“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)
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.
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
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 booklength 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
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 meaningmaking 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
Note
John R. Ziegler
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.
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 nonheteronormative 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
J. R. Ziegler, Queering the Family in The Walking Dead, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99798-8_1
1
R. ZIEGLER
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
J.
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
J. R. ZIEGLER
fresh, sometimes state-sponsored, attacks, frequently under the guise of so-called religious freedom, on progressive gains and positions. With this in mind, Robin Wood’s comments on the social politics of the horror film offer a useful way to think about the degree of progressivism in The Walking Dead’s engagement with family. Wood (2003) identifies the family as central to American horror and the 1970s as its subversive period, in which a “crisis in ideological confidence temporarily released our culture’s monsters from the shackles of repression” and produced a “recognition … that the monster is a product of normality,” which is itself “monstrous” (85). The 1980s then ushered in a regressive movement toward reactionary politics (Wood 2003, 168). These politics include tying the nuclear family to financial stability in the face of cuts to the social support network, even as the majority of such family units come under increasing economic stress (Halberstam 2011, loc. 1377). At the risk of oversimplifying, and though some amount of diversification has occurred since then, I would suggest that this conservative orientation—perhaps resurrected, or merely reaffirmed, by the post–9/11 anxieties that have become a critical commonplace—remains dominant in the horror genre, and The Walking Dead hews fairly closely to its normative impulses. In some ways, its politics are closer to those of European zombie movies of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the real monsters are those who “dare” to defy the precepts of “family, nation and body,” and “who are becoming a new kind of human” (Smith 2015, loc. 1507). If, as Wood argues, in Romero’s early films, the family itself is monstrous, and the threat comes from within, the threat in The Walking Dead is once again primarily from outside the family, to it rather than from it, a threat of destruction or conversion, not only from zombies but also from other, nonnormative family units.
In No Future, Lee Edelman (2004) implicates the family in the ideology of what he names reproductive futurism. By providing the fantasies, enacted by figural and linguistic means, that structure and maintain social reality, reproductive futurism enforces the dominant, monogamous heterosexual paradigm (loc. 130–138). The most important figure is the Child, which is fundamental to how society conceives (of) itself and serves as a presumed guarantee of its future. A body politic requires a fantasy of its own future existence in order to maintain cohesion, and a sense of stability inheres in the premise, propped up by the Child, that social reality will survive beyond any particular individual (loc. 543). Thus, the cannibals’ destruction and consumption of children function not merely to mark them as outside the ethical pale (while at least partly justifying Rick
and his group’s violent revenge) but also as an attack on what continue to be the most basic underpinnings of social organization, even in the apocalypse. Rick’s encounter with the teddy bear–clutching zombie girl represents an encounter with a kind of anti-Child, a figure that stands in opposition to reproductive sexuality and its promise of a future. Her very existence, with the “insecurity indicated by the corruption even of children, the bedrock of futurity, undermines the most basic assumption” of a society like ours that it will remain more or less stable and static (Heckman 2014, loc. 2128). A corrupted child could interfere with the steady transmission of the social order into the future. A zombie child, however, represents merely a more extreme version of the 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
J. R. ZIEGLER
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”
(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-
J. R. ZIEGLER
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
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
J. R. ZIEGLER
progressiveness in its human characters, leaving disruptive force to inhere 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,
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ara vus prec
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Ara vus prec
Author: T. S. Eliot
Release date: December 23, 2023 [eBook #72472]
Language: English
Original publication: London: The Ovid Press, 1919
Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARA VUS PREC ***
Ara Vus Prec by T. S. Eliot
THE OVID PRESS
Or puoi, la quantitate
Comprender dell’ amor ch’a te mi scalda, Quando dismento nostra vanitate
Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.
IS NO.
GERONTION
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were, an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both.
I am, an old man in a dry month
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign.”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagama, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues; deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted, And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What’s not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I want to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do, Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammell, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running by the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the gulf claims And an old man, driven on the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER: BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.
Tra la la la la la laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; cætera fumus—the gondola stopped the old palace was there How charming it’s grey & pink —Goats & monkeys, with such hair too!—so the Countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, & so departed.
Slowly: the god Hercules Had left him, that had loved him well.
The horses, under the axletree
crossed a little bridge Descending at a small hotel; Princess Volupine arrived, They were together, and he fell.
Defunctive music under sea Passed seaward with the passing bell
Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings
And flea’d his rump and pared his claws? —Thought Burbank, meditating on Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES
?
Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward to the River Plate, Death and the Raven drift above And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee cup, Reorganised upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges, Bananas, figs and hot-house grapes;
The silent vertebrate exhales,
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league; Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in, Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart, The nightingales are singing near The convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
SWEENEY ERECT
And the trees about me
Let them be dry & leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; & behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, Look, wenches!
me a cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Æolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne’s hair And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands (Nausicaa and Polypheme); Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes, This oval O cropped out with teeth; The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees
Then straightens down from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed And clawing at the pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed full-length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base, Knows the female temperament And wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, says Emerson, Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides; The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced; Call witness to their principles Deprecate the lack of taste
Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood; Mrs. Turner intimates It does the house no sort of good.
But Doris towelled from the bath
Enters padding on broad feet, Bringing sal volatile And a glass of brandy neat.
MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE
“Look, look master, here comes two of the religious caterpillars”.
JEW OF MALTA
The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window-panes. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Word, Superfetation of το εν And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptised God. The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The father and the Paraclete.
The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence,
Under the penitential gates
Sustained by staring Seraphim Where the souls of the devout Burn invisible and dim.
Along the garden-wall the bees With hairy bellies pass between The staminate and pistilate: Blest office of the epicene.
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath.
WHISPERS OF IMMORTALITY
was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.
Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense
To seize and clutch and penetrate, Expert beyond experience
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh
