23:n138). In the panel containing this exchange, Lydia’s arms are outstretched toward Alpha, who is turned away from her, oriented toward Whisperers in the right of the frame, who of course look like zombies, and away from the clear space on the left that is the direction of the settlement that Lydia came from. Later, after Carl has followed Lydia, who has rejoined the larger Whisperer group with her mother, she has a similar difficulty following the strictures of their communalism in answering his question about why no one “calls anyone by name here” (c3:ch24:n142). She attempts to again position their social codes as natural, but falters: “We don’t have names. We don’t use them anyway. My moth—Alpha … our leader. She says we don’t need them …. Animals don’t have names” (c3:ch24:n142).8 The comparison to animals speaks to the Whisperers’ negation—much the same as zombies’ negation—of the illusions that disguise and rules that organize “animal” drives in the living. In Lydia’s continued reversion to individual names (she has also yelled “Joshua” at a Whisperer who is killed by Jesus in the fight after which she is captured) and family roles as identifiers, the narrative also privileges those social modes as powerful and shows them to be a deep-rooted schema that she must continually struggle to ignore. Alpha, too, and perhaps more importantly, struggles to abide by the dissolution of the family, and both she and her daughter ultimately capitulate to the traditional norms associated with Rick’s community. As Carl snarls to Alpha in angry close-up, “You can call yourself whatever you want. You’re still her mother” (c3:ch24:n142). And indeed, even this savagely atavistic Whisperer, in the end, upholds the dominance of reproductive futurism and the Child. Despite Alpha’s stated willingness to murder everyone in Rick’s settlement, her condoning of unconditional sexual

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access to Lydia, and her characterization of maternal bonds as a weakness, ultimately, she cannot avoid acting as a traditional, loving mother, covertly handing off her daughter to Rick. The reader witnesses the process leading up to that decision, which highlights through the difficulty that Alpha has in making it the power of the maternal role as normatively conceived. Lydia, an adolescent who has, multiple times by different men, been what dominant ethical norms would identify as raped, occupies a liminal space between a sexually active heterosexual adult and a frighteningly reproductive zombie child, and complains that “my own mother refuses to protect me” (c3:ch24:n144). Alpha rebuffs her, saying that “emotion is a weakness,” but she is shown struggling with emotion over the next several panels, during which Lydia calls her “Mom” questioningly and places a hand on her back (c3:ch24:n144). This gesture is followed by a small panel containing just Alpha’s head and shoulders, a bright stream of tears on her otherwise shadowed face, itself followed by a page-wide panel of her lashing out and hitting Lydia. On the next page, with the background-­ free focus solely on her and Rick, she grips Rick by the shirt, tears still streaming, and abjures her own ideology for the sake of her child: “I can’t offer my daughter the life she needs. Not here. Not safely. But you can” (c3:ch24:n144). She then notifies Lydia that she must leave the Whisperers because she is “weak and … long[s] for the old ways, the broken ways” (c3:ch24:n144). But the reader knows that this reasoning is a façade, and that Alpha is turning over her daughter precisely to and because of these old ways. Alpha has rejected a permanent home, the nuclear family, monogamy and female sexual autonomy, leaving her and her people unsettlingly similar to the zombies whose skins they wear, yet she still acts according to “the old ways” that she claims to reject, succumbing finally to the seemingly unshakeable dominance of the Child. In The Walking Dead, attempts to make a new world, and specifically a new concept of family, are consistently presented as at best misguided and at worst insane and a product of larger evil. Most survivors insist on the absolute difference between human and zombie as a means of preserving reproductive futurism, and those who would adapt to rather than purge zombie children or reengineer the entirety of sociosexual organization must themselves die, be labeled inhuman, or both. Ironically, however, the “antagonistic split between the social order and the other is already incorporated within the ‘normal’ order of things vis-à-vis the zombie virus” (Boehm 2014, loc. 2769). Beyond, then, the failures to contain the zombie children Penny and Duane in the comics, the exclusion of the undead

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Other and its queer force, while largely successful, has no way to remove perhaps its greatest threat: that the very people who make up the social order are, in an inversion of the Whisperers, all zombies masquerading temporarily in suits of human skin. The breakdown of conceptualized differences between the undead and living and the queer and the normative individual and family, along with the repeated instances of transgression against reproductive futurism, demonstrates, simultaneously and paradoxically, the durability and the fragility of heteronormativity. It is powerful and consistently inspires forceful defense, but it consistently requires forceful defense to maintain its power.

Notes 1. One might compare Nurse’s reading here of The Walking Dead with Cassie Ozog’s (2013) reading of the 2009 film Zombieland, in which “the zombies, who have shattered the long-held traditions of our society, have become emblematic of the changing social tides wherein traditional family spheres have fragmented, allowing for new family shapes and processes to emerge” and the survival of the protagonists requires that they accept “each other as new family and let go of the old world rules which can no longer govern them” (134, 138). I propose this juxtaposition, which points to a recurring concern in zombie narratives, with the caveats that the film’s family shapes are not as radically new as Ozog implies and that they never so much as hint at thinking of including the undead. One might also compare 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, which ends with protagonist Shaun forming what could be considered a family with his girlfriend Liz and Shaun’s now undead friend Ed, Liz’s former homosocial rival for Shaun. Bishop (2015) argues that the hero finding “purpose, stability, and social inclusion by establishing a traditional family structure” is the “central defining feature” of zombie comedies (47). 2. Viewed through the lens of dominant sexual morality, the speed at which Jessie begins a sexual relationship with Rick can be seen as demonstrating a level of neediness (Carol is characterized similarly in the comics) and insufficient adherence to traditional heteronorms. 3. The fact that Maggie remains behind with Sophia does not necessarily undermine Rick because she does so out of the belief that she and Sophia are not fast enough to make it rather than out of any repudiation of Rick’s statements on progeny. 4. He does not treat zombies outside his family this well, using them in fights for public entertainment and keeping severed zombie heads in aquariums in his domicile.

