Lurching for the Cure?: On Zombies and the Reproduction of Disability

• Published in: GLQ 2015, Vol.21 (1), p.24-31
• Main Author: Chen, Mel Y
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: LGBTQ studies; Monsters; People with disabilities; Popular culture
• ISSN: 1064-2684; 1527-9375

There is no doubt now: zombie apocalypses are de rigueur; vampires, take your select, small-scale bloodletting elsewhere. While monsters, ghouls, ghosts, and other creatures have long populated popular culture around the world, recent years have seen zombie hordes of diverse characters, mobilities, and provenances populating mainstream films, TV shows and novels, and video games, as well as anticapitalist demonstrations related to global economic crises and retrenchments from 2007.29 While some probing performance studies analyses, such as those in recent pieces by Rebecca Schneider and Tavia Nyong’o, map the reflections of economic zombification onto Occupy-based theatrical performances, I look more closely at the contemporary zombie’s realization in terms made evident by transnational queer and disability perspectives.30 This greatly abbreviated bocado omits critically linked arguments about chronic indebtedness and debility, even if it attempts to deter reductionist readings by leaving terminological traces here. My longer piece moves beyond the more common economic analysis, one in which zombie capitalism produces the generalized biopolitical figure of the eternal, undead laborer who exists under desubjectifying conditions, whose focus on templatically capacitated labor obscures rather than clarifies questions of both debility and disability. By elaborating questions of disability, I wish to mark an aspect within and of the zombie horde that has been less attended to.