——————————————————————————
Using Zombies in the Critical Medical Humanities:
A Transdisciplinary Methodology for the Development of Ethical
Thinking and Feeling
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Mia Jayne Harrison
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
2020 STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.
I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.
Mia Harrison
26 August 2020
Page ii of ix ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the critical potential of the pop culture figure of the zombie for the enhancement of ethical debates in the areas of health and medicine, both as an illustrative intervention into current debates and as a way of provoking new ones. Situated within the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical medical humanities, it draws on theoretical precepts from the disciplines of cultural studies, gender studies, film studies, philosophy, law, anthropology, and science and technology studies in order to conduct a close study of two types of narratives: those produced in zombie popular media and those popularly generated out of scientific and public understandings of medical phenomena. Through this process, it develops a transdisciplinary methodology for addressing difficult ethical questions posed both in the specialised field of medical ethics and in broader public discourse. In doing so, it responds to a call in medical ethics for a more expansive approach to ethical thinking, arguing that close critical attention to popular culture broadly, and the zombie specifically, can promote feeling-inflected approaches to addressing ethical and philosophical opportunities in health and medicine already identified by scholars in health ethics, feminist science and technology studies, medical anthropology, and critical medical humanities. Furthermore, it argues that feeling and affect produced through popular culture constitute a strong and much-needed mechanism for ethical thinking in health and medicine. Through four transdisciplinary case studies, this thesis utilises a qualitative and experimental research approach combining methods of close textual analysis, critical discourse analysis, thought experiments, and radical qualitative comparison. These case studies analyse a series of zombie types (found in the zombi stories of Haiti and the films/television series White Zombie [1932], Night of the Living Dead [1968], Dawn of the Dead [1978], Day of the Dead [1985], Land of the Dead [2005], The Walking Dead [2011–present], Warm Bodies [2013], and The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975]). They then use these zombie types, along with the narrative and aesthetic techniques that produced them, as a source of theory to critically and affectively investigate a range of biomedical topics (including organ donation, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, death, immunisation, and microchimaerism). In developing this transdisciplinary, multimodal methodology and applying it to the above biomedical and bioethical case studies, the approach of this thesis offers a rich, flexible, and generative contribution to critical medical humanities and beyond.
Page iii of ix TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi Preface: A Brief Reflection on COVID-19 vii
PART 1 1
Introduction 2
Chapter 1: Zombies! From Haiti to the Academy 11
1.1 Usage of Terms 11 1.2 Vodoun in Haiti 13 1.3 The Zombie in Popular Culture 16 1.4 Classic Academic Analyses 26 1.5 The Zombie as a Critical Tool 31 1.6 Zombies: What and Why? 37
Chapter 2: Critical Medical Humanities, Popular Culture, and Radical Transdisciplinarity 44
2.1 Disciplinary Intervention 44 2.2 The Value of Popular Culture 51 2.3 Methods 59
PART 2 70
Chapter 3: The Vulnerable Bodies of the Organ Donor and the Early Zombi/e 71
3.1 White Zombie 75 3.2 The Evolution of Organ Theft Urban Legends and the Zombi/e 77 3.3 The Zombi/e in a Mass and the Zombi/e in Pieces 88
Chapter 4: Personhood, Agency, and the Post-Romero Zombie 103
4.1 The Usefulness and Risks of the Zombie as Metaphor: Romero’s Zombies and Alzheimer’s Disease 107 4.2 Legal Personhood, the Dead Donor Rule, and The Walking Dead 125
Page iv of ix PART 3 143
Introduction to Part 3: Beyond Personhood, Towards Relationality 144
Chapter 5: Healing Heterogeneity and Warm Bodies 154
5.1 Boundaries and Non-Places 155 5.2 Immunity and the Foreign Body 161 5.3 Consumption as Affective Boundary Crossing 172
Chapter 6: Foetomaternal Microchimaerism and The Rocky Horror Picture Show 184
6.1 The Production of Agency in Chimaera Narratives 191 6.2 Diffracting the Boundaries of Self and Non-Self 204 6.3 The Gendered and Sexed Identities of the Chimaera 213
Conclusion 229
Media Mentioned 236 References 239
Page v of ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would be difficult to complete a truly transdisciplinary project without accumulating a long list of people who have supported, encouraged, and inspired me along the way. I will try to be brief. First and foremost, thank you to my supervisor Ruth Barcan, who not only emboldened me to pursue a much more difficult thesis, but also (I believe) a much less boring one. Thanks also to my associate supervisor Anthea Taylor, especially for her feedback in the final stages of my candidature. Thank you to Lee Wallace, Rachel Cole, Hannah Gillard, and Nicole Waterson for providing me with feedback on chapters and conference papers along the way, and to Sarah Bauer- Mackenzie for being a generous audience when I needed someone to listen to me practice my presentations. An especially big thank you to Scott Webster and Vanessa Gregory for the tedious (or satisfying, if you ask Vanessa) task of carefully reading my thesis in full. These extra eyes and ears have been very welcome. Thank you to the various academic communities around the world who have listened to me present my work and provided helpful feedback, as well as to the funding bodies who made this possible—the FASS Postgraduate Research Support Scheme at the University of Sydney, the GCS Strategic Student Funds Scheme at the University of Sydney, and Elizabeth Stephens’s ARC Future Fellowship Travel Bursary. A special thanks to Sydney Health Ethics, and in particular Claire Hooker and Christopher Jordens, for being incredibly gentle and generous as I began to test out my ideas beyond my own discipline. Thank you to the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies for their warmth, collegiality, lively discussion, and Friday afternoon drinks. A special thank you to Elspeth Probyn and Jessica Kean for their continued support of my professional development in GCS and beyond. I cannot imagine a better environment within which to conduct research and teach, nor a more supportive group of peers. I have cultivated too many friendships to name in full, but I am so incredibly grateful for what this department has offered me—intellectually and emotionally. Finally, thank you to the friends and family not yet mentioned above, especially my brother, Paul Harrison, and my oldest friend, Anita Dawson. And of course, thank you to Yasmin and Gregg Harrison, who are not only inspiring, loving, and supportive parents, but are also formally trained in biology and physics and so have received some incredibly specific emails and texts about diffraction and Darwinism over these past 4 years. You have me instilled in me a joy for learning and creativity that has made this all possible. Page vi of ix PREFACE: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON COVID-19
It goes without saying that when I began writing this thesis in 2016, I could never have imagined that the final months would be spent in the midst of a pandemic—moreover, one with striking resonance to many of the issues about which I am writing. A more zealous student might have been tempted to overhaul their entire thesis: “Zombies and COVID-19: A Transdisciplinary
Approach!” After all, Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2020) released a book on COVID-19 in
March and I would have at least four months more than him to refine my thinking.
Alas, I will not be spending the final hour of my PhD kneading my thesis into a COVID-19- shaped box for a couple of reasons. First, the obvious: doing so would require a choice between significantly extending my candidature or producing something unforgivably rushed and shallow.
But my second reason is one of ethics: the situation with COVID-19 is still unfolding. We can see the consequences of speaking too early on such issues play out in some of the public responses by eminent international philosophers to date. First, on the 26th of February, Giorgio Agamben described Italy’s emergency response to the “alleged” epidemic as “frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded” (Agamben in Foucault et al. 2020). He went on to criticise the limitations on freedoms and state of fear that such a response had caused, describing the virus as “practically nothing” compared to the common flu, and probably less lethal than car accidents or worker fatalities in Italy
(Ibid.).
The following day, Jean-Luc Nancy publicly admonished his “old friend” and went on to announce that Agamben had been one of the few people to advise Nancy (many decades ago) to ignore doctors’ advice that he should have a heart transplant—a decision, Nancy believes, that would almost certainly have led to his death (Nancy 2020). Nancy concluded by saying that we are all capable of being misled and expressed his broader admiration for Agamben (Ibid.). The day after
Page vii of ix that, Roberto Esposito joined in the public conversation to address Nancy’s dismissal of the paradigm of biopolitics while also critiquing Agamben’s position on the current situation:
One thing is claiming, as Foucault does, that in the last two and [a] half
centuries politics and biology have progressively formed an ever tighter
knot, with problematic and sometimes tragic results. Another is to assimilate
incomparable incidents and experiences. I would personally avoid making
any sort of comparison between maximum security prisons and a two-week
quarantine in the Po Lowlands. (Esposito in Foucault et al. 2020)
To which Nancy succinctly replied (via email to Sergio Benvenuto), “neither ‘biology’ nor ‘politics’ are precisely determined terms today […] I have no use for their assemblage” (Nancy in Foucault et al. 2020.).
Others continued to weigh in. Eventually, on March 17th, Agamben returned with a brief essay titled “Clarifications,” which began rather dramatically:
An Italian journalist applied himself, according to the best practice of his
profession, to distorting and falsifying my considerations on the ethical
confusion into which the epidemic is throwing the country, where there is no
longer even any respect for the dead. In the same way as it’s not worth
mentioning his name, it’s not worth rectifying his predictable manipulations.
(Agamben in Foucault et al. 2020)
He concluded by reiterating that we should remain concerned about the future and to what extent the security measures implemented during the pandemic would extend beyond the medical emergency.
All of this is to say that the consequences of speaking too early on an unfolding situation can be at best, a potential source of future embarrassment, and at worst, a cause of great harm.
Page viii of ix Moreover, what should the role of theorists and philosophers (even those of us committed to transdisciplinarity) be in contributing to a discourse in which even virologists and epidemiologists are meeting increasing public skepticism? To insert oneself into an evolving conversation, where potentially millions of lives are at stake, is not a decision to take lightly.
Yet it would be impossible not to address COVID-19. The resonances between the public discourses on COVID-19 and the objects of my analyses are too great, and the effects of the pandemic (social, medical, etc.) will be too significant. Thus, instead of ignoring COVID-19 entirely, I will at various points throughout my thesis pause for a reflection on how my arguments spill out into, and are transformed by, the current context. I will also focus primarily on how
COVID-19 is taken up in public discourses (and the subsequent implications of these engagements), rather than discussing the science of the disease.
It is also worth acknowledging the challenges of producing a thesis that advocates for a pluralistic approach to the production of medical knowledge in a climate in which conspiracy theorists are claiming that COVID-19 is caused by 5G networks, biowarfare, or is simply a hoax
(Ahmed et al. 2020). I do believe that non-dominant perspectives offer important contributions to the presently overly rationalist Western canon of medical thought. I do not believe that software developer and business magnate Bill Gates is planning to inject trackable microchips through the
COVID-19 vaccine (Ibid.). The call for open and pluralistic approaches to the production of medical knowledge does not invite perspectives from any apocryphal source, nor does it weigh all perspectives equally. Instead, this thesis advocates for a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production and asks us to recognise the histories and values that inform the assumption of objectivity in dominant scientific thought.
Page ix of ix PART 1 INTRODUCTION
Zombie is the word on everyone’s lips because zombie as metaphor condenses elements of the present that we most need, and are least able, to think about. […] Zombie is a metaphor that enables ‘us’—a mass us; an undifferentiated, transcultural, global ‘us’—to think the impossibility of now.
Rutherford 2013, p. 23
The zombie has proven itself not only as a legitimate subject of scholarship and a powerful cultural metaphor, but also as a strong tool of critical thought in biomedicine. The zombie is employed as a metaphor, adjective, and modifier in much popular biomedical discourse, but has also moved beyond such symbolic usage to model real-world biomedical crises, to think through philosophical conundrums, and to form the subject of various hypothetical thought experiments where real-world logics are applied to fictional zombie scenarios. The elasticity and creativity of the zombie as a tool of critical thought is undeniable.
This thesis investigates the imaginative critical potential of the zombie from within the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical medical humanities. To do this, it establishes four primary research aims:
1. To develop a qualitative, experimental, mixed-method research approach for use in critical
medical humanities that is informed by transdisciplinary theories, methods, and
2. To test the zombie figure as an instrument and source of theory in critical medical
humanities.
3. To demonstrate the utility of feeling and affect (and in particular, how they are generated
via popular culture consumption) in health and medical ethics.
Page 2 of 277 4. To contribute to the long and rich philosophical discussions across various disciplines in
(and outside of) academia that ask what does it mean to be human? To be a person? To be
living? To have autonomy?
These aims are accomplished through a series of mixed-method case studies, where key examples of the zombie in popular media are put into dialogue with biomedical phenomena in the human body. Each case study speaks to a particular biomedical issue and uses a specific zombie type and combination of methodological techniques to guide my approach to analysis. I consider existing scholarly discussions taking place in these areas and present alternative models for approaching these topics. Crucially, however, I do not propose singular or superior alternative models; instead, I seek to contribute a more productive tapestry that allows for rich, flexible, multiple, and affective ways of producing knowledge. In doing so, I demonstrate that the zombie is an epistemologically and affectively generative tool in the areas of health and medical ethics. Furthermore, I argue that feeling and affect produced through popular culture constitute a strong and much-needed mechanism for ethical thinking in health and medicine.
The most significant contribution of this thesis is its methodological approach. I develop a qualitative, experimental, mixed-method research approach that contributes to evolving arts- inflected methodologies in critical medical humanities. This approach is informed by transdisciplinary theories and methods from the arts and humanities, health and medical ethics, law, and the natural sciences. I use this transdisciplinary approach to address ethical and philosophical opportunities in health and medicine already identified by scholars in health ethics, feminist science and technology studies, medical anthropology, and critical medical humanities. I critique technologies of power in medicine and health and, along with progressive thinkers in these fields, continue the work of challenging the rationalist model of Western medical knowledge production. I propose exploratory answers to abstract questions such as “what is autonomy?” and “what is a
Page 3 of 277 person?” I interrogate metaphysical boundaries between binaries including human and nonhuman; living and dead; fiction and reality; loss and gain; self and other; inside and outside; vulnerable and threatening; contaminated and pure; and disease and healing.
The technical and metaphysical mechanisms of the zombie in popular culture, along with its historical and cultural significance and potential for provoking affect and feeling, make it an excellent tool for addressing the research goals above. In developing the methodology for this thesis and applying it to biomedical and bioethical case studies, I propose that my approach offers a rich, flexible, and generative contribution to critical medical humanities and beyond. Furthermore, in framing such a methodology as transdisciplinary (as opposed to multi- or interdisciplinary), I produce specific technical and epistemological offerings that transcend that of any singular contributing discipline. Where multidisciplinarity presents an additive or cumulative approach to research, in which individual (and implicitly siloed) disciplines contribute their own perspective to a subject, and interdisciplinarity presents a collaborative approach to research, in which different individual disciplines are in conversation, both suggest that these individual disciplines can and should remain unchanged through the process of such research (Nicolescu 2014, p. 187).
Furthermore, the process of joining disciplines in such a way necessarily results in an artificial hardening and clarifying of the boundaries between disciplines in order to distinguish the contributions each discipline offers (Hodge 2007, p. 217). In contrast, transdisciplinarity offers something more radical and ultimately messier than either of these approaches. To borrow a thematically auspicious descriptor from Hodge (1995), transdisciplinarity allows us to produce more monstrous forms of knowledge; to look beyond the shadowy margins of dominant disciplines; to allow (indeed, facilitate) a cross-contamination between disciplines; to expose the permeability of the supposed boundaries between disciplines; to insist that the process of working with different knowledges, logics, and methods must transform every discipline involved.
Page 4 of 277 This is not to say that transdisciplinarity rejects the goals and contributions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, or interdisciplinarity; rather, it involves working not simply between and across disciplines, but “beyond all discipline” (Nicolescu 2014, p. 187). In proposing my transdisciplinary methodology, I draw from multiple theories, methods, and bodies of research and investigate what opportunities arise when such theories, methods, and literatures are moved beyond the hegemonic margins of their disciplinary homes (which are often characterised by internally coherent but externally opaque logics and languages) into a shared space; when they are not simply put into dialogue with each other but allowed to transform and co-constitute each other. I follow education and writing scholars Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson’s (2006) prompt to “work with literatures” as an ongoing, iterative, and incomplete process (pp. 34–35). In this way, I consider how transdisciplinary literatures inform not only my research, but also each other.
For this reason, I frequently draw explicit attention to the research interests and disciplinary expertise of the academics (and non-academics) I cite throughout this thesis. This stylistic manifestation of the literatures’ contexts orients the reader to the importance of the discipline, location, and register of the evidence I am assembling, thereby signalling the audiences to whom these writers speak as well as the kinds of knowledges, histories, and logics they draw upon in their writing. I believe this contextualisation of sources is an especially important part of transdisciplinary scholarship as it demonstrates the ways that different voices and perspectives overlap, converse, and inform one another. It also creates a map of sites of knowledge production and transformation.
This thesis is structured in three parts. Part 1 establishes the context, methodology, and interventions of the thesis. Part 2 is thematically centred around the vulnerability of the human body and how monstrosity is produced within the bounded body. Part 3 moves beyond this focus on the vulnerable singular person to consider how bodies are inherently multiple and intracorporeally
Page 5 of 277 relational. It furthermore introduces the mythological and scientific figure of the chimaera as a fruitful companion to the zombie.
OUTLINE
Part 1
CHAPTER 1: ZOMBIES! FROM HAITI TO THE ACADEMY
Chapter 1 tracks the evolution of the zombi of Haiti to the zombie of North American popular culture. It then presents a summary of how the zombie has been presented in popular analyses, classic academic analyses, and as a critical tool in scholarly thought. It finally defines what the zombie is and justifies why the zombie is the critical focus of this thesis.
CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES, POPULAR CULTURE, AND RADICAL
TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Chapter 2 establishes the methodology of the thesis. It begins by outlining the disciplinary interventions being made and explicating the value of popular culture in critical analysis. It then articulates the transdisciplinarity of the thesis and defines the four techniques that form the basis of my mixed-method research approach: close textual analysis, discourse analysis, thought experiments, and radical qualitative comparison.
Part 2
CHAPTER 3: THE VULNERABLE BODIES OF THE ORGAN DONOR AND THE EARLY
ZOMBI/E
Chapter 3 utilises radical qualitative comparison to better understand two types of narratives: stories of the zombi of Haiti along with the zombie of the 1932 film White Zombie, and cultural, including medical, narratives surrounding organ transplantation. Through this comparison,
Page 6 of 277 I identify recurrent themes of compromised bodily integrity, including cultural anxieties relating to the commodification of and unauthorised access into the human body. I begin by interrogating the argument that horror narratives about organ theft serve to both disturb and reassure audiences by conducting a comparative analysis of organ theft narratives and stories of the zombi/e in Latin
America and the United States. In doing so, I argue that the capacity for horror narratives to be reassuring relies on the (un)likelihood of such fears eventuating—something which is complicated when histories of colonialism are taken into consideration. I then analyse the representation of eyes in White Zombie and use this analysis to explore the vague and emotionally motivated reported reasons for selective refusal of corneal donation after death. I additionally trouble dominant Western medical understandings of the body as flesh and unlinked to notions of spirit, an afterlife, or similar, instead arguing that the ontological and phenomenological concerns of donors, informed by their own understandings of personhood and spirituality, must be taken into consideration when seeking to understand the motivations for such refusal. Through these qualitative comparisons, I argue that zombie stories make visible particular social and cultural concerns about the vulnerability of the body and in doing so, they allow for important interventions into debates about organ transplantation in cultural studies and health ethics discourse.
CHAPTER 4: PERSONHOOD, AGENCY, AND THE POST-ROMERO ZOMBIE
Chapter 4 questions how agency and personhood should be understood in the body in the context of medical issues such as Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, brain death, and Permanent
Vegetative States. It considers how we construct categories such as “living” (versus “dead”) and
“human” (versus “nonhuman”), as well as cultural concerns about the importance of memory in establishing a stable personal identity. This chapter utilises the zombie type established primarily by
George A. Romero, focusing specifically on Romero’s Dead series and the AMC television series
The Walking Dead (2011–present). In focusing on these zombies, I pose several ethical questions:
Page 7 of 277 do the classic, shuffling, seemingly unthinking zombies of Romero’s films and The Walking Dead have agency?; are these zombies alive, dead, or somewhere in-between?; can they be considered to be the same “people” they were before their death/zombification?; can they be considered “people” at all? To do this, I use the method of the thought experiment to explore the kinds of emotional and affective attachments we have to different representations of personhood, and furthermore investigate how speculative fiction provides a space for feeling-through complicated ethical dilemmas. This responds to calls in medical ethics to find new ways to help us think through difficult questions, taking up health ethics scholar Paul Macneill’s suggestion that the arts can help promote better modes of ethical behaviour that move beyond normative approaches (2014, p. 259).
In doing so, this chapter argues that thinking alone is not sufficient, but creative and exploratory ways of ethical feeling are very much needed.
Part 3
INTRODUCTION TO PART 3: BEYOND PERSONHOOD, TOWARDS RELATIONALITY
Part 3 marks a conceptual turn in the thesis. Where Chapters 3 and 4 were primarily interested in notions of vulnerability, personhood, autonomy, and intercorporeal relations, Chapters
5 and 6 move to consider the possibilities of the intracorporeal—namely, the healing potential of corporeal heterogeneity. Rather than exploring the anxieties produced through the losing of the self
(through organ donation in Chapter 3 or loss of memory in Chapter 4), Chapters 5 and 6 ask: what does it mean to bring the other within? In addition to facilitating the transition between these chapters, Part 3 also formally introduces the figure of the chimaera as a composite monster already lending its name to various heterogeneous bodies in the biomedical sciences. It furthermore argues that the zombie figure offers a way of making sense of the affective and messy entanglements within/between the chimaeric body. Finally, Part 3 presents alternative models to existing dominant militaristic and maternalistic narratives of the (supposedly single and pure) body.
Page 8 of 277 CHAPTER 5: HEALING HETEROGENEITY AND WARM BODIES
Chapter 5 focuses on the biomedical phenomena of microchimaerism and immunisation to explore how transgressive boundary crossing can be thought of as capable of producing a healing form of corporeal heterogeneity. It explores some sociocultural taboos of corporeal boundary crossing and how we can make sense of the grotesqueness of visceral techniques of healings. This chapter utilises the zombie type introduced in the 2013 romantic comedy film, Warm Bodies; these zombies are functionally unique in zombie lore in their ability to relive the memories of their victims through the consumption of the victims’ brains. Thus, the zombies both physically and metaphysically bring the other within. Crucially, however, this ability to relive the memories of a human prompts the protagonist zombie to emotionally relate to the humans around him and, eventually, heal himself. Thus, the destructive act of consuming the foreign produces a stronger, heterogeneous body. I use close textual analysis to engage with the cinematic techniques of this film to think through the affective potential of watching the zombie in the context of a fictional film. I think about how Warm Bodies moves us to feel particular feelings and how these feelings can allow us to think about the body in different ways. I explore the grotesque but healing act of cannibalism in the film and link this to how human bodies bring the outside inside in similarly gross but healing ways. Through this affective exploration, I consider how the body may be thought of as a messy assemblage, and how this assemblage produces the potential for healing.
CHAPTER 6: FOETOMATERNAL MICROCHIMAERISM AND THE ROCKY HORROR
PICTURE SHOW
This chapter focuses on a specific form of cellular chimaerism called “foetomaternal microchimaerism” (FMc). FMc is a form of cellular chimaerism that is produced through pregnancy and is frequently narrativised in popular and scientific literature within one of two frameworks: militaristic (where the foreign cells invade the vulnerable nationstate body) or maternalistic (where
Page 9 of 277 FMc is a natural expression of gendered familial relationships between mother and child). This chapter diverts from the more obvious examples of zombies presented in previous chapters to consider how the zombie as a monster type can be understood in other fictional stories; namely, The
Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). In particular, I am interested in the Frankensteinian relationship between the creature, Rocky, and his performatively, ritualistically, and reflexively produced creator, Frank-N-Furter. In this example, Rocky constitutes the zombie figure, against which the chimaeric figure of Frank-N-Furter presents a compelling point of comparison. I focus on the
Frankenstein–Creature relationship and how its particular manifestation in Rocky Horror allows for ways of thinking through the functional, structural, and affective power of popular and scientific narratives. I consider the liminal viewing experience of watching Rocky Horror as a midnight movie and how the anthropological notions of communitas and liminality (along with Karen
Barad’s [2014] conceptualisation of diffraction in physics), present ways of destabilising social and corporeal boundaries. Finally, I argue the idea of citationality as understood in feminist and cultural theory, particularly when read through a popular text such as Rocky Horror, offers a cogent contribution to critical medical humanities in helping us make sense of both scientific narratives (in public and academic arenas) and embodied experiences.
Through these case studies, I propose that popular culture (and the zombie in particular) should not be confined to constituting an object of analysis; instead, popular culture is a source of theory and a tool for radical critical thought. It holds particular value for its capacity to invoke emotion and affect through narrative and aesthetic techniques, and this in turn promotes a more empathetic thinking-through of complex ideas about the body. Ultimately, these case studies demonstrate a working case for the mixed-method, transdisciplinary approach developed in this thesis that can be taken up in critical medical humanities and beyond.
