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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 con-
tinue 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
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 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 transgres-
sions 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 fundamen-
tally American notion of the family. This book intends to examine the inter-
play 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 dif-
ferent 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 poly-
amory continue to fall under consistent cultural and political attack. Bisexuality
similarly persists in being elided, even at times by putative allies. Such resis-
tance to alternative sociosexual ­configurations often employs rhetorics of
aberrance, unnaturalness, or irrationality, as well as invokes danger to (always

v
vi PREFACE

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 the-
ory 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 situ-
ates 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 the-
ory 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 increas-
ingly studied and taught academically. By considering the comics in con-
junction 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 (par-
don the pun) an academic exercise. Like the survivors of a zombie apoca-
lypse, 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 real-
ity 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
 PREFACE vii

expressions; the distances, reciprocities, and vectors of bodies; and “sym-

bolic resources, such as … sweat drops to represent surprise or anxiety”
(Feng and O’Halloran 2012, 2069, 2081, 2072, 2074). Readers of com-
ics must also fill in the narrative gaps within and between panels, con-
structing 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 rela-
tionships 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 cre-
ation, 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 part-
ner in all senses of the word, and our small household of feline editorial
assistants: Perdita, Renfield, Trey, and Benny.

ix
 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

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Rick encounters a zombie child 2

Fig. 2.1 Rick reclaims his family unit 25
Fig. 2.2 Rick and Shane’s moonlight standoff 29
Fig. 3.1 Rick looks down on Lori 48
Fig. 3.2 Negan makes Dwight wait 55
Fig. 4.1 Hershel reveals the contents of his barn 70
Fig. 4.2 Carnage at Hershel’s barn 78
Fig. 5.1 The Governor kisses Penny 93
Fig. 5.2 The Governor with a beribboned Penny 96

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