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5. Her reaction perhaps also partakes in the American cultural assumption that a lone man with a child must be a pedophile. Canavan (2010) sides with Michonne by referring in passing to the Governor’s “sexualized relationship with a zombified young girl he claims was once his daughter” (444; emphasis mine). 6. Although they live with and wear the skins of zombies, they do not go quite so far as the Governor did at least once and eat human flesh, an idea that Lydia calls “[g]ross” (c3:ch23:n137). 7. In contrast to Smith’s perception of zombie collectivity, Gordon Coonfield (2013) regards them as “a perfectly dehumanized mass unburdened by either individuality or collectivity” (7). I would suggest a position closer to Scott Kenemore’s (2011), who observes in arguing that the Walking Dead comics demonstrate that humans need to become more like the superior zombies that zombies “naturally work with other zombies around them” and that there may be “no evidence … of a conscious decision to employ teamwork, but it has largely the same effect” (189). While the living dead may not actively cooperate, they also do not place restrictions on other individuals of their kind, including and maybe especially reproductive restrictions. 8. Cf. Lizzie’s emphasis on names as conferring personhood, discussed in Chap. 4.

References Bishop, Kyle [William]. 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. 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. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition. New  York: Routledge. Canavan, Gerry. 2010. ‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative. Extrapolation 51 (3): 431–453. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, loc. 164–600. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle. Coonfield, Gordon. 2013. Perfect Strangers: The Zombie Imaginary and the Logic of Representation. In Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means, ed. Murali Balaji, 2–17. Lanham: Lexington Books. Kindle.

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Grizzell, Trevor. 2014. Re-Animating the Social Order: Zombies and Queer Failure. In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 2217–2516. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Hanson, Ellis. 2004. Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 107–136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Steve, and Shaka McGlotten. 2014. Introduction. In Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, loc. 37–340. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Kenemore, Scott. 2011. A Zombie Among Men: Rick Grimes and the Lessons of Undeadness. In Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 185–198. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Nurse, Angus. 2014. Asserting Law and Order Over the Mindless. In “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human, ed. Dawn Keetley, loc. 1399–1620. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Ozog, Cassie. 2013. Zombies and the Modern American Family: Surviving the Destruction of Traditional Society in Zombieland. In Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means, ed. Murali Balaji, 127–140. Lanham: Lexington Books. Kindle. Riley, Brendan. 2011. Zombie People: The Complicated Nature of Personhood. In “The Walking Dead.” in Triumph of the Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder, 81–98. Dallas: Smart Pop. Kindle. Smith, Phil. 2015. The Footbook of Zombie Walking: How to Be More Than a Survivor in an Apocalypse. Axminster: Triarchy Press. Kindle.

Episodes Referenced “Made to Suffer” (season 3, episode 8, 2012) “Say the Word” (season 3, episode 5, 2012)

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: A Terminus

Abstract  Rick Grimes’s semi-successful defense of the nuclear family is emblematic of how The Walking Dead represents struggles around reproductive futurism. The franchise presents a variety of queer alternatives to the heteronormative order, and in presenting the resistance to these alternatives, it also presents the contradictions within and damage from the traditional, monogamous, possessive sexual-familial model, helping us to consider the struggle of queer American families. Zombies (always already or potentially us) are oppositional to reproductive futurism and represent queer potentialities, and the containment of queerness invites denaturalizing consideration of its mechanisms. This containment sometimes fails, and until the conclusion of The Walking Dead, its completion remains deferred. In fact, the TV show has recently killed Carl, the ideological impact of which is for now unknown. Keywords  The Walking Dead • Nuclear family • Heteronormativity • Zombies • Queer A popular observation circulates among fans of The Walking Dead that the TV show primarily portrays Rick as a hero doing what needs to be done despite his actually being a terrible leader who travels around bringing devastation to previously functioning communities. Rick similarly acts as a semi-successful defender of the monogamous patriarchal family, doing his © The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_6