Page 10 of 277 CHAPTER 1: ZOMBIES! FROM HAITI TO THE ACADEMY
1.1 Usage of Terms
Before I begin, it is necessary to spend some time defining a few of the key terms that will be used throughout this thesis. There is no singular historical usage of terms associated with the zombie and various spellings and usages are highly debated, particularly when in connection with their Afro-Caribbean roots. The history of the zombie is long and complex, with various cultural entanglements that have been all but eliminated for contemporary popular consumption. Thus, in many ways, the words “zombie” and “voodoo” are not only detached from their original contexts but are also considered by many to be culturally insensitive when connected to their cultural origins.
Thus, I seek to establish here a clear vocabulary that I will use for the entirety of this thesis.
The etymology of the word “zombie” is a contentious topic, with various scholars proposing different origins. Suggestions have included a derivation from the French word for
“shadows” (ombres), the West Indian word for “ghost” (jumbie), the Arawak Indian term for “souls of the dead” (zemis), a word in the African Bonda language (zumbi), a term for a “cadaver” among the Mitsogo people of Gabon (ndzumbi), or a Kongo word meaning “spirit of a dead person” (nzambi) (Davis 1988, p. 57). The clearest direct lineage we have to the word “zombie” is zombi or zonbi, which has been documented to have been used as far back as Saint-Domingue (the
French colony of Hispaniola lasting from 1659 to 1804, known today as Haiti) (McAlister 2012, p.
459). Early usage of zombi/zonbi did not refer to a specific creature, but instead was an umbrella term that covered a variety of spirits and demi-gods in the West African religions (Dendle 2007, p.
46). Indeed, even though specific mentions of the zombi as a revenant date back as far as 1792, the term was more frequently used throughout the 1800s in connection with the Vodoun snake god, or to refer to Jean Zombi (a Haitian revolutionary), and did not come to be more commonly associated with the undead until the early twentieth century (Bishop 2008, p. 143). The evolution of the
Page 11 of 277 meanings attached to the word zombi will be explored at length in this chapter, as will its connections with anti-colonial resistance.
The term “voodoo” has a slightly less complicated history, yet there are still numerous variations in the spelling, with scholars and writers having used terms such as vodoun, vodun, vodou, voudou, voudon, or voudoun to refer to the anthropological use of the word. The term vodoun (etc.) can be roughly translated from the African Fon language to mean “spirit,” but much like the term zombi, has attracted more complex attachments over time (Luckhurst 2015, p. 45).
Throughout this thesis, I follow ethnobotanist Wade Davis’s spelling; Davis uses the word
“Vodoun” both because of its phonetic accuracy and to dissociate the word from the sensational and inaccurate representation of “voodoo” in popular media (Davis 1988, p. 291).
As will become clear in this chapter, the contemporary understandings of the words
“zombie” and “voodoo” must be separated from their anthropological understandings, yet both are of interest to my research. For the purpose of clarity, I take a similar approach to that of writer and academic Roger Luckhurst in his book Zombies: A Cultural History (2015, p. 6). With the exception of quotations, for which I uphold the authors’/translators’ original spellings, I use the following terms: zombi refers to the cultural/religious/mystical figure of largely Afro-Caribbean origin;
“zombie” is used for the popular culture figure that entered the American imagination in the early twentieth century; Vodoun is used to refer to various Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs and practices;
“voodoo,” like “zombie,” refers to the contemporary pop culture interpretation of Afro-Caribbean mysticism and ritual, which has been significantly stylised and romanticised by ethnographers, journalists, writers, and media creators since America was introduced to the zombie. It is important to note here that Haitian peasants use the term Vodoun to refer to a specific ritual, not their entire religion (Davis 1988, p. 291). However, as so many scholars have taken a less strict approach to the
Page 12 of 277 usage of the term Vodoun, I use the term to cover all aspects of the associated mysticism, religion, and practices to avoid misrepresenting the research of my sources.
1.2 Vodoun in Haiti
Unlike most prevalent other pop culture monsters we know today, the zombie has no origin in European literature or folklore; instead it originated largely in the Afro-Caribbean religion and mysticism of Vodoun (McAlister 2012, p. 461). We can trace parts of the contemporary zombie back through history to Central Africa, specifically colonial-era Kongo (Ibid.). Elements of Vodoun were brought to Haiti during French colonial rule (1625–1804) as the French mass-imported slaves from Africa (Luckhurst 2015, p. 46).
The French colonial rule of Haiti played a significant role in the evolution of the Vodoun religion and in turn contributed to the development of the Western understanding of “voodoo.”
Haitian Vodoun is a complex hybrid of Western Christianity and African mysticism, which has notably evolved in response to the suppressive efforts of Christian missionaries. Following significant intervention from Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the practice of Vodoun was systematically prevented among the peasantry in Haiti, leading to the black-market sale of Vodoun religious instruments (Luckhurst 2015, p. 35). In a response to the mass conversion and suppression of non-Christian people by the Catholic church, along with other forms of dispossession, many of the Haitian population (with their diverse African cultures) united under a shared African identity
(Moreman 2011, pp. 124-125).
Despite an official decree in the seventeenth century that all slaves must be baptised, there was little to no followup of Christian education. The slaves of Haiti therefore had only a passing understanding of Christian theology and were much more familiar with the “loa” (Vodoun gods/ spirits) (Bishop 2010, p. 45). Many of the Haitian slaves adopted Catholicism superficially while
Page 13 of 277 retaining their Vodoun belief system, which led to the integration of Christian symbolism into
Vodoun practice and mysticism (Moreman 2011, p. 125). Christian narratives were in turn often revised to accommodate Haitian Vodoun beliefs. For instance, many loa became visually identified as Catholic holy figures, with their images integrated into ritual practice and worship, such as the
Virgin Mary being considered to represent the loa Ezili (Edmonds and Gonzalez 2010, pp. 111–
112). Some even came to believe that Jesus’s tomb had been guarded by Haitian soldiers, who stole the secret to resurrection from God and passed it on to the sorcerers of Haiti (McAlister 2012, p.
467).
As the colonial rule of Haiti continued (and the slaves grew in number) Vodoun became more than a cultural/religious belief system, and transformed into a form of resistance against religious and cultural oppression. The brutality inflicted by the colonial planters of Saint Domingue was increasing, with physical bodily harm and torture employed against the slaves as a method of control (Davis 1988, p. 215). Beating, murder, rape, castration, flogging, sexual mutilation, live burial, and the spraying of flesh with boiling syrup were just some of the common acts committed against the slaves (Ibid.). By the late 1700s, Vodoun was a powerful unifier of revolutionary slaves
(p. 225). In 1791, hundreds of slaves gathered to swear allegiance to the revolution and in the following weeks, plantations were burned, two thousand mills were destroyed, and a thousand white persons were strangled (pp. 225–226). Thus, Vodoun transcended its role as an expression of religious belief and cultural unity, and actively became a tool of colonial resistance.
Before I introduce some of the finer details about Vodoun mysticism and practice, a few disclaimers must be made. First, the inclusion of the zombi in Vodoun mysticism is not ubiquitous
(Flint 2009, p. 9). Vodoun has evolved through the complex merging of various religions and belief systems and it would be a gross simplification to offer the following descriptions of Vodoun practice as representative for all who participate in it. For the purpose of this thesis, I focus
Page 14 of 277 primarily on the beliefs and practices that relate to the contemporary figure of the zombie. Second, while stories of zombis in Haiti all feature a “dead” victim who returns to the living, other details are much less consistent: magic and poison both feature as methods for creating the zombi, while revenge and the exploitation of unpaid labour for capitalist gain are two popular motivations
(Bishop 2010, p. 51). Furthermore, such accounts have been brought to the West by white ethnographers, who often voiced the stories themselves, rather than directly documenting the words of the Haitians. This has led to an interesting situation where the ethnographers have become part of the tradition as the primary storytellers of Haitian folklore in the West (both through translation of existing stories and through original storytelling) (Ibid.). The following should be considered with this potential bias in mind.
The Vodoun religion is founded on the relationship between life and death, with the barrier between life and death considered permeable (Davis 1988, p. 58). Death is a separation from the mortal body and understanding this separation forms a key element in the production of the zombi
(p. 57). The zombi is created through the splitting of the victim into two separate zombi beings: the zombi efface1 or zombi astral (spirit zombi) and the zombi corps cadavre or zombi jardin (flesh zombi) (p. 8). This separation is performed by the bokor (sorcerer).
The act of creating a zombi is not necessarily criminal or evil. In his work in Haitian communities, Wade Davis found that many cases of zombification were a result of social sanction that had the full support of the community (1988, pp. 213–215). The two resulting zombis have distinct uses and appearances. The zombi corps cadavre can be recognised by its docility, glassy eyes, and nasally voice, and is often put to work on farms as a slave (Bishop 2010, p. 48; Davis
1988, p. 60). By contrast, the zombi efface is trapped in a bottle, which can then be manipulated for a variety of purposes such as healing, protection, or attack, or can be implanted into other bodies
1 I have followed the majority of my sources in spelling “efface” with no accent (as opposed to the French “effacé”). Page 15 of 277 (human or otherwise) for use by the bokor (Davis 1988, p. 60; McAlister 2012, p. 465). Afro-
Caribbean scholar Elizabeth McAlister describes this bottled zombi efface as a commodity, noting that the dead have now taken a place similar to the historical position of Afro-Caribbeans under slavery—they are rendered nonhuman, a commodity, and enslaved (2012, p. 465). This thematic understanding of the zombi forms a large part of early zombie cinema in Hollywood. Though an understanding of the zombi in its dual form has not been translated into the Hollywood zombie canon, the idea of the zombie as colonial slave is present for a significant portion of Hollywood zombie cinema.
1.3 The Zombie in Popular Culture
The zombie has not had a simple translation from the zombi of Haiti to the creature we know today. As U.S. audiences increasingly embraced the pop culture figure of the zombie, the representation of the creature adapted and media creators, critics, and audiences began to project their own socially contingent meanings onto the zombie. In order to situate the zombie within its historico-cultural context and explicate the varied ways it is understood across popular cultures and academia today, I must first track the key cultural developments of the zombie throughout history from its advent in cinema. This thesis primarily focuses on the zombie figure in Hollywood and
U.S. media, though other notable manifestations of the zombie will be signalled where relevant.
The zombie was introduced to the U.S. public (and to the world) through a variety of
Western voices, most notably American journalist William B. Seabrook in his book The Magic
Island (1929) (Luckhurst 2015, pp. 40–41). The Magic Island offered a highly stylised and exotic account of his experiences with Haitian Vodoun (or, as Seabrook puts it, “voodoo” and “black magic”). Seabrook’s writing is generally credited as the most direct link between the zombi of Haiti and the zombie that appeared on the screen starting in the early 1930s with Victor Halperin’s White
Page 16 of 277 Zombie (1932). White Zombie largely capitalised on the success of other monster movies of the time, even going so far as to reuse sets from Universal Studios films such as Dracula (1931) and
Frankenstein (1931), and casting Bela Lugosi as mesmerist Murder Legendre, a role distinctly similar to his character in Dracula (Luckhurst 2015, p. 75).
Many of the first zombie films, White Zombie included, centred their plots on the capture and zombification of the white heroine, channelling a gendered cultural fear in North America of the undoing or reversal of colonisation (Bishop 2010, p. 13). At the same time that the zombie was becoming known in Hollywood, the U.S. was withdrawing from its occupation in Haiti (ending in
1934) (Dendle 2007, p. 46). The U.S. had a politically fraught relationship with Haiti at this time; following the murder of Haitian President Guillaume Sam in 1915, the U.S. presented itself as the paternalistic saviour of Haiti as it increased its control over the state. The New York City Bank had been securing control over the finances of Haiti; Haiti became $40 million in debt to the New York banks; and America installed a puppet president and forced Haiti to once again allow foreign ownership of land (Luckhurst 2015, p. 34). Given Haiti’s history of successful slave revolt and decolonisation of a state, the vaguely Caribbean (and sometimes specifically Haitian) settings of early zombie cinema and its frequent focus on slavery would have been particularly relevant to the political climate in the U.S.
The popularity of the zombie in U.S. cinema has historically peaked in times of social and political unrest. At the end of the 1960s, a new zombie was forming that was quite distinct from the
Haitian-inspired figure popular in cinema thus far. In 1968, George A. Romero released Night of the
Living Dead, the first in a series of Dead films that would redefine the zombie genre. Martin Luther
King Jr. had been assassinated mere months before the film’s opening, the civil rights and feminist movements were highly visible in the public consciousness, and anti-war sentiment was on the rise as protests against the Vietnam war took place across North America (Fallows and Owen 2008, p.
