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The traditional antagonist is thus remade, and what was adversarial in most zombie media
becomes a point of identification in Zombie Walks. Moreover, while there are some texts
that focus on the zombie’s point of view,24 most zombie texts do not, and so Zombie
Walks give walkers a chance to inhabit a position generally unavailable in zombie
media.25
By taking up the zombie in this way, zombie walkers not only get the chance to
experience the world as they might imagine a zombie would, but, as discussed in Chapter
Four, they are situating themselves in a sort of binary opposition to “living” spectators.
Moreover, they create a situation where the “living” spectators they encounter get to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24 Video games like Left 4 Dead (2008) or Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005), comic books
like Marvel Zombies (2005-2006), and films like Dead Heat (1988) or Zombie Strippers (2008) are
examples of texts that provide the zombie’s point of view.
25 It is worth noting here that Zombie Walks could be seen as a form of cosplay. Simply put, Cosplayers
fashion costumes matching chosen media characters as closely as possible. Figures from anime and fantasy
media are especially popular, and there are zombie cosplayers, with costumes based on specific zombie
characters, like Stubbs the Zombie. Other zombie cosplayers take a media character and convert it into a
zombie; hence, there are zombie Dumbledores (from the Harry Potter universe) and zombie Lady Gagas.
However, many zombie cosplayers stray from the typical cosplay focus on precision in mimicking and
simply create their own zombies from scratch. There are elements of cosplay at work in the walks (with
fans for whom the costume is largely the point). Yet, most walks provide makeup stations to help
transform participants into zombies, as some walkers do not come pre-made-up or pre-costumed.
Similarly, while crafting a cosplay costume can be very expensive, most zombie looks are achieved
cheaply. Very few walkers are attempting to fashion authentic costumes based on a particular character, so
there is a freedom for personal interpretation in the walks. One could make the claim that one focus in
cosplay is the beauty of a finely-crafted costume made to exacting detail. As will be discussed later,
performing as a zombie can be read as a counter practice, as ugliness is often valued. In this sense, the
order of cosplay resists the disorder of the zombie walker’s body (both as a body without one clear referent
and as one in disorder as a corpse). Zombie Walks could also be related to participation in Role Playing
Games (RPGs), especially live-action RPGs (LARPs). However, these games do not typically invite or
encourage spectator interaction in the way Zombie Walks do. For a discussion of the performative aspects
of fan practice in RPGs, see Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media
Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
Object Description
| Title | And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death |
| Author | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Author email | ckee@usc.edu; ckee211@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies) |
| School | School of Cinematic Arts |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-03-08 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-05-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Marez, Curtis |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kinder, Marsha Hoskins, Janet |
| Abstract | In October 2009, five pale, blood-stained teenagers sat on a curb in Newhall, California. They were not crime victims nor movie extras. Rather, these teens were “zombies,” waiting to participate in a Zombie Walk. These events, where groups of people dressed as zombies lumber through the streets, have been happening globally since 2001 and entice up to several thousand participants for each walk. Zombies are familiar characters in comic books, video games, television and film, but with thousands of people dressing as zombies and taking to the streets, it becomes clear that the kinds of work zombies do in U.S. culture provides insight into how we approach death, try to diffuse its potency, and use it to make political interventions into everyday life. Zombies are critical repositories of social fears and desires related to capitalist wage slavery, race, gender, and the political power of the masses, and as such, they demonstrate how representations and performances of death, in widely different forms, have served remarkably consistent functions in the United States throughout the past two centuries.; This project seeks to show that the zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave and master, both living and dead, both black and white—is often positioned as that which invades the normative space of the living, a space that is generally conceived of in terms of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing those who exist in this space to face a being who can encompasses both their ideals and that which their society rejects, the zombie can be used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo while also undercutting those same ideals—often within the same text.; Chapter one provides a survey of zombie scholarship and describes the history of the figure in U.S. popular culture. Chapter two places zombies in their historical context, considering their ties to Vodou belief and U.S-Haitian relations. Examining travelogues, magazine articles, and official documents about Haiti circulating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the zombie is identified as one in a long line of figures used in debates surrounding dependent territories, self-rule, and the limits of U.S. democracy. Early film zombies thus come to symbolize the paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially liberating imaginative escape from dominant systems. However, this idealistic feature of zombies is restricted by racism in early zombie films.; Chapter three considers how the zombie state in film is marked by race and gender, arguing that while the zombie can be terrifying, it also presents a fantasy of escape from white, heteronormative patriarchy. This fantasy state is often racialized, positioning blackness as more attractive than normative whiteness, and female characters frequently offer a point of identification with it. Many zombie films are therefore sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both promoting and punishing the transgressive and non-normative, often within the same text.; The fourth chapter considers the connection between the spectator’s relationship to images of death in 19th century presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances, to that same relationship in contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain visual technologies can encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness that empowers spectators/players, this chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the context of representations of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to enact desires that show death not as final, but as something that can be transcended, which ultimately robs the zombie of some of its inherent political potential.; The fifth chapter examines Zombie Walks. These events present a contemporary example of death being introduced into the world of the living to unsettle assumptions of how public space should be used. Public performances of zombiness disrupt the normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which “zombies” walk while simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting, ugly corpses. In this way, zombie walkers offer an important example of the contemporary carnivalesque.; The final chapter of this project illustrates that while the zombie can stand as something that is both comforting and threatening, in either guise, it carries with it the potential of another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the aspirations of any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or the abject by their society’s standards. Thus, often, in the form of the zombie, death is not only made attractive in U.S. popular culture, it is made politically useful as well. |
| Keyword | zombies in film; zombie video games; Zombie Walks; voodoo in film; U.S./Haiti relations; race in film; gender in film; phantasmagoria; spiritualist phenomena; zombies and the carnivalesque |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage date | 2001/2010 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3808 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Kee-4414 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume51/etd-Kee-4414.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 316 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 305 The traditional antagonist is thus remade, and what was adversarial in most zombie media becomes a point of identification in Zombie Walks. Moreover, while there are some texts that focus on the zombie’s point of view,24 most zombie texts do not, and so Zombie Walks give walkers a chance to inhabit a position generally unavailable in zombie media.25 By taking up the zombie in this way, zombie walkers not only get the chance to experience the world as they might imagine a zombie would, but, as discussed in Chapter Four, they are situating themselves in a sort of binary opposition to “living” spectators. Moreover, they create a situation where the “living” spectators they encounter get to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 24 Video games like Left 4 Dead (2008) or Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005), comic books like Marvel Zombies (2005-2006), and films like Dead Heat (1988) or Zombie Strippers (2008) are examples of texts that provide the zombie’s point of view. 25 It is worth noting here that Zombie Walks could be seen as a form of cosplay. Simply put, Cosplayers fashion costumes matching chosen media characters as closely as possible. Figures from anime and fantasy media are especially popular, and there are zombie cosplayers, with costumes based on specific zombie characters, like Stubbs the Zombie. Other zombie cosplayers take a media character and convert it into a zombie; hence, there are zombie Dumbledores (from the Harry Potter universe) and zombie Lady Gagas. However, many zombie cosplayers stray from the typical cosplay focus on precision in mimicking and simply create their own zombies from scratch. There are elements of cosplay at work in the walks (with fans for whom the costume is largely the point). Yet, most walks provide makeup stations to help transform participants into zombies, as some walkers do not come pre-made-up or pre-costumed. Similarly, while crafting a cosplay costume can be very expensive, most zombie looks are achieved cheaply. Very few walkers are attempting to fashion authentic costumes based on a particular character, so there is a freedom for personal interpretation in the walks. One could make the claim that one focus in cosplay is the beauty of a finely-crafted costume made to exacting detail. As will be discussed later, performing as a zombie can be read as a counter practice, as ugliness is often valued. In this sense, the order of cosplay resists the disorder of the zombie walker’s body (both as a body without one clear referent and as one in disorder as a corpse). Zombie Walks could also be related to participation in Role Playing Games (RPGs), especially live-action RPGs (LARPs). However, these games do not typically invite or encourage spectator interaction in the way Zombie Walks do. For a discussion of the performative aspects of fan practice in RPGs, see Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). |