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best but not always achieving his aims. In this way, he might be seen as emblematic of how the TV show and comics as a whole present sexual politics, particularly struggles around reproductive futurism. Characters in The Walking Dead continually imagine or enact transgressions against reproductive futurism, which others attempt to, and often but not always manage to, contain. Reproductive futurism maintains its supremacy in The Walking Dead’s postapocalypse: it has supporters even within the all-­ female community at Oceanside introduced in season 7 of the TV show. Even after Rick’s group has attacked their settlement, Oceansider Cyndie argues, in opposition to her grandmother, for joining his planned war on the Saviors: the teenage child siding with the father against the woman past reproductive age. However, the franchise’s portrayal of its universe also shows that heteronormativity depends on a strict rhetorical and conceptual framework, enforced sometimes with physical violence, to remain dominant. When, in the comics, Rick’s “actions shockingly come to resemble those of the zombies themselves,” and he bites out a man’s throat to save Carl, he “wonders out loud if he’s even human any more, but asserts he’s still willing to do anything to protect his son” (Bishop 2015, 81). The ends of the heteronormative order justify the means, but those means can also threaten to unfix the boundaries that they are supposed to preserve. As a whole, The Walking Dead presents a variety of alternatives to the heterosexual, reproductive futurist family—Carol’s desire for a polyamorous marriage; Hershel and Lizzie’s conferral of personhood on zombies (particularly relatives), those Othered figures of anti-­ futurist sinthomosexuality; the Governor’s and Morgan’s cohabitation with zombie children; the Whisperers’ disintegration of the very idea of the nuclear family—and in presenting the resistance to these alternatives, it also presents the contradictions within and damaging effects of the traditional, monogamous, possessive sexual-familial model most fully expressed in the Rick–Shane–Lori triangle. In doing so, it both reflects and allows readers and viewers to think about the ongoing struggle of queer families in contemporary American culture. Simultaneously, it encourages us, as viewers and readers, to think at a structural level, to conceptualize these struggles not as specific to individuals but as endemic to a system of social and sexual organization that functions foremost to preserve its own status quo. Such thinking will better allow us to answer Halberstam’s call for “new languages of desire, embodiment, and the social relations between reproductive and nonreproductive bodies” in a time when reproductive technologies and “new

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rationales for nonreproductive behavior” are contributing to the slow and precarious progress against reproductive futurism (Halberstam 2011, loc. 733). Nontraditional arrangements have gained greater social and sometimes legal acceptance in the United States, although even these legal advances have fallen under renewed attack. The reluctance displayed in The Walking Dead to fully embrace such alternatives even at the end of the world demonstrates both how entrenched the dominant paradigms still are and how much work remains to be done to open up new social spaces and models. Although, as Robin Wood (1998) admits, “it is difficult to conceive of ways of human relating that would totally exclude all possible concepts of ‘marriage’ (not necessarily permanent, heterosexual, or monogamous) and ‘family’ (not necessarily biological or indissoluble, and certainly not ‘nuclear’),” that does not mean that we should not think through the new forms that such “relating” could take (186). The Walking Dead functions as a site at which this rethinking can occur. Postapocalyptic narratives allow audiences to imagine a point from which everyone can start over, a sort of society-wide reset (Castillo et al. 2016, 52). Even if The Walking Dead’s sexual politics often hew closer to a repetition than a restart, that too provides a means to consider queer possibility. Representations of the postapocalypse often reproduce conservative social constructions, including of gender and sexuality, thereby positioning them as natural and even necessary (Gurr 2015, 1–2). However, the attempted rejection of alternative family models on page and screen simultaneously involves their attempted implementation, and thus allows for and draws attention to their possibility and appeal. As a sprawling zombie narrative, The Walking Dead furnishes a fruitful locus for the (re)consideration of heteronormativity and the naturalization of its corresponding social units and boundaries. In the same way, contemporary zombie narratives suggest that hope might be found in reconsidering the Other (Castillo et al. 2016, 27). Zombies, as “the only humanoid threat that will bring about the end of civilization by turning all of us into them,” usefully figure anxieties about queer contamination (Paffenroth 2011, loc. 401). According to Bernini (2017), the queer resists noncontradiction, and he aligns queerness with an “apocalyptic zombie temporality” that unites life with death and Eros with Thanatos (117). If we view the undead (always already or potentially us) as oppositional to reproductive futurism, then we can theorize them not as an enemy “but as a positive evolutionary step in the movement towards the kind of socio-political change hitherto unthinkable” (Boehm 2014, loc. 2782). Perceived in this

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way, the zombie manifests egalitarian, collective relations (Mahoney 2011, loc. 2420). Reading against the privileged status accorded the patriarchal nuclear family in The Walking Dead permits a reversal of reproductive futurism’s efforts to banish the queer to the provinces of the irrational and immoral. The very enactment of the repression of queerness invites consideration of its mechanisms, denaturalizing them and opening them to critique. Zombies heighten this process and its potential for resistance, representing a position from which the social order can be taken apart and reformulated (Boehm 2014, loc. 2798). The Walking Dead’s zombies also allow us to read their monstrosity back into the living who, like Carol and Shane, unsettle the normative order by expressing structurally unacceptable desire, or who, like Hershel, the Governor, and Alpha, foster and adapt to monstrous negation, a way of seeing the living that erodes if not collapses classificatory borders. We can imagine through the undead apocalypse how we might break apart the exclusionary boundaries imposed by hegemonic heteronormativity. This hegemony proves to be less than absolute, as in Rick’s acceptance on the TV show that Judith is most likely the biological child of his patriarchal rival and his decision to raise her as if she were, and through the unresolved fates and possible survival of zombie children Penny and Duane in the comics. A comparable lack of complete (fore)closure is reproduced in the structure, so far, of The Walking Dead as a whole. Wood posits, “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized … as an object of horror … and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression” (Wood 2003, 68). The Walking Dead, however, continues to lack an ending, happy or otherwise. Robert Kirkman has stated that he “knows where he’s ultimately taking the [comic] series, but who knows how far away that final moment could be” (Ashley 2017), and AMC will likely continue to produce the TV series until it is no longer profitable to do so. Until those final moments, the restoration of repression remains deferred, and the possibility of its failure to occur persists. In fact, in a notable divergence from the comics, the TV show has recently killed off Carl in a manner that brings together in a complex knot many of the threads that this book has teased out. The Child remains central: before he dies, Carl tells Judith that he knows that she will “beat this world,” and Morgan tells Rick in a later episode that he saved Rick when they first met because his son, Duane, “was there” (“Honor”; “Still Gotta