Page 17 of 277 25). Night of the Living Dead was a major challenge to audience expectations, and (intentionally or otherwise) tapped into many of these themes. Night starred a black man and a woman as the leads of the film fighting against the senseless violence perpetrated not only by the zombies, but also sometimes by the humans. By the end of the film the heroes are dead, another highly unusual move for a film of this time period. Additionally, many of the stylistic choices of the film would have resonated strongly with audiences of the time. The use of a black and white grade in a time when news programming was broadcast in black and white would have made the film feel more like a documentary (Harper 2005). The graphic still photography sequence presented beneath the end credit title cards would also have been reminiscent of photojournalism from the Vietnam war.
Romero’s next Dead film was just as politically primed for the time period and even more successful. Dawn of the Dead (1978) was set primarily in a shopping mall and commented directly on capitalist consumption. Fallows and Owen argue that the commentary on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead fed directly into the apathy Americans felt post-Watergate: “Sure, the world was corrupt but what could you do about it?” (2008 p. 57). In Dawn, the characters seem content (for a while at least) to indulge in the consumeristic trappings the shopping mall has to offer, sampling fine food, manufacturing “bourgeois” living spaces, and donning luxurious accessories (Ibid.). Yet there is almost something paradoxical about the subject position of the audience of Romero’s films: though films such as Dawn of the Dead use the zombie to comment on the behaviours of the masses (or rather, the perceived behaviours of the masses), the audience themselves are not zombies
(Luckhurst 2015 p. 151). As Luckhurst writes:
For all the assertion that Romero’s message is that ‘the zombies are us,’ this
mode of survival horror often flatters the exceptionalism of its audience,
reinforcing a sense that it is possible with the appropriate exercise of cynical
Page 18 of 277 reason, to see behind and demystify ‘false consciousness’ and stay humanly
alive. (pp. 151–152)
The audience, therefore, is absolved of any of the critical commentary the film is making upon the public. The audience is surely not one of the mindless consuming masses Romero depicts. They can resist the lures of capitalist consumption.
Much like his first two Dead films, Romero’s third instalment, Day of the Dead (1985), featured heroes in marginal positions in society: a black man, an independent woman, and an Irish immigrant (Fallows and Owen 2008, p. 77). Yet despite the arguably progressive slant in Romero’s films, Luckhurst suggests that his success might in part be attributed to “the post-war revival of
Protestant millenarian thought in America” (2015, p. 156). Additionally, though the Caribbean zombie of early Hollywood cinema had now all but gone from the screen, the persistence of cannibalistic imagery in Romero’s films and beyond is a remnant of colonial attitudes towards the
“savage otherness” of Afro-Caribbean culture out of which the zombie had been translated
(Luckhurst 2015, p. 55). With this in mind, Romero is arguably the first significant example of the malleability of the zombie monster type.
As is illustrated at length in this chapter, the zombie has historically been a monster that functions in many ways as a blank canvas, accepting almost any meaning or interpretation media creators and audiences project upon it. Romero’s popularity spawned its own plague of zombie movies, particularly in the U.S. and Italy (where unofficial sequels to Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead had achieved widespread popularity). The increasing popularity of low-cost gore and body horror movies in the horror (and horror comedy) film genres throughout the 1970s and 1980s was a perfect market for this new, bloody, and cannibalistic zombie. Thus, Romero’s early Dead films can be considered the pioneers for the second wave of what English professor and zombie scholar Peter
Dendle identifies as “The Golden Age” of zombie cinema (2001, p. 7).
Page 19 of 277 The third wave would not be seen until the new millennium, but the 1990s is also a noteworthy time in zombie popular culture history due to the advancement of video game technologies, particularly in Japan and North America. Though zombie video games existed as far back as the mid-1980s, Doom (1993), Half Life (1998), and most notably the early Resident Evil games (1996; 1998; 1999) (known in Japan as Biohazard) were highly popular and made accessible by the increasing prevalence of personal computers and home game consoles. Though not quite attaining the zeitgeist of early zombie cinema or the gore-filled zombie furore following Romero’s re-imagining, these games are noteworthy not only for being arguably the strongest carrier of the zombie in Western media throughout the ‘90s, but also for inspiring countless zombie video games, films, and comics over the following decades.
The cultural shift post-9/11 had an immense impact on U.S. cultural products, but zombie cinema can arguably be considered the most revealing (Bishop 2010, pp. 9–10). Following 9/11, a new kind of zombie emerged; this zombie was once again a departure from the preceding wave yet was less defined than either Romero’s zombie or the Haitian-inspired early zombie. Filmmakers increasingly used various disasters of the time to their advantage, with much clearer parallels now drawn between the narratives and tropes of zombie films and the events of the real world. For instance, shots from the film 28 Days Later (2002) directly drew inspiration from journalist footage of real-world crises, such as the Cambodian “killing fields” and an earthquake in China (Bishop
2010, p. 27). These “images of metropolitan desolation and desertion” played into contemporary anxieties of terrorism and large-scale disaster (Ibid.). This new zombie not only seemed to reflect the key anxieties of the time, but also appeared almost prescriptive in documenting mass response to global crises. For example, in filming a remake of Romero’s classic, Dawn of the Dead (2004),
Zack Snyder reportedly noticed similarities in news media-driven “panic and misinformation” between his fictional film and the concurrent SARS epidemic in 2003 (Bishop 2010, p. 28). Thus,
Page 20 of 277 like Romero’s Dead films, the zombie was once again functioning as more than simply a reflection of the cultural anxieties of the times—it was participating in active commentary and reproduction of popular concerns.
A common zombie subtype that emerged in this time period was the zombie epidemic or pandemic, with media centred around this subtype sometimes even attributing the zombie origin to a virus. The “infected” zombies of films such as 28 Days Later, Quarantine (2008), and Planet
Terror (2008) are arguably more frightening than the traditional monsters of fantasy and horror genres, not simply because anyone can be infected, but also because they cross the line into science fiction: the construction of a logical epidemiological justification for the zombie apocalypse makes it feel as though it could really happen (Bishop 2010, p. 28). Though the infection is most commonly compared by critics to the AIDS epidemic, Bishop points out that “cholera, smallpox, anthrax, or the avian or swine flues” could just as easily be referenced in such films (Ibid.). We can only presume that COVID-19 will inspire its own catalogue of zombie pandemic films (indeed, as I note later in this chapter, the zombie apocalypse is already featuring in public discourse on the current pandemic). This transition of third-wave zombie films from the traditional horror genre into more explicitly science fiction (or sci-fi horror) facilitates a more tangible commentary on the horrors of the real world. The third-wave zombie films (and other media) also increasingly combined other real-world threats into their stories, with murder, rape, and other bodily harm featuring heavily. These acts of human-on-human violence often prove to be the most unsettling aspects of new zombie media, even as graphic zombie-on-human violence increases in bloodiness and realism. Such scenes, in a much more direct way, continue the project of the zombie providing commentary on what it means to be human.
Following this new boom of zombie media, Romero returned to his Dead series with three new instalments, beginning with Land of the Dead (2005). Land of the Dead heightens the anxieties
Page 21 of 277 of the genre by making economic and social disparity a more central theme of the film (Bishop
2010, p. 29). It additionally ties closely and deliberately into the anxieties of post-9/11 America.
Leader Paul Kaufman adopts a military style reminiscent of that of the Bush Administration, with safety being offered in return for the sacrifice of freedom, the rich being offered protection (with the poor left to fend for themselves), and troublemakers threatened with incarceration in what Fallows and Owen describe as “an undead Guantanamo Bay” (2008, pp. 118–119). As Bishop notes:
Supposedly like Americans in the years immediately after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the residential population in Land of the Dead is ironically asked by
their selfish and misguided leaders both to continue their lives as if no real
threat existed and to toe the line because of the threat that does exist. (2010,
p. 30)
Though social commentary had always been a feature of the Dead series, in addition to the broader political resonances of war-like imagery, Land of the Dead arguably leans into the critical power of political allegory more than any previous film in the series. Interestingly, in a film climate that increasingly avoided using the word “zombie” explicitly (a trope that has earned its place on
TVTropes under the title “Not Using the ‘Z’ Word”2), Land of the Dead is the first of Romero’s films to use the word “zombie” (TVTropes n.d.).
Today, the zombie is ubiquitous not only in Western popular culture, but is gaining increasing sociopolitical interest. Zombie walks, for instance, where tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people dress up as zombies and march the streets (taking place primarily in major cities across North America) are just one way that the zombie has transcended its various media predecessors. These walks date back to 2003, with events largely functioning as a carnivalesque ode to the zombie genre (Orpana 2011, p. 154). However, the zombie walk was more recently co-opted
2 For example, in 28 Days Later (2002) victims are infected by the “rage” virus; the zombie/vampire hybrid monsters of I Am Legend (2007) are known as “Darkseekers”; REC (2007) never directly names its infected monsters. Page 22 of 277 by political demonstrators in Hamburg ahead of the 2017 G20 summit. One thousand actors in zombie dress joined the two-hour protest against “the destructive impact of capitalism,” with a spokesperson stating, “we cannot wait until change happens from the world’s most powerful, we have to show political and social responsibility – all of us – now” (Said-Moorhouse 2017).
Speaking on the rise of zombie marches, interdisciplinary sociology and literature scholar Jennifer
Rutherford notes that even supposedly apolitical zombie marches are reminiscent of the rhetoric of the “old Left” in their quest to achieve a collective identity and with it exercise a collective power
(2013, pp. 26–27). Thus, the zombie has become a political tool that is being earnestly adopted by those who see its value.
The area of public health has also adopted the zombie as a metaphor. Take, for instance, patients who are described as having “zombie-like” side effects to medication (for example, psychiatric patients experiencing the so-called “Thorazine shuffle”) (Servitje 2016, pp. 2–3). The zombie has become a shorthand for a variety of medical and medicalised states, both in medical- related fields and in Western popular consciousness. An example of this can be seen in the description in news media of psychosis-inducing bath salts as “zombie drugs” (p. 3).
Even before the zombie was understood as the shuffling, grotesque creature we know today, such imagery already existed in U.S. public discourse. In a 1962 Californian court case addressing the criminalisation of narcotics addiction, the following description was employed:
To be a confirmed drug addict is to be one of the walking dead. … The teeth
have rotted out; the appetite is lost, and the stomach and intestines don’t
function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a
billious [sic] yellow. In some cases, membranes of the nose turn a flaming
red; the partition separating the nostrils is eaten away; breathing is difficult.
Oxygen in the blood decreases; bronchitis and tuberculosis develop. Good
Page 23 of 277 traits of character disappear, and bad ones emerge. Sex organs become
affected. Veins collapse, and livid purplish scars remain. Boils and abscesses
plague the skin; gnawing pain racks the body. Nerves snap; vicious
twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind, and
sometimes complete insanity results. Often times, too, death comes much
too early in life. … Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the
plague of being one of the walking dead. (Robinson v. California 1962)
This visceral association with “the walking dead” came six years before the release of Night of the
Living Dead. It is therefore no wonder that the zombie popularised by Romero, and then revived in more recent years, has become such a common metaphor in Western medical narratives—an understanding of such a creature-type being associated with medicalised subjects has existed for more than half a century.
Today, the zombie has become a common (if troubling) descriptor for various degenerative conditions. This, according to literature professor Gerry Canavan, is unsurprising, given contemporary cultural anxieties. Canavan writes:
To risk putting too fine a point on things, we have suddenly become acutely
interested in slow moving, degenerating bodies and forgetful minds with
violently altered personalities at the very moment that cultural concern over
the progressive and degenerative conditions that strike the elderly (such as
Alzheimer’s disease, post-stroke symptomology, advance cancers, aphasias,
multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and the like) is at
an all time high. Likewise, these ravenous undead figures have become
important cultural markers at the very moment that anxiety about the ability
of younger and poorer generational cohorts to support the swelling ranks of
Page 24 of 277 the elderly over the coming decades has become a potent force in Western
politics. (2015, p. 18)
Though the extent to which these two cultural phenomena have influenced each other is debatable, there has nevertheless been a notable rise in the use of the zombie as allegory in discussion of
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (in both popular and public health discourse). I explore the implications of such comparisons at length in Chapter 4.
The study and use of “metaphorical” zombies by public commentators has also exponentially increased over the last two decades. The word “zombie” can be used as a modifier for almost any word and its meaning will be understood: “zombie computers, zombie stocks and shares, zombie corporations, zombie economics, zombie governments, zombie litigation, zombie consciousness” (Luckhurst 2015, p. 8; Lauro and Embry 2008). The zombie as metaphor is quite unique in its ability to draw two opposing ideas together: “death and life; passivity and aggressivity; drive and enslavement; discontinuity and continuity; love and hate; consumption and revulsion; the individual and the mass; self and other; an apocalyptic future and a repressed past” (Rutherford
2013, p. 23). As a modifier, it is frequently applied to objects, concepts, and persons “marked by loss of agency, control of consciousness of their actual state of being: they are dead but they don’t know it yet” (Luckhurst 2015, pp. 8–9). As Rutherford writes:
Zombie is the word on everyone’s lips because zombie as metaphor
condenses elements of the present that we most need, and are least able, to
think about. If we approach zombies as mere fictional constructs or
understand the zombie metaphor – as mere allegory – then we entirely miss
what is going on with zombies today. Metaphors are ways of making
meaning and as such they are vehicles for thought. (2013, p. 23)
Page 25 of 277 Thus, the power of the zombie emerges in its capacity to generate meaning, prompt thought, and facilitate a working-through of prominent cultural concerns.