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Mean Something”). Rick distracts Negan long enough to wound and defeat him in their climactic physical altercation by asking for ten seconds to talk for Carl’s sake, which Negan grants before tearing up at Carl’s vision of the future. Rick, like Morgan, sees his own fatherhood as paramount in defining him: he “finally knew” who he was for “the first time” when he was walking with a young Carl, and he extends that into a metaphor for how Carl has brought them all “to the new world” and “made it real” (“Wrath”). Carl’s death is framed as almost Christlike in how it helps to make this new world “real” by redeeming Rick and, one assumes, Negan, setting them on a new path. Slightly complicating this is that Carl dies because he helps Siddiq attempt to honor his deceased mother’s belief that zombies are monstrous bodies entrapping human souls, and that killing them releases those souls to the afterlife. While not an embrace of the undead, it is at least an acknowledgment of their liminality (and represents one son helping another to perpetuate a parent’s belief system). There is a greater tension inherent in the fact that although Carl offers a vision of a more cooperative future that he wants Rick and his group to actualize, his death seemingly subverts the social stability promised by reproductive futurism: when Negan hears that Carl is dead, he literally says, “That kid was the future” (“The Lost and the Plunderers”). In addition, Carl’s deathbed argument is that there must be “something after,” that they as survivors must be better people, but while that something after might be an evolution, it could also be a return to something akin to the society that existed before the zombie apocalypse. Whether Carl’s exit was determined by narrative choices or any of the rumored external factors, the fact remains that his death removes the most important remaining Child and the male heir to Rick’s leadership, a loss that Negan blames on Rick being a bad father and a bad leader. It is possible that Judith will become central to shaping the survivors’ future in the way that Carl currently is in the comics, but as of now, the ideological impact of Carl’s death on that future is tantalizingly unknown. There is a lot of The Walking Dead, in its various manifestations, still to come, and its universe has proven itself nothing if not capable of the unexpected. In the meantime, even if the TV show and comics themselves resist a revolutionary reimagining of the family and the ideology that both reproduces it and is reproduced by it, we as viewers, readers, fans, and scholars can use this particular apocalypse to reflect on and enact those changes ourselves. The hope must be, then, that such radical reshaping will take as many forms and reproduce as efficiently as zombies themselves but without requiring the end of the world.

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References Ashley, Kendall. 2017. Robert Kirkman Is Not Ending the Walking Dead Comic after All. Nerdist. www.nerdist.com. Accessed on March 29, 2018. Bernini, Lorenzo. 2017. Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory. Trans. Julia Heim. New York: Palgrave. Bishop, Kyle [William]. 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. Castillo, David R., David Schmid, David R.  Reilly, and John Edgar Browning. 2016. Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave. 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. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle. Mahoney, Phillip. 2011. Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie: From Suggestion to Contagion. In Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, loc. 2404–2746. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Paffenroth, Kim. 2011. Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat. In Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, loc. 390–570. Jefferson.: McFarland. 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.

Episodes Referenced “Honor” (season 8, episode 9, 2018) “The Lost and the Plunderers” (season 8, episode 10, 2018) “Still Gotta Mean Something” (season 8, episode 14, 2018) “Wrath” (season 8, episode 16, 2018)

Index1

A Aaron, 11, 55–57 Abraham, 11, 57, 60n14, 60n17, 97 Against equality, 36–37 Alex, 56 Alpha, 12–13, 86, 99–102 Althusser, Louis, 5 “Always Accountable” (episode), 57 Amber, 53, 54 Amy, 59n9 Donna’s criticism of, 51 Andrea, 34, 59n4, 59n9, 59n13 Carol shot by, 52 death of, 45, 97 Donna’s criticism of, 51 Governor’s relationship with, 59n13 Michonne’s relationship with, 59n13 sex with Tyreese refused by, 59n4

Apocalyptic narratives, as relying on conservative ideologies, 44–45 Assimilation, 80n3 B Benjamin, 39n17 Berger, James, 28, 30, 33, 66, 68, 78 Berlant, Lauren, 7, 77 “Better Angels” (episode), 29–30 Billy, Carol’s sexual relationship with, 51 Birds, The (film), vi Bisexuality, v Bishop, Kyle William, v, vi, 3, 8, 22, 66, 79, 89 Bob, 94 Boehm, Chris, 8 Boon, Kevin, 66 Booth, Robert, 11 Browning, John Edgar, 3 “Bury Me Here” (episode), 39n17 Butler, Judith, 92, 93

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8

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114 

INDEX

C Cannibalism, in Terminus, 46 Cannibals consumption of children by, 4 Grimes’s killing of, 2–4, 7 Capitalism, 37 living with extended family discouraged by, 59n9 spousal relations in, 22 Carl, 87 Carol’s desire to mother, 48 as Child and future patriarch, 34 death of, 58n1 desire for polyamory of, 31 gun received by, 30 gunshot wound of, 81n14 Lori’s death and, 34 Lori’s desire to protect from polyamory, 50 Lori’s worries about raising alone, 50 Lydia followed by, 100 Lydia’s rape denied by, 100 Lydia’s release negotiated by, 100 made zombie, 12 naming of zombies deplored by, 73, 74 Negan’s polygamy as temptation for, 53–55 Negan’s sexual banter and, 59n12 protected by Shane, 35 Rick and Shane’s conflict over, 10–11, 22, 24, 26–28, 37, 65, 86, 87 Rick’s proposal of escape from town of, 88 Rick’s reprimanding by, 72 and role of reproductive futurism in dominance of nuclear family, 44 saved from Jessie by Rick, 87–89 Shane killed by, 26, 30–31 traditional family structure adhered to by, 52

Carol Billy’s sexual encounter with, 51 death of, 10, 45, 52, 58, 67–68 desire for polyamory of, 9, 10, 45–47, 49–52, 56, 58n3, 59n5, 78 Griselda killed by, 75 killing rejected by, 14n5 Lizzie’s father killed by, 73 Lizzie killed by, 76, 80, 81n13, 86 Lizzie prevented from turning Judith into zombie by, 75 as Lizzie’s substitute mother, 75 Lori kissed by, 46, 47 naming of zombies deplored by, 77, 78 need to kill emphasized by, 74, 75 Negan’s non-monogamy compared to, 52 queer negation turned to by, 51 Rick kissed by, 46, 47 stepping outside bound of heteronormativity, 68 suicide attempted by, 46 “Cherokee Rose” (episode), 33 Cherokees, 81n15 Child as a historical, 12 alternative sociosexual configurations and, v Carl’s embodying of, 30 as center of reproductive futurism, 7, 49 as fundamental to society’s self-­ conception, 4 Governor as protector of, 35 Governor redeemed by, 10 heteronormativity vs., 36–37 Judith’s embodying of, 75 in Lori and Carol’s debate on polyamory, 49 Lori’s contemplation of killing, 33

 INDEX 

as marker of society’s inability to reproduce itself, 39n12 as “meaning” in The Birds, 38n8 nuclear family’s production of, 66 and opening of family structure, 22 queerness vs., 12, 14n7, 14n12, 89–90 removed from center of Whisperers’ social organization, 99 Shane’s desire to protect, 72 Sophia as, 78, 79 Sophia as amalgam of sinthomosexual, child, and, 11 zombie, 9–10, 78–79, 85, 86, 88, 101, 102 zombies vs., 68 Christie, Deborah, 68 Clara, 72–74 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 68 Collectivity abandoned by Hershel, 71 as threatening, 52 traditional family vs., 38n4 Comic books, narrative and representational elements of, vi Competition between Rick and Shane, 10, 21–22, 24–32, 36–37, 44, 54, 65, 86 nuclear family functioning through, 44 Contestation, 80n3 D Dale, 29–31, 37 Andrea offered sex with Tyreese by, 59n4 Donna’s criticism of, 51 Hershel confronted by, 69 and killings at barn, 77 progressive philosophy of, 39n18 Dante, 98, 100

115

David, 34, 35 Dawn of the Dead, females as property in, 23 Day of the Dead, masculinity critiqued by, 14n5 “Days Gone Bye” (episode), 27 “Dead Weight” (episode), 35, 36 Denise, 11, 56–57, 60n16 Donna, 51 Doppelgänger, 59n10 Duane, 89, 97–98, 102 Dwight insulted by Negan, 54 Negan brought down by, 11, 54, 56 E Eddie, 72–74 Edelman, Lee, 4, 9–10, 14n7, 14n9, 45, 47, 50, 51, 66–67, 90 “18 Miles Out” (episode), 27–28, 35 Eric, 11, 55–57 Eugene, 54, 55 child conceived by, 38n8 F Family as central to American horror, v hybridized (see Hybridized families) liberatory forms of, 36–37 nonnormative structure of, vi, 4 socially and politically acceptable, 3 See also Nuclear family Feudal monarchy, 46 Films, narrative and representational elements of, vi “First Day of the Rest of Your Life, The” (episode), 44 Fischer, Craig, 38n8

116 

INDEX

G Gay agenda, 79 Gender-nonconforming marriage, v Glenn, 26, 32 child conceived by, 38n8 Maggie’s permission to hunt zombies given to, 72, 81n9 murder of, 57 Globalization, 13n4 Governor Andrea’s relationship with, 59n13 death of, 34–36, 95 Hershel killed by, 36 killing as self-preservation allowed by, 39n16 living with undead child, 12, 89–97 and Meghan’s death, 36 Michonne’s torture of, 91–92 nuclear family embraced by, 35–36 prison attacked by, 74–75 redemption of, 10, 35–36 Rick captured by, 50 as Rick’s double, 35–36 suggestion of incest regarding, 92, 94 on zombies’ desires, 67 zombies granted humanity by, 12, 81n10 Greene, Arnold, 71 Greene, Hershel death of, 36 desire to cure zombies, 69, 72 undead family members kept in barn by, 9, 12, 67, 69–72, 77, 81n14, 89–91, 98 undead sons killed by, 71, 80n6 willingness to use violence, 71–72 zombies granted humanity by, 12, 69, 86 Greene, Lacey, 71 Greene, Shawn, 71

Grimes, Rick almost shot by Hershel, 72–73, 97–98 angry over Lori’s desire to end pregnancy, 32–33 asked into polyamorous marriage, 10, 45–47, 49–52, 56, 58n3, 78 cannibals killed by, 2, 3, 5, 7 captured by Governor, 50 Carl given gun by, 30 Carl saved from Jessie by, 87–89 child zombie killed by, 2, 5 Clara’s desire to feed to Eddie, 72–74 and contradictions of nuclear family, 86–88 decision to kill Saviors, 39n16 distance between zombie and person maintained by, 73 failure to separate love from monogamy by, 59n4 family destroyed by, 89 as Governor’s double, 35–36 guilt over killing of Savior of, 56 and Hershel’s keeping of zombies in barn, 69, 71, 81n14, 97–98 Jadis’s desire to have sex with, 43–44 Jadis’s sculpting of, 58n2 Jessie’s sexual relationship with, 86 and killing of zombies in Hershel’s barn, 69–72 kissed by Lori, 47 mercy killing of zombie by, 3 and Morgan’s living with undead child, 97–98 Negan captured by, 54 Negan’s suggestion of superiority to, 59n12 new nuclear family created by, 86, 87

 INDEX 

Pete punched by, 86 Shane’s conflict with, 10, 21–32, 36–37, 43, 54, 65, 86 and Shane’s fathering of Judith, 36, 72 Shane stabbed by, 29–31 Shane’s usurping of, 24, 28, 86 Sophia killed by, 11, 76–79 traditional family structure adhered to by, 52 Tyreese’s fight with, 46–47 wedding ring of, 24, 27, 38n3 Whisperers’ social organization witnessed by, 99 Griselda, 75 Grizzell, Trevor, 89 “Grove, The” (episode), 75, 76 Gurr, Barbara, 13n3, 44–45 H Halberstam, Judith, 14n7, 14n8 Hannabach, Cathy, 55, 59n13, 67 Heath, 56 Heteronormativity, v Carol’s stepping outside of, 68 child vs., 35–37 and death of homosexual characters, 57 dismissal of alternatives to, 32–33 incest taboo as fundamental to, 92–94 Lori’s death as effect of, 33, 43 Lori’s defense of, 49, 50 monogamy required for, 31 naturalization of, 5–6 of Negan, 55 and nuclear family, 5–6 and Rick, Lori, and Shane triangle, 43 in Rick’s marriage, 26–27 Sophia as Child sacrificed for, 79

117

The Walking Dead and transgressions of, 6, 9, 24 zombie children as threat to, 86, 88–90 zombies as attempted suppression of alternatives to, 79 See also Nuclear family Heteropatriarchy, naturalization of, 13 Heterosexuality created by prohibition on homosexuality, 94 enforced by reproductive futurism, 4 as sacred national fetish, 7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 38n8 Homonormativity, 60n14 Homophobia, 55 Homosexuality, 9 fear of conversion to, 79 prohibition against, 92 Horror, family as central to, v “Hostiles and Calamities” (episode), 54 How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture (Bishop), v Hybridity, abandoned by Hershel, 71 Hybridized families, 10 destruction of, 72, 89–90 of Governor, 12, 89, 97–98 of Morgan, 89, 97 I Incest and Governor’s relationship with Penny, 92, 95 taboo on, 92–94 Indentured servitude, 46 “Indifference” (episode), 73–75 “Infected” (episode), 73 “Internment” (episode), 74

118 

INDEX

J Jadis, 43–44, 58n1, 58n2 Jessie bitten by zombie, 88 Rick’s sexual relationship with, 87 zombies granted humanity by, 12, 86–87, 98 Jesus, 11, 56, 60n14, 60n15 revelation of homosexuality of, 60n14 Jim, 81n8 Jones, Steve, 67–68, 87 Judith, 10, 22 birth of, 33, 50, 95 Carl’s protection of, 34 death of, 33 disputed father of, 35–36 held by Michonne, 81n13 Lizzie’s attempt to turn into zombie, 9, 67, 74 Negan’s bouncing on lap, 59n12 and role of reproductive futurism in dominance of nuclear family, 43 K Kee, Chera, 44, 52 Keetley, Dawn, 32 Kelleher, Paul, 9 Kincaid, James R., 77 Kingdom, 39n17 feudal monarchy in, 46 “King, the Widow, and Rick, The” (episode), 58n1 Kirkman, Robert, vii, 51 “Knots Unite” (episode), 57, 60n17 L LaBruce, Bruce, 80n3 Lacan, Jacques, 92 Lacey, see Greene, Lacey Land of the Dead (film), 14n10

“Last Days on Earth” (episode), 57 Lavin, Melissa F., 22, 37, 45, 55 LGBTQIA movements, 80n3 Lilly (comic character), 95 Lilly (TV character), 35 on road with Governor, 34–36 “Little girl” figure, 77 Lori anger at Hershel, 71 asked into polyamorous marriage, 10, 45–47, 49–52, 56, 79 Carl given gun by, 30 and Carol’s kissing of Rick, 46, 47 death of, 32–34, 37, 43 heteronormativity defended by, 49, 50 infidelity of, 9, 33 internet’s policing of sexuality of, 60n15 kissed by Carol, 46, 47 pregnancy of, 26, 28, 31–33, 72 Rick and Shane’s conflict over, 10, 21–22, 24–31, 33, 36, 43, 54, 65, 87 traditional family structure adhered to by, 52 “Lost and the Plunderers, The” (episode), 46 Lowe, Brian M., 22, 37, 45, 55 Lucille, 55 Lydia, 98–102 M “Made to Suffer” (episode), 96 Maggie, 32, 56, 57, 60n14 child conceived by, 38n8 Governor killed by, 36 and killing of Shawn and Arnold, 71 Rick’s proposal of escape from town of, 88 zombies granted humanity by, 70 zombies seen as threat by, 72

 INDEX 

Marriage arguments for expanded definition of, 37 evolving laws concerning, 22 gender nonconforming, v rational advancement hampered by, 10 same-sex, v as social construction, 6–7 Martinez, 35 Masculinity linking of reproductive futurism to, 35 received models of, 21 valorized by, The Waking Dead, 14n5, 27, 37 May, Jeff, 71 McGlotten, Shaka, 14n9, 87 Meaux, Kevin, 9 Meghan, 34 death of, 35 on road with Governor, 34–35 Michonne, 12, 36, 37, 75 Andrea’s relationship with, 59n13 and Governor’s keeping of child zombie, 91, 94 and Jadis’s desire to have sex with Rick, 43–44 Judith held by, 81n13 Tyreese’s affair with, 46–47 Mika, 72, 75–77, 81n12 death of, 76 Monogamy Alpha’s rejection of, 101 dominance in Walking Dead of, 6 enforced by reproductive futurism, 4 private property linked to, 22 Rick’s failure to separate love from, 59n4 as social construction, 6–7 Moreman, Christopher M., 66 Morgan incapacity to kill zombie wife, 2–5

119

killing rejected by, 14n5 living with zombified child, 89, 97–98 zombified son of, 12 Muñoz, José Esteban, 9, 11, 14n7, 14n9, 59n8 Murray, Jessica, 14n11 N Negan, 13n2 Abraham killed by, 57 capture of, 10, 54, 56 heteronormativity, 55 polygamy engaged in by, 11, 52–55, 59n12 superiority to Rick suggested by, 59n12 Nick, 73 Night of the Living Dead (film), vi tensions around family in, 22–24 No Future, 4 “Not Tomorrow Yet” (episode), 7, 57 Nuclear family as allegorically arrayed against foreigners or queers, 87 Alpha’s rejection of, 102 as center of life in post war U.S., 5–7 Child produced by, 66 conflicts in zombie media over, 22–24 contradictions in, 86–87 functioning through biological territorialism, 44 Governor’s embracing of, 34–36 Lizzie’s worldview as threat to, 74 as locus of control over desires, v, vi property ownership as pillar of, 22 queer collectivity vs., 52 Rick’s creation of new, 86, 87 Shane and Lori’s usurpation of, 24 tied to financial stability in 1980s, 4

120 

INDEX

Nuclear family (cont.) of Whisperers, 99 zombie children as threat to, 88–89 in zombie media, 9 zombies as challenge to, 86 See also Heteronormativity Nurse, Angus, 71 O Oedipal conflict, 38n6 Ohi, Kevin, 12 Other, 13 definition of, 14n8 self’s fear of absorption into, 66 “Other Side, The” (episode), 56 Otis, 28 killed by Shane, 35 P Paffenroth, Kim, 24 Pagano, David, 51 Partisan divisions, 3 Patriarchy control over reproduction lost to zombies by, 81n14 Lori’s pregnancy and, 32, 37 violence as result of challenge to, 44 Western nuclear family as, 21 Penfold-Mounce, Ruth, 59n7 Penny, 12, 89–98, 102 death of, 97, 102 suggestion of incest regarding, 92, 96 Pete, 86–88 Pokornowski, Steven, 3 Polyamory Carol’s desire for, 9, 10, 31, 46, 47, 49–52, 58n3, 59n5 Jadis’s desire for, 43–44

Polygamy of Negan, 10, 52–55, 59n12, 65 seen as villainous, 52, 53 “Pretty Much Dead Already” (episode), 28, 71, 72 Property, patriarchy linked to, 21 Q Queerness child vs., 14n7 of children, 12, 14n12, 90 and collectivity, 52 as deviation from normal, 8–9 gay agenda, 79 heteronormative family vs., 7, 8, 44 increasing in Walking Dead, 56 and negation of death, 39n10 queer antagonism towards reproductive futurism, 11 as representing death drive of social order, 8 reproductive futurism vs., 7, 8 suicide linked to, 59n8 of zombies, 9, 11, 44, 58, 65–67, 78, 81n9, 94 Queer theory, vi R Rape, 100 Reed, Darren, 59n7 Reilly, David A., 13n4, 50 Reproductive futurism Abraham’s death as ambiguous about, 57 child as center of, 7, 49 and congratulating pregnant women, 31 contradictions of, 88 defense against contemplating end of self enabled by, 45 and dominance of nuclear family, 44

 INDEX 

family implicated in, 4 Governor’s embrace of, 35 Governor’s reconfigured family as resistance to, 95 Hershel’s farm linked to, 69 hope as inseparable from, 7 Jessie’s appeal to, 88 Judith’s birth denaturalizing tenets of, 39n12 linking of traditional masculinity to, 35 and Lori’s pregnancy, 32 mechanisms of naturalization of, 72 negative effects of possessive model of, 89 queerness vs., 7, 8 relationships configured by, 5 and Rick’s acceptance of Shane’s status as father, 36–37 sinthomosexual vs., 9 Sophia as Child sacrificed for, 79 two fathers unthinkable under, 26 undead’s queer antagonism towards, 9 upheld by Alpha, 101 veneer of meaningfulness in, 67 zombie as a means of preserving, 102 zombies as attempted suppression of alternatives to, 78 zombies seen as Other to defend, 85 Richard, 39n17 Rick, see Grimes, Rick Riley, Brendan, 81n8, 91 Romantic love, 22 Romero, George, v, 3, 4 progressive potential removed from zombies by, 9 Ron, 86, 88 Rosita, 57 death of, 38n8 pregnancy of, 38–39n8 Rushton, Cory James, 66

121

S Same-sex marriage, v Samuels, Lizzie attempt to kill father by, 73 Carol as substitute mother for, 75 failed plan to turn sister into zombie of, 9, 67, 73–75 killed by Carol, 78, 81n13, 86 plans for hybrid family of, 86 zombies granted humanity by, 11, 72–75, 85 zombies named by, 73 Sasha, 57, 60n14, 60n17 Saviors, 52–54, 59n12 Abraham captured by, 57 Eric killed by, 56 indentured servitude of, 46 Rick’s decision to kill, 39n16 Scavengers, 44, 46 Schmid, David, 66 Sconce, Jeffrey, 5 “Secrets” (episode), 32, 69–71 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 3 “Service” (episode), 36 Sex, 57, 87 Shane death of, 28, 31, 36, 43 made a zombie, 38n7 Otis killed by, 35 as possible father of Lori’s child, 26, 29, 31, 33, 36, 72 redefinition of zombies rejected by, 71 Rick’s conflict with, 10, 43, 54, 65, 86 Rick’s stabbing of, 24, 29–30 Rick usurped by, 28, 86 traditional family structure adhered to by, 52 violence kicked off at farm by, 72 Shawn, see Greene, Shawn Sherry, 54

122 

INDEX

Simpson, Philip L., 29, 34, 44 “Sing Me a Song” (episode), 54–55, 59n11, 59n12 Sinthome, 9 Sinthomosexual coining of term, 10 in opposition to futurity, 51 Sophia as amalgam of child, Child, and, 11 Sophia as disruptive, 39n14 zombies identified with, 66–69 Smith, Phil, 23 Sophia, 30, 81n15, 88 Carol’s desire to mother, 48 Carol’s praise of, 86 as disruptive sinthomosexual, 39n14 killed by Rick, 11, 77 zombification of, 11, 67, 77, 78, 86, 89 Steiger, Kay, 58n3 Stevens, Doctor, 81n8 Suicide, queerness linked to, 59n8 T Tara, 11, 34, 56 on road with Governor, 34–35 “Tell it to the Frogs” (episode), 27 Terminus, cannibalism in, 46 Terrorism, 79 “30 Days Without an Accident” (episode), 73 “Time for After” (episode), 58n1 “Too Far Gone” (episode), 36 “Twice as Far” (episode), 57, 60n16 Tyreese, 46–47, 59n4, 75 U Undecidability, 80n1 United States, social changes in, 6–7

V Vatos, 39n18 Vossen, Emma, 46–49, 51–52, 57 W Walking Dead, The as anticipating apocalypse, 51–52 audience reaction to homosexual kiss in, 56 characters containing own doubles in, 59n10 conservative orientation towards nontraditional sexuality of, 22–24, 36, 45, 48, 65 continuing decay of zombies in, 68 criticized for white, heterosexual male ideal citizens, 12 heteronormativity displayed by death of homosexual characters in, 57 heteronormativity transgressed in, 6, 9, 26 increasing queer inclusivity in, 56 masculinity valorized by, 14n5, 28, 37 morality in postapocalyptic world in, 7 patriarchal narrative at center of, 7 sex as separating living from dead in, 57 sexual freedom as heteronormative in, 47–49 subversion of gender norms in, 44 variety of social orders in, 45–46 zombies as attempted suppression of alternatives to heteronormative reproductive futurity, 78 zombies as sinthomosexual in, 66 Walking Dead, The, family in in absence of state apparatus, 7

 INDEX 

conservative orientation of, 4, 7, 8, 100–103 failure to consider queer potentiality in, 10, 45–46 larger social arrangement as reflective of, 37 in opening season, 8 threats from outside family in, 4 See also Family; Nuclear family Warm Bodies (film), 44 Whisperers, 12, 46, 86 Rosita killed by, 39n8 social organization of, 98–102 “Wildfire” (episode), 27–28 Wood, Robin, 4, 6–7, 9, 10, 22, 23, 59n10 Y Young, P. Ivan, 29, 30 Z Zani, Steven, 9 Zombie media as American creation, v, 10 as anticipating apocalypse, 51 conflicts over traditional family in, 21–24 European, 1970s and 1980s, 3–4 patriarchal narrative at center of, 7 social and cultural anxieties reflected in, v, 3, 8, 80n4 structure of family in, vi, 8

123

Zombies ability to unsettle line between human and zombie of, 52, 95, 98, 102–103 as challenge to social norms, 86 child vs., 68 children, 4–5, 79, 86, 89–92, 102 continuing decay in TV show of, 68 driven by desire, v, 9, 67, 90 as freedom from responsibility, 14n9 gay parallels with, 79 Hershel’s desire to cure, 72, 77 human choices and, 32 identified with sinthomosexual, 66 promise of future promised by Child undermined by, 66 queer, 11 queer antagonism towards reproductive futurism, 11, 66 queerness of, 9–11, 44, 58, 66, 92–94 reproduction of, 9, 66, 68, 80n2, 87, 88, 94 seen as other to defend reproductive futurism, 85 in social organization of Whisperers, 98–102 symbolic racialization of, 44 as symbolizing self’s fear of absorption into Other, 66, 80n4 terrorism as parallel of, 79