What is particularly interesting about the zombie metaphor is that the zombie itself is rarely the focus of zombie media. Zombie stories are not about zombies—the zombies are a backdrop
(Green, George, and Wilkinson 2016, p. 80). They surround more personal and deep stories about relationships and the human condition, about the political tensions of the world that produced them, and about culture at large. Perhaps it is this role—as both a maker of and canvas for meaning—that has helped facilitate a translation of the zombie into academia. The ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture has led to increased academic attention across most (if not all) disciplines. In addition to the more obvious areas of cultural studies, literature, film studies, and history, other less likely disciplines have swarmed to seriously study the zombie: law, philosophy, economics, medicine, health, computer science, and the natural sciences have all shown increasing interest in the figure of the zombie over the past two decades. As the zombie continues to gain legitimacy in academic scholarship, it also finds itself transformed by academics into a tool of critical thought.
The following sections explore the study and use of the zombie in academia in depth.
1.4 Classic Academic Analyses
The zombie has been steadily securing its place in academia since its return in the new millennium. A search in Google Scholar for the word “zombie” yields over 130,000 results, with over 10,000 of these published in 2019 alone. Academic analyses of the zombie in the disciplines of literary, film, and television studies have birthed their own field of “zombie studies” (distinguishing itself within the broader “monster studies”), with McFarland Press having published a series of books titled “Contributions to Zombie Studies” with Kyle William Bishop as the series editor—an
Page 26 of 277 English and film studies scholar known for his extensive academic work on the zombie (McFarland n.d.).
The zombies of early U.S. zombie cinema have enjoyed academic engagement primarily through an understanding of such cinema as a colonial or postcolonial text (Aizenberg 1999; Bishop
2008; 2010; Blumberg 2018; Comentale 2017; Luckhurst 2015; McAlister 2012; Phillips 2011).
The zombie is “an example of the trope of hybridity through which we can enjoy postcolonialism’s pleasures, explore its perils, and create a more precise, newer, critical model” (Edna Aizenberg in
Bishop 2010, p. 67). Zombies not only occupy a liminal in-between space, but also represent exotic forbidden desire (Kee 2014, p. 178). The malleability of the zombie makes it a monster ideally situated to symbolise the historical fear of the “other”; the zombie is able to simultaneously remind audiences of the distant horrors of exotic locales (such as Africa and the Caribbean) and the closer- to-home horrors of the lower classes (Barnett and Kooyman 2016, p. 59).
This layered potential of the zombie lends many zombie films to a Marxist reading. For example, when White Zombie is read through a Marxist lens, the character Neil, an American working in finance, represents the bourgeois middle class, while zombie slave master Murder
Legendre becomes a hybrid of the older, Feudal slave master of the historical agrarian economy of
Haiti, and the aspiring imperial capitalist who will profit from burgeoning capitalist systems of power (through exploitation of the “proletariat” zombie class) (Bishop 2008, pp. 148–149). The zombie can be considered an industrialised, working-class version of the vampire (Servitje and Vint
2016, pp. xi–xii). Even the contemporary zombie horde reflects the precarious and devalued state of the working-class human under a Marxist reading; both are expendable and marginalised (pp. xiii– xiv).
As zombie cinema progressed beyond its early, Haitian-inspired iterations, key cultural and political events affecting the U.S. began to influence the kinds of zombie stories told. The
Page 27 of 277 development of the cold war, the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War (and subsequent protests), and the Watergate scandal were all major influences on zombie cinema beginning in the 1950s, but most notably shaping the future of zombie cinema with Romero’s Dead films of the 1960s and 1970s. Film and literature scholars analysing zombie films created in this time period have paid careful attention to the political tone of these decades and how they shaped both the writing and reception of zombie stories (Bishop 2010; Blumberg 2018; Grant 2017;
LaRose 2011; Luckhurst 2015; Randell 2011). Furthermore, many scholars have linked both
Romero’s cinematic success and his influence on the genre to these cultural events (Fallows and
Owen 2008, p. 13).
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the subsequent zombie films inspired by its success have also prompted film and cultural scholars to analyse how such films reflect and critique mass culture, consumerism, and capitalist ideology (Bailey 2013; Balaji 2013; Bishop 2010; Blumberg
2018; Buckley 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff 2017; Giroux 2010; 2011; Harper 2002; Jones 2013;
Larsen 2017; Lauro 2017; Lauro and Embry 2008; Luckhurst 2015; McNally 2017; Schott 2011;
Webb and Byrnand 2008). As Luckhurst writes:
[T]he thematic content of the zombie mass, that resonant image of mindless
shuffling hordes, was also one of the strongest reflections on the objected
form of mass culture. The zombie was one of the most objected products of
the American mass culture industry because it became a commentary on
massification itself. (2015, p. 129)
This exposes an irony in the attention afforded to the figure of the post-Romero zombie. Particularly since Dawn of the Dead, the zombie mass has, in part, come to symbolise the capitalist slavery of mass consumption, both in academia and in popular consciousness. Yet Romero’s conspicuous depiction of the zombie as being unconsciously driven by a consumeristic agenda has been
Page 28 of 277 reproduced en masse in popular culture and popular and academic criticism. Whether this is viewed as an ironic turn of events or simply evidence that Romero understood the potential cultural resonance of the zombie, the creature made popular largely through Dawn’s critique of consumerism has become a ubiquitous commercialised and analysed intellectual product.
Academic analysis of recent zombie media continues to largely explore the cultural themes presented. Such an approach has merit—it is no coincidence that the zombie has peaked in times of high sociopolitical tension in the West (e.g. the Vietnam and Iraq Wars). Zombie cinema is often centred around social and political unrest, along with the cultural anxiety that death is an inescapable reality (Bishop 2010, p. 11). For example, many scholars have analysed zombie media produced since 2001 though the lens of post-9/11 American anxieties (Bishop 2010; Blumberg
2018; Cirucci 2013; Drezner 2011; Froula 2010; McSweeney 2010; Wetmore 2012; Zealand 2011).
Bishop argues that the post-9/11 world has allowed for a return of the zombie that was last matched in popularity “during the civil unrest of the 1960s and ‘70s” (2010, p. 11). He writes:
The unleashing of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
disastrous Tet Offensive and the fall of Saigon, the collapse of the World
Trade Center towers, the rise in terrorist activities, unexplained pandemics,
and natural disasters: each of these human catastrophes mark […] turning
points in cultural historical progress. […] The zombie creature, therefore,
represents a logical ‘form’ for anxieties related to such moments of ‘cultural
historical progress,’ a supernatural creature, often the result of misguided
technology, that is nonetheless essentially natural in appearance. (Bishop
2010, p. 32)
A fear of terrorist attacks post-9/11 is not the only cultural anxiety that has influenced zombie media in the twenty-first century; global health crises (Bishop 2010; Blumberg 2018; Drezner 2011;
Page 29 of 277 Luckhurst 2015; Vint 2016; Wonser and Boyns 2016), the rapid advancement of technology
(Kozma 2013; Riley 2011), and our ecological footprint (Cohen 2017; Lauro 2011; Murphy 2018;
Pollock 2011; Rutherford 2013) have all prominently figured in analyses of the zombie. Scholars studying the zombie have also analysed it through the lenses of gender (Grant 2017; Jones 2011); queerness (Cocarla 2014; Grizzell 2014; Hannabach 2014; Elliott-Smith 2014; McGlotten 2011;
Mora 2013; Thornton 2014; Tidwell 2013); sex and intimacy (Cook 2014; Harmes 2014; Jones
2011; 2013; 2014; Jones and McGlotten 2014; Marks 2014; Vossen 2014); disability (Baldwin and
McCarthy 2013; Canavan 2016; Duane 2017; Hannabach 2014; Tidwell 2013); and race and cultural identity (Ahmad 2011; Bai 2013; Baldwin and McCarthy 2013; Canavan 2017; Coonfield
2013; Geyser 2013; Hannabach 2014; Kee 2014; Ozog 2013; McAlister 2012; Stratton 2017; Vials
2011).
This close critical attention to the zombie also extends to the attention paid by fan communities, particularly in online spaces.3 As Manning notes, “the zombie tradition presents almost a tabula rasa space, a text remarkably free of generic convention or complex heritage, and this blankness makes it an open, accessible or even democratic popular cultural phenomenon” (2015, p. 164). The democracy of the zombie subgenre, along with the often low- budget approach to zombie cinema, invites a significant level of audience participation. Digital technologies allow fans to write extensive blogs on lore, debate in forums, or even contribute to the subgenre with their own films, with the urban settings and simple practical effects frequently employed by career filmmakers being easy to replicate by amateurs (Jenkins 2006, pp. 140–142).
This accessibility fosters a sense of ownership and expertise in fans, many of whom have spent years or even decades consuming, pondering, and writing about zombie stories. For this reason,
3 I have focused primarily on English-speaking online fan communities for this thesis. Due to the anonymity of online spaces, the cultural locations of these fans are often unknown—the internet obscures most of these boundaries. However, further details on the contexts of particular fandoms will be provided where known and relevant (for example, in the midnight movie screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show discussed in Chapter 6). Page 30 of 277 when online entertainment articles pose humorous hypothetical questions about zombie tropes, or challenge the logic of the zombie, it is not unusual to find lengthy, detailed, and thoughtful responses in the comments section (Stork and Van Riper 2013). Digital platforms have created an opportunity for more nuanced and critical explorations of zombie lore, and with this deep, analytical engagement comes the understandable emotional attachment many fans have towards what they consider “canon” (factual within the fictional universe).
The approaches outlined thus far primarily consider the zombie as a reflective figure—that is, one that embodies and reflects some form of social, cultural, or political anxiety. This, as is explored further in Chapter 2, is an important and productive way of critically engaging with the zombie. These approaches also demonstrate why I have chosen to do something different in this thesis. There already exists a preponderance of academic literature on the zombie figure and how it might be seen as a cultural barometer of anxieties and concerns. Furthermore, I consider an analysis of the zombie as a reflective figure to be limited in that it can only utilise half of what the zombie has to offer. The zombie can not only reflect or reveal knowledges, but also produce, model, and complicate them. In the following section I explore the ways that academics and educators have already begun to utilise the zombie as a tool of education, research, ethics, and other real-life modelling.
1.5 The Zombie as a Critical Tool
The zombie is much more than an object of critical exploration—that is, something we can analyse and produce knowledge about; it has become a modelling tool for understanding complex ideas—something that can itself produce knowledge. In philosophy, for example, the zombie
(known as the “philosophical zombie” or “p-zombie”) has been (controversially) employed alongside other philosophical tools (such as the Turing test) in thought experiments to consider
Page 31 of 277 reality and consciousness (Dennett 1995; Moody 1994; Nunez 2010; Webb and Byrnand 2008). The zombie has also been used as a conceptual tool to explain ideas in economics and capitalist markets
(Desjardins and Emerson 2011; Harman 2009; Quiggin 2010).
In a particularly elaborate approach to the application of real-world scholarship to a hypothetical zombie apocalypse, mathematicians from Carleton University and The University of
Ottawa utilise the “classical pop-culture zombie” (which they describe as “slow moving, cannibalistic and undead”) to propose mathematical models for calculating the rate of zombie creation and the rate of zombie destruction to determine “the ‘doomsday’ equilibrium” (Munz et. al.
2013 p. 134–136). Through this model, they conclude that in the case of a short outbreak, total human zombification is likely, and that human–zombie coexistence would be impossible (p. 137).
This is published as part of an edited collection aimed at students and researchers focused on epidemiology and global public health. In justifying their work, they write:
The key difference between the models presented here and other models of
infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an
unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may
include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.
[…] While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is
nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual
outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and
shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in
‘biology.’ (p. 146)
Throughout their paper, they also develop models to calculate the likely outcomes of situations with a latent infection (where infection takes at least 24 hours), with a quarantine strategy, with
Page 32 of 277 treatment, and with “impulsive eradication.” This zombie-inspired infection transmission modelling has also been implemented into the digital simulation tool “SimZombie”:
The program (SimZombie) simulates the spread of infection through an
animated population of individuals, using an individual-based version of a
standard susceptible/infected/recovered model, and graphically depicts
different categories of individual over time. (Verran et. al. 2014, 98–99)
In these examples, the benefit of the zombie to mathematical modelling is two-fold: in applying such models to a supernatural (and inconsistently represented) creature, the zombie tests the power and flexibility of the modelling tool; furthermore, as Munz et. al (2013) argue, though the literal situation of a zombie apocalypse might be unrealistic, there are many realistic “infection” scenarios
(biological, political, etc.) that hold similarities to some of the mechanisms of the zombie and thus could benefit from this speculative work (p. 146). Such an exercise, therefore, has tangible utility beyond imaginative philosophising.
The language of the “zombie” is also commonly employed as a tool in describing epidemics and parasites (Servitje 2016, p. 4). For instance, there are many parasitical relationships in nature that mirror the behaviour-altering characteristics of fictional zombie plagues (Barbosa et. al. 2015;
Khattab and El-Hosseny 2014; Libersat and Gal 2014; Weinersmith and Faulkes 2014). The zombie has been utilised as a more engaging educational tool for teaching infection control and prevention, as opposed to the “notoriously ‘vanilla’” training traditionally used in infection prevention and control education (typically involving “annual staff training, in-service programmes, posters, reporting of audit results and online learning”) (Zimmerman and Mason 2017, pp. 56–58). The
Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response (the American Center for Disease Control
[CDC]) has modelled response guides for epidemics on the zombie, releasing a “Zombie
Apocalypse Preparedness Pack” with posters aimed at schools (Luckhurst 2015, p. 181). This was
Page 33 of 277 intended as an educational resource to engage the U.S. public in understanding preparation for epidemics. A 2011 blog article on the CDC website, for example, asks: “So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen?” (Khan 2011). The article then lists what items should be included in an emergency kit before later assuring readers:
If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an
investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide
technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a
zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing
and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and
infection control (including isolation and quarantine). It’s likely that an
investigation of this scenario would seek to accomplish several goals:
determine the cause of the illness, the source of the infection/virus/toxin,
learn how it is transmitted and how readily it is spread, how to break the
cycle of transmission and thus prevent further cases, and how patients can
best be treated. (Ibid.)
This paragraph, of course, resonates a little differently when read in 2020 in the middle of the
COVID-19 pandemic. While the CDC has not updated this blog entry in response to the current real pandemic, many others (from academics to journalists to zombie media creators) have endeavoured to predict in what ways zombie films may have prepared us for COVID-19, or indeed, in what ways
COVID-19 might prepare us for a zombie apocalypse. As of June 2020, a Google search of the terms “zombie,” “apocalypse,” and “COVID-19” yields over six million results, with articles including:
• “Will COVID-19 Cause a Zombie Apocalypse to Hit the Economy?” (Tenreiro 2020)
• “What Great Zombie Movies Say About This ‘Zombie’ ‘Apocalypse’” (Kehe 2020)
Page 34 of 277 • “Zombie Outbreak: THIS Is How a Zombie Apocalypse Would Look Based on
Coronavirus Pandemic” (Martin 2020)
• “Experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Kind of Zombie Apocalypse” (Moore 2020)
These articles, often with great sincerity, attempt to map out how the language of the zombie survival genre provides a working model for how the world might respond to an unprecedented crisis—politically, economically, medically, and socially.
This is not the first time that a global health crisis has been connected with zombie media in a such a way. Real-world crises such as the 2002–2003 SARS and 2009 H1N1 epidemics/ pandemics have been considered as a way to predict possible political approaches to a zombie outbreak. For instance, in his book Theories of International Politics and Zombies (2011), international politics professor Daniel W. Drezner theorises various possible responses by the
United States, the European Commission, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Arab
League, and the African Union to a hypothetical zombie outbreak based on precedents set from real- world crises (p. 59). Drezner’s approach demonstrates how speculating about how different political bodies would respond to a zombie apocalypse illustrates how current policies, attitudes, and cultures may develop if pushed to their extremes. Drezner has since revisited this work in light of
COVID-19, arguing that the zombie canon could give an insight into how the pandemic might eventually play out: “Panic and distrust can be just as viral as biological pathogens. Combine those feelings with rising gun sales, and suddenly the world of The Walking Dead feels closer” (2020).
However, Drezner also points out that zombie films often fail to account for human beings, writing:
“In a race between the breakdown of human society and the search for treatments and vaccines, I would bet on the doctors and scientists every day of the week and twice on Sundays” (Ibid.). James
Der Derian and Phillip Gara take a slightly (though not completely) more pessimistic view than
Page 35 of 277 Drezner. Der Derian4 and Gara are the creators of the documentary film Project Z: The Final Global
Event (2012), which “tracks from the end of the Cold War to the wake of the Arab Spring the emergence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network” through the lens of a zombie crisis (Sydney Democracy Network 2014). On the topic of COVID-19 (published only a few days before Drezner’s article) they write:
The zombie clearly has something to teach us about the virus. The zombie
film holds up a mirror to realities we’d prefer to bury, reflecting deep-rooted
racism (Night of the Living Dead), superficial life-styles (Dawn of the
Dead), environmental degradation (World War Z), and totalitarian eugenics
(Overlord). […] In the world of COVID-19, in the theater of security that
pretends to be the real story, the fourth wall between author and audience—
eroded by media disinformation, political confabulation and wishful
thinking—has collapsed, and so too our best defense against the contagion:
a credible script directed by competent leadership with sufficient resources
to flatten the curve of the pandemic. (Der Derian and Gara 2020)
Referring to their work on Project Z, Der Derian and Gara argue that events that should have prepared us for the current health, economic, and political crisis (such as “climate disasters, economic meltdowns, viral movements, cyberwar, and pandemics”) have not (Ibid.). Instead, the global impacts of COVID-19 have exposed the persistent fragility of social systems across the world.
The approaches outlined above illustrate the utility of the zombie metaphor when employed by educators and researchers to think through and explain medical concepts; as medical humanities scholar Lorenzo Servitje argues, “the real/fictional binary is no longer a sufficient mode for
4 Der Derian is also Michael Hintze Chair of International Security and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. Page 36 of 277 describing the exchanges between culture and medicine” (2016, p. 5).5 When seriously applied to the real-world events of pandemics, terrorists attacks, and financial crises, the hypothetical zombie apocalypse becomes more than simply a playful exercise in asking “what if?”; it is instead a powerful, if imperfect, educational and philosophical tool that succeeds on the strength of its cultural resonance (as well as imaginative flexibility). In bringing the zombie to the field of critical medical humanities, I am interested in how the zombie can present a valuable tool for critical thought in a radically transdisciplinary space. I outline what this looks like in the context of this thesis in Chapter 2.
1.6 Zombies: What and Why?
Though I have now provided a comprehensive introduction to the zombie, I have yet to clearly define precisely which zombie I will be employing throughout my thesis. As is already evident from the sections above, attempting a singular, usable definition of the zombie is a near- impossible task. Part of the great appeal of the zombie is its flexibility; the zombie figure can be manipulated to suit multiple purposes. Yet some boundaries must be drawn in order for the zombie to be used as an object or tool of research in any meaningful way.
For a Western definition of the zombie, we can turn to one of the earliest accounts in
William B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island:
The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from
the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life — it
is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.
People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body
before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it
5 Of course, creators and theorists of literature and popular culture have long known about the permeability of the real/ fictional binary. Page 37 of 277 a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more
often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull
heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens. (1929, p. 93)
As outlined above, Seabrook’s characterisation has had a lasting influence on definitions of the zombie in the West. Yet as more popular culture embraces the zombie figure, a definition of the zombie has become much more elusive. The Zombie Research Society (ZRS)—“an organization dedicated to the historic, cultural, and scientific study of the living dead” (Zombie Research Society n.d.)—has an entire category archive dedicated to the definition of the zombie, with articles including “What Is a ‘Romero’ Zombie?” (Zombie Research Society 2010b), “Walking Dead
Zombies Defined” (Zombie Research Society 2010a), and “Frankenstein Is Not a
Zombie!” (Zombie Research Society 2012). The ZRS also offers membership to “anyone committed to [their] three foundational principles,” which are as follows:
1. A zombie is defined as a relentlessly aggressive human, or reanimated
human corpse, driven by a biological infection.
2. Enthusiastic debate regarding the historic, scientific, and cultural study of
zombies is essential to the survival of the human race.
3. The zombie pandemic is inevitable, and survival of the human race is
crucial. It’s simply a matter of when… so be prepared. (Zombie Research
Society n.d.)
Here, the definition of the zombie has been narrowed to indulge the fantasy of an impending zombie apocalypse. Despite the academic and scientific slant of many of their featured articles, the
ZRS website is intended for popular consumption, offering reviews of popular media featuring the zombie, selling merchandise, and providing other entertaining content. Notably, it is the efforts of
Page 38 of 277 communities such as these, ostensibly fan communities, that have largely informed popular understandings of the zombie.
In online zombie fan communities, the politics of what constitutes an “authentic” zombie are frequently tied to figures of authority. Arguments in forums dedicated to discussing the (Western) zombie figure are inevitably supported by evidence from the same handful of films: George A.
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), Shaun of the Dead (2004), 28 Days Later (2002), and sometimes more recent films such as World War Z (2013). These films serve almost as a literature review to support the positions of those arguing. The zombis of Haiti and the films largely inspired by Haitian traditions are often absent or take a minor role in such debates. The highest authority on the subject are the creators of these seminal zombie texts, notably Romero, Max Brooks (writer of The Zombie Survival Guide
[2003] and the original book World War Z [2006]), and Simon Pegg (star and co-creator of Shaun of the Dead [2004]). These individuals are the ones most frequently called upon or quoted by the media to weigh in on the debates, and have supported their definitions of the zombie with logic purported by their own fictional works, creating a kind of “zombie auteurism.”6 Vulture even dedicated an article to Romero’s thoughts on the topic of how zombies should move. According to
Vulture, it is at least partly a matter of taste, with Romero stating:
I remember Christopher Lee’s mummy movies where there was this big old
lumbering thing that was just walking towards you and you could blow it
full of holes but it would keep coming. And in the original Halloween,
Michael Meyers never ran, he just sort of calmly walked across the lawn or
across the room. To me, that’s scarier: this inexorable thing coming at you
and you can’t figure out how to stop it. (in Oler 2008)
6 It is worth noting that “auteurism” in (Western) film analysis and fandom is also often an issue of gender and race, as white men have historically been significantly more likely to gain auteur-status. See Jaikumar (2017) for more. Page 39 of 277 Interestingly, despite Romero’s longer (and arguably more compelling) support for the slow- walking zombie as the “true” zombie on the basis of emotional impact, the argument that Vulture focuses on, and constructs their headline around, is Romero’s logical understanding of how zombie bodies work: zombies cannot run, as “their ankles would snap” (Oler 2008). More recently, Max
Brooks has been interviewed as a zombie pandemic expert by a range of media outlets to comment upon the social and political climate created by COVID-19 (Corban and Ryssdal 2020; Culver
2020; Gross 2020; Wilkinson 2020). These interviews do not ask Brooks for a definitive zombie definition; instead, they largely draw on his “expertise” (demonstrated through his portrayal of the fictional post-apocalypse world in World War Z) to discuss what a post-pandemic world might look like. In his interview with NPR, Brooks explains that he researched extensively to create World War
Z (and other speculative works) and worked closely with experts in politics, health, and national security (Gross 2020). In this example, we can see a bidirectional permeability between reality and fiction created through Brooks’s auteurship; the extent of the research undertaken to write World
War Z elevates Brooks to an authoritative level on zombie lore, while simultaneously allowing him to use his fictional expertise in a manner similar to Drezner, Der Derian, and Gara. While Brooks is primarily a zombie expert and Drezner, Der Derian, and Gara are primarily international politics and security experts, the line between each is blurred as the zombie apocalypse becomes a model for a post-COVID-19 world. While this might suggest that anyone can claim to be an expert, I would instead argue that these examples demonstrate that the rules governing who can become an expert are changing; there is therefore a need to work out how we should navigate this new world and reconsider what claims to “expertise” we should take seriously.
Every narrative intrusion made by creators of zombie media instructs the audience in how to understand lore and creates an apparent elasticity between diegetic and non-diegetic worlds
(Genette 1976). Fans increasingly make logical leaps in narratives, privileging the rules posited in
Page 40 of 277 single texts as transmedial “facts.” This focus on homogeneity in the zombie genre is frequently encouraged by the creators of the media, such as Simon Pegg who insists: “I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run” (Pegg 2008). These debates about the true definition of a zombie expose some interesting ideologies in online zombie fan communities. Fans who focus on “tradition” in zombie media usually reference Romero’s films as the “true” or “original” zombies, essentially erasing the predominantly Afro-Caribbean origins of the mythos, which were adapted (with significant liberties taken) for a white audience in pre-
Romero zombie cinema. Thus, just as the zombie of early Hollywood cinema presented a new
“true” zombie that erased the cultural complexities of Afro-Caribbean mysticism and tradition, many fans today uphold a new new zombie as the “original” zombie (that bears little resemblance to the zombies of, for example, White Zombie) insisting that significant lore changes to this “original” zombie should disqualify it from the category of “zombie” altogether. Additionally, the elevation of
“speed” as an inexorable and quintessential signifier of power and enjoyability reveals a passionate and essentialist attention to detail that is indicative of the cultural significance the zombie figure.
Yet despite the privileging of Romero in fan communities as both an auteur and ultimate authority on the zombie, Romero’s zombies are arguably closer to vampires or aliens than to the classic zombies of Hollywood, in that they are removed from voodoo magic and lore, they eat flesh, they outnumber humans, and they can pass on their condition (Bishop 2010, p. 94). Taken a step further, from the perspective of the zombi of the Afro-Caribbean, Romero’s zombie is hardly recognisable.
Looking beyond Romero’s zombie and its immediate predecessors, zombie-type figures have also appeared elsewhere around the world and throughout history. Anthropologists working in communities in South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands have reported testimonies of “black magic” and “‘voodoo’ death” comparable to that of Haiti (Cannon
Page 41 of 277 1942). Re-animated, undead corpses can be seen in tales of the revenant of Medieval Europe, the jiang-shi of Chinese legend, the ro-langs of Tibetan folklore, the draugr of Nordic mythology, the lich and wight of European literature, and the ghoul of Islamic mythology. Taken a step further, should we consider the mummy a zombie? An animated skeleton? The creature of Frankenstein
(1818) and its various reproductions? Popular consensus is clear that the vampire is not a zombie, yet films such as I am Legend (2007) blur the line between the two, and the vampires of the original novel by Richard Matheson (1954) were an inspiration for Romero’s zombies (One for the Fire:
The Legacy of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ 2008).
Yet as stated earlier, some boundaries must be drawn for the purposes of this analysis, even if they are sometimes seemingly arbitrary. Here I will attempt an (incomplete) list of characteristics of the zombie (as it appears in cultural products across the West):
• The zombie is neither completely alive nor completely dead. It is best characterised as
“undead” or “living dead.”
• The zombie was once alive and is usually a human or nonhuman animal.
• The zombie may be produced through magic, religious ritual, science/technology, virus,
bacteria, or an undefined cause.
• The zombie’s personality usually differs in some way from the personality of its living
predecessor.
• The zombie has a physical presence.
Though these characteristics together form a more complete picture of how the zombie is distinct from other similar undead creatures (e.g. a ghost), it is really only the first point that is non- negotiable. Since this thesis asks what it means to be human and alive, then the liminal space between life and death that the zombie occupies is of great importance. Of course, the vampire and ghost hold a similar metaphysical status and have both proven their strength in academic
Page 42 of 277 scholarship. Like the vampire and ghost, the zombie also has an uncanny relationship to humanity, sitting at the borders of human life while seemingly remaining permanently separated from it. The zombie, however, is not (or is rarely) a sexy monster; one does not think of Robert Pattinson or
Patrick Swayze as a typical casting choice for the zombie. The zombie is an object of disgust and abjection, of rot and decay and rebirth. It does not easily invite a fantasy of identification or a desire to turn (as an attractive and powerful vampire might); yet, as I demonstrate throughout this thesis, it is capable of provoking emotional investment (even as it affects horror and disgust from its audience).
Part of the specific appeal of the zombie is its flexibility—it is capable of absorbing and producing meaning in diverse ways that are not possible to such an extent in more rigidly defined creatures. There is no singular mythos for how the zombie is created and how it can be killed (if, indeed, it can be “killed” at all). It can therefore be moulded to different uses in fictional media, as long as its specific function is defined. Within this flexibility, a space is created for rich ethical and philosophical thought. The following chapter explicates in detail how the zombie presents an especially productive tool for thinking (and feeling) in this thesis and what it offers to the field of critical medical humanities.
Page 43 of 277 CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES, POPULAR CULTURE, AND
RADICAL TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
2.1 Disciplinary Intervention
This thesis contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical medical humanities.
In their introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (2016a), editors Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods characterise critical medical humanities as a second wave of medical humanities. The medical humanities, they write, “names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences” (p. 1). Medical humanities began to attract global popularity in the 1990s and early
2000s, a time in which, according to Deborah Kirklin and Ruth Richardson in their preface to
Medical Humanities: A Practical Introduction (2001), “arts-informed medical education [was] experiencing a renaissance, both in popularity and acceptability” (p. xv). Yet even today, medical humanities holds something of a nascent position in academia. In December 2019, I presented work from this thesis at the annual conference held by the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia in their first-ever medical humanities stream. The Call for Papers for this stream described medical humanities as “a multi-disciplinary and non-conformist research area, exploring the various historical, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic aspects of health, medical science and practice,” and claimed:
Medical Humanities has developed different profiles, and has taken different
forms in the North American and European contexts – in this stream you
will have the chance to determine the shape and character of a new
Australian Medical Humanities. (CSAA 2019)
Under this view, my research is not only intervening into a scholarly field, but is actively helping shape it in the Australian context.
Page 44 of 277 Medical humanities has historically focused on medical ethics and bioethics, medical and health education, and the experiences of illness, making it a field well-suited to exploring issues such as end-of-life care and reproductive medicine (Whitehead and Woods 2016a, p. 3). Whitehead and Woods identify a “primal scene” of medical humanities as “structured around the clinical encounter between doctor and patient,” which focuses on the lived body of the patient (p. 2). This, they argue, can assume a generality of U.K.- and U.S.-centred normative lived experiences, erasing other dimensions such as “gender, class, race, sexuality,” while also frequently avoiding critical consideration of “‘non-medical’ notions of health, illness and wellbeing; the production of clinical knowledge; or the sense that humanities and social sciences might play a constitutive role in shaping such knowledge” (Ibid.). These are some of the limits they believe critical medical humanities address.
It is important to note here that a taxonomic distinction of “critical medical humanities” as a second wave of medical humanities has not been adopted by all scholars of medical humanities.
Critical medical humanities is an emerging field and thus many people who are contributing to this scholarship (according to the definitions and limitations described by Whitehead and Woods) are described elsewhere as “medical humanities” scholars. I have reproduced the distinction between
“medical humanities” and “critical medical humanities” described by Whitehead and Woods, as this allows me to more clearly articulate the opportunities in the field of medical humanities that critical medical humanities is positioned to address. However, when introducing scholars throughout this thesis, I will describe them in accordance with the field within which they themselves identify as working. It should be acknowledged, therefore, that many scholars who are referenced as “medical humanities” scholars are already doing the kinds of work (and addressing the gaps and limitations) that critical medical humanities has been established to achieve.
Page 45 of 277 When compared to medical humanities, critical medical humanities opens up further critical and methodological possibilities in the areas of health and medicine. It presents opportunities for feminist criticism and radical interventions into pre-existing systems of knowledge production (such as those cultivated by Western biomedical institutions). It provides ways of understanding the
“legal, social and colonial underpinnings” of biomedical knowledge and the mechanisms through which medical institutions produced within violent systems of power (re)inscribe such violence upon the patients they purport to help (Whitehead and Woods 2016a, p. 24). It moves beyond the often dualistic approach of medical humanities, where affect and emotion are considered the domain of the arts and humanities as opposed to detachment and pragmatism, which are the domain of biomedicine; instead, critical medical humanities asks how both biomedicine and the arts and humanities can help us better understand empathy and affective distance together (p. 5).
In their introduction to a special issue of the journal Medical Humanities, William Viney,
Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods (all scholars of medical humanities) consider the possibilities offered by the evolution of medical humanities into critical medical humanities (2015). They write:
If diversity and plurality have, in the past, traditionally been strengths for
the medical humanities in terms of encouraging creativity and
epistemological innovation, then this collection of papers and responses is
intended as an invitation to keep the field of medical humanities open to
new voices, challenges, events, and disciplinary (and anti- or post-
disciplinary) articulations of the realities of medicine and health; to be
adventurous in its intellectual pursuits, practical activities, and articulation
with the domain of the political. (p. 2)
One of the ways this can be realised is through radical transdisciplinary collaboration, such as in the work of Margrit Shildrick et al. in their research on heart transplantation; this project brings
Page 46 of 277 together a health sociologist, a cardiologist, a “philosophically oriented theorist,” a clinical psychiatrist, a social scientist, nurses, and artists “to explore the complexities of organ transplantation in a novel way, by explicitly entangling research from the arts, biosciences and humanities without privileging any one discourse” (2017, pp. 1–2). This non-hierarchical approach is another distinguishing factor between medical humanities and critical medical humanities, where the former has often framed the importance of the arts and humanities as in service to the biomedical sciences. Feminist science studies scholar Susan Squier argues that there exists an
“epistemological hierarchy of the disciplines” where, despite the increasing recognition of the importance of analysing culture in disciplines such as science studies, the study of cultural products such as literature is still regarded as “insignificant, invisible, feminized” (2004, p. 42). This perspective is echoed by Viney, Callard, and Woods, who argue that the arts, humanities, and social sciences should not be viewed as playing a “‘role’ within medicine”; rather, these disciplines are entangled with medicine, with both sides capable of producing knowledge and informing the approaches and perspectives of the other (2015, p. 3).
I should also note how medical and health ethics relate to these areas, given their prominent role in critical medical humanities and this thesis. According to physician, medical researcher, and philosopher Paul A. Komesaroff (2008), ethics functions in two major (and contradictory) ways.
First, ethics calls for a radical questioning of how and why decisions are made and actions are taken, and encourages a suspicion towards authority and naturalised ways of doing (p. xiii). Second, it requires participants in a society to adhere to regulated patterns of pre-determined ethical behaviour (Ibid.). This paradox also illuminates a tension between a theory of ethics (wherein skepticism and radical proposals are encouraged) and a practice of ethics (which requires stable logics that can be clearly and consistently followed in, for example, policy making or a clinical setting). This is not to say that ethics cannot be applied and practiced in ways that provoke radical
Page 47 of 277 questioning and challenge social norms and patterns. However, medicine (if medicine is “a practice of ethics” [Pellegrino in Komesaroff 1995, p. 3]) is inevitably informed by variable social and cultural morals, and furthermore reinforces these morals at an institutional level (think, for example, of the historical formalised pathologisation of queer sexualities) (Komesaroff 1995, p. 4). In this way, notions of “health” must be understood in relation to the ethical discourses that define them.
This idea of “health” as defined by discourse, rather than an objective understanding of what it means to be “healthy” (which, of course, assumes that objectivity is both possible and desirable) is a key concern of this thesis. Medical ethics has often been characterised as a practice of problem solving, where ethical “dilemmas” are systematically addressed through an ethical framework. This produces some troubling effects. First, it assumes a universal knowledge of medicine that may be applied in any setting, provided the right resources and training. Such an approach frames knowledge as innate and waiting to be discovered, rather than produced by specific histories and socially and culturally informed values (which are often rendered invisible to those working within those same contexts) (Komesaroff 1995, p. 4). Under this view, one simply has to apply “rational” thought to an ethical problem in order to uncover the solution (2008, p. xv). Furthermore,
“rationality” is closely tied to a sense of “neutrality,” which has the added implication that bioethicists are able to occupy a “neutral” position (even when that position exists in relation to, for example, human rights abuses) (Dawson et al. 2018, p. 483) and that such a neutral (“non-political and dispassionate”) position “gives the field a certain detached authority” that protects and legitimates academic work (Ashby and Morrell 2018, p. 479). Second, while this approach to medical ethics acknowledges differences between individual, specific bodies, “it does not acknowledge, recognise as valid, or accept the existence of differences between distinct forms of bodily knowledge” (Rothfield 1995, p. 170, emphasis in original). Thus, it not only assumes a singular mode of “rational” thought, but also a universal experience of embodiment. Third, by
Page 48 of 277 privileging a singular canon of medical knowledge, formed by specific (notably Western) histories and values, it ultimately invalidates other forms of knowledge (“holistic, traditional, Chinese, indigenous”) in favour of conventional Western medicine (Ibid.). This is particularly problematic because conventional Western medicine has produced the very methods that are used to test unconventional medicines, leaving no room for alternative perspectives, approaches, and standards of measurement to co-exist with these hegemonic ideas. Finally, and importantly to this thesis, by framing conventional Western approaches to medical ethics as “rational,” other forms of knowledge
(informed by emotions and non-hegemonic values) are implicitly framed as “irrational.”
A radical transdisciplinary approach to critical medical humanities offers ways to think through the complexities embedded in rationalist medical ethics. In this thesis, I draw upon transdisciplinary knowledges and methods to create an ethical approach that is open, pluralistic, emotionally informed, embodied, and ongoing. This approach is primarily applied at the level of abstraction; for example, Chapter 5 re-imagines “healing” as an affective, biopolitical encounter between and within bodies. I am, however, also interested in how abstract ethical and philosophical discourse is implicated in day-to-day decision making; for example, Chapter 3 of this thesis explores how spiritual and aesthetic attachments to human eyes are enmeshed in organ donation decision making. This kind of analysis is realised through an interrogation of affective attachments, which can be illuminated through the study of popular media, including film and television. This thesis also, at times, incorporates philosophical and ethical perspectives from areas outside of medicine and the arts and humanities, including disciplines such as jurisprudence and quantum physics. I am writing, however, from within the area of cultural studies, so I would like to take a moment to articulate the specific disciplinary offerings of cultural studies to critical medical humanities.
Page 49 of 277 First, I bring the method of close textual analysis to my methodological approach. As is explained in detail in Section 2.3, a cultural studies approach to close textual analysis pays careful attention to the relationship between text and context, and how they are mutually constitutive. This emphasis on the importance of context speaks directly to the call in critical medical humanities and medical ethics for a greater understanding of technologies of power in medicine and health.
Furthermore, cultural studies permits a stepping away from hegemonic cultural texts, creating space for popular texts in critical medical humanities. This addresses a major weakness of the approach of medical humanities to the arts: the majority of work in the medical humanities focuses on “‘high culture’ works of visual art—chiefly, European painting and sculpture—and literature, mixed with a small set of similar contemporary works chosen to represent certain diseases or dilemmas” (Hooker
2014, p. 218). Medical humanities scholar Claire Hooker elucidates the implications of this privileging:
In the medical humanities this might mean that particular kinds of emotion
—grief, sacrifice, resolution—particular concepts—empathy, autonomy,
illness, depression—and particular forms of personhood—disciplined, self-
improving—become naturalised and present themselves as intuitive and
authentic, excluding or delegitimating other ways of being. […] Debates
about genre or the definition of art, for example, have been virtually non-
existent in favour of an anything-goes supportive stance that seeks, in the
first instance, to do justice to and to validate the concerns of its suffering
creators. Such works are unproblematically treated as ‘revealing’ the
‘experience’ of illness. (218–219)
This is an issue, broadly speaking, that has always been a prime concern of cultural studies. Cultural studies critiques representative power and cultural hegemony, recognising that what counts as
Page 50 of 277 “art” (or “narrative” or “literature”) is always informed by ideology (Squier in Squier and Hawkins
2004, p. 245). Through this critique, cultural studies in turn creates space for a diversity of voices, in part due to its respect for the value of popular culture (or “low art”). Furthermore, cultural studies’ embrace of popular culture allows for a legitimation of the value of imagination and feeling
(as opposed to the rational ethics that medical humanities has sought to provide a counterpoint to) beyond the narrowed scope of emotions and personhood that Hooker identifies as being privileged in high culture; though emotions such as grief and sacrifice play an important role in the medical humanities, so too can the disgust elicited by a decaying walking corpse or the complicated erotics provoked by a teen romantic comedy.
I also bring from cultural studies a critical approach to discourse analysis. Like textual analysis, discourse analysis offers a way to critique how institutional power, cultural practices, and social and political ideas are entangled (van Dijk 2015, p. 466). Theoretical interventions from feminist science and technology studies, building on the work of scholars such as feminist physicist
Karen Barad, have already made their way into critical medical humanities and have demonstrated the capacity of feminist theory to enrich discussions of power and culture in health and medicine
(Fitzgerald and Callard 2016, p. 39). This cross-disciplinary value has also been demonstrated in the adoption of approaches to critique developed by scholars such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Bruno Latour (Viney, Callard, and Woods 2015, p. 3). In taking up approaches such as these, this thesis demonstrates how cultural studies offers valuable contributions to the shift to the critical in the medical humanities.
2.2 The Value of Popular Culture
Popular culture has long been understood as a barometer for social and cultural anxieties
(Bishop 2010, p. 9). The inextricable relationship between creative media and the cultures that
Page 51 of 277 produce it has been a preoccupation of cultural scholarship since the early twentieth century. In
1938, Ruth A. Inglis described the relationship between fiction and society as being both reflective and productive (p. 426), a notion that was later famously explored in relation to mass culture more broadly by philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who articulated the role of
Western art in reproducing society and perpetuating capitalist ideology ([1944] 1997). In 1979,
Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson expanded upon and critiqued Adorno and Horkheimer’s work to argue that human experience is reproduced and commodified in mass culture, but that a binary of mass culture (as authentic but degraded) and high culture (as autonomous and rejecting of the popular) is erroneous; instead mass and high culture are interdependent forms of art that emerge as inevitable products of late capitalism.
Yet, as many academics, critics, and educators have increasingly argued, popular culture can do more than reflect and reproduce “real-life” culture. In 2001, cultural studies scholar Alan McKee
(in)famously declared: “What Cultural Studies needs is less Adorno” (McKee 2002, p. 311). He went on to later clarify his position that it is not theory that should rejected, but rather the gatekeeping of particular modes of culture as “high culture” capable of doing something, and in turn the amount of prestige afforded to academics/participants in such culture (versus the broader
“popular culture”). As he writes:
High culture often provides the tools to study popular culture. But why
should not popular culture provide the tools for studying high culture? Why
can we not use theories of culture derived from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to
read Deleuze and Guattari (should we want to?); Big Brother to interpret
Foucault? Why do we so rarely use the theorising of Hitchcock to critique
Lacan? (p. 312)
Page 52 of 277 In a similar vein, I argue that popular culture can be mobilised to many productive ends in academia beyond the textual analysis it receives in disciplines such as cultural studies and film and media studies. First, popular culture holds great educational value—something that scholars have been paying increasing attention to in recent years. For example, in 2017, public health and medical education scholars Evie Kendal and Basia Diug edited a book focused on the pedagogical value of popular culture in the field of medicine titled Teaching Medicine and Medical Ethics Using Popular
Culture. Popular culture is of particular pedagogical value due to its ability to help audiences process information and relate to concepts through narrative storytelling (Zimmerman and Mason
2017, p. 57). Personal identification is a powerful mnemonic tool and the “relatability” of popular culture can provide a way for students, scholars, and practitioners to think through intellectually and emotionally complex material. As signalled in the previous section, scholars in medical humanities have argued that fiction can provide a way of increasing empathy, for example in healthcare practitioners (Pasco et. al. 2016, p. 246). Science fiction and speculative fiction in particular are recognised for their pedagogical value in many academic fields (Zimmerman and Mason 2017, p.
56). As Pasco et. al. note: “To read science and speculative fiction in medical training is undoubtedly a way to understand our present through imagining our future” (2016, p. 246). The scope of science fiction and speculative fiction to imagine what is possible makes them especially versatile genres that have the capacity to be moulded to various pedagogical uses.
With this in mind, I argue that the second utility of popular culture, as demonstrated in my review of the ways the zombie has been deployed as a critical tool in the previous chapter, is its strong conceptual value; the act of asking “what if?” in a speculative space can prompt otherwise ridiculous or unimagined possibilities to be considered. As Squier writes: “Fiction gives us access to the biomedical imaginary: the zone in which experiments are carried out in narrative, and the psychic investments of biomedicine are articulated” (2004, p. 17). A return to the imaginaries
Page 53 of 277 produced, for example, by popular science fiction allows us to better navigate the research conducted in the techno-sciences (Schick 2016, p. 225). Bioethics scholar Ari Schick characterises science fiction as a set of ideas that shape human understandings of the relationship between past and present as framed by Darwinism, Marxism, and techno-science (p. 226). The imagined futures produced by science fiction and speculative discourse increasingly shape the present. As Schick writes: “In the new unstable present, ever on the cusp of an uncertain but certainly different technological future, science fiction becomes an increasingly important cultural resource through which we attempt to re-establish our narrative bearings and get a sense of where we are heading” (Ibid.). The meeting of technological advancements with social change in many great works of science fiction (such as that of H.G. Wells) has helped humans evolve their understanding of the present; since the advent of science fiction, readers have increasingly come to understand the present as being in the process of becoming the future. Thus, speculative fiction can indulge the fantasy of contemporary events constituting the past to an imagined future.
An understanding of the pedagogical and conceptual potential of popular culture is an important part of pushing popular culture out of its more comfortable disciplines of English literature, film and media studies, and cultural studies. Medical humanities scholars Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane argue that science fiction in particular can play an important role in
“challeng[ing] the limitations of disciplines such as science studies and history and philosophy of science” (2016, p. 213). They argue that science fiction is more than simply “entertainment” and that the act of interpretation on the part of the audience is an important part of the relationship between science fiction and its consumers. They write:
Such reflective meaning-making, whether potential or actual, shows that
scholarship can go far beyond merely recording and analysing how science
fiction happens to be understood as ‘entertainment’ by a particular audience.
Page 54 of 277 Rather, academics can enter into conversations that reflexively inform and
modify the interpretation and evaluation of science fiction by its various
audiences. […] The task for studies of science fiction within the medical
humanities is to articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to
medical thematics within the genre. (Ibid.)
Thus, science fiction does not simply impart a message but is in return “made sense of” by audiences in ways that are complex and debated in public and scholarly arenas (Ibid.).
This academic potential of science fiction can only be reached through the crossing of disciplinary borders. Evelyn Fox Keller, a physicist whose work often intersects with biology, gender, and philosophy, argues in her 1995 work, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century
Biology, that disciplines could be thought of as “harbouring intellectual and institutional resources” (pp. xviii–xix). She continues: “That would account for the extent to which their borders are policed, for the trading (and raiding) across disciplines that nonetheless persists, and even for the periodic attempts at annexation with which all histories of interdisciplinary activity are rife” (p. xix). Keller’s work demonstrates the power of the metaphor when employed in the sciences. It is not only data that is important, but also the language used to discuss data, by both scientists and the general public. Scientific discourses are not simply reflective of the available data, but can be productive in knowledge creation and dissemination. Through greater cross-disciplinary engagement in scientific discourses, new avenues for critical inquiry may be opened.
Today, more than two decades since the publication of Refiguring Life, such collaboration across the disciplines has significantly increased. In my own research, I am interested in the ways that the speculative (in particular, the zombie) can be used to complicate dominant public and scientific narratives in biomedical science and technology, and vice versa. Keller poses the question: “What are the intellectual and institutional resources to be risked or to be gained by the
Page 55 of 277 borrowing of literary techniques for the study of science and, conversely, by the addition of scientific texts to the mill of literary criticism?” (1995, p. xix). I consider this question (in specific relation to the popular and sociocultural text of the zombie) throughout this thesis.
The final utility of popular culture I wish to discuss, and the one I feel that critical medical humanities has the greatest opportunity to make better use of, is its affective and emotional value.
Though affect and emotion are not synonymous, they are both evoked through the consumption of popular culture and both are of importance to this thesis. Philosopher Brian Massumi makes a case for this distinction in his book, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002). First, he equates affect with “intensity,” which he describes as “a complicating immediacy of self- relation” (p. 14)—in other words, the unconscious embodied reaction to the materiality of bodily experience, or the complexity of sensation compounded in “the feeling of having a feeling” (p. 13).
He writes:
Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But […]
emotion and affect – if affect is intensity – follow different logics and
pertain to different orders. An emotion is a subjective content, the
sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that
point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the
conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically
and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction
circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. (p.
28)
I clarify the distinction of affect from emotion here not only to avoid the perception of a linguistic slippage, but also to highlight the specific utility of affect in critical medical humanities. The turn to affect in feminist theory, as described by Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead, has arisen in part to
Page 56 of 277 address a perceived limitation of the use of affect in discourse analysis: “that affect can only be analysed as, or within, discourse” (2012, p. 116). A feminist approach “provides a way to emphasise the constitutive role affect plays in the production of knowledge and subjects” (Stephens 2015, p.
274). Affect transcends both emotion and discourse to allow for “a vital re-centring of the body” (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012, p. 116). This “re-centring of the body” has, in many ways, been a key aim of medical humanities (albeit sometimes inhibited by a universalising of “the body” as that experienced by an imagined neutral patient). Emotion, as explored earlier, has been a significant consideration in medical humanities, even as certain emotions have been privileged as more authentic or revealing. Yet affect has taken a less prominent role. Critical medical humanities has begun to remedy this, with The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities collecting a quarter of its contributions under the heading “Mind, Imagination, Affect” (Whitehead and Woods 2016b, p. 337). An understanding of affect, therefore, serves as an important and logical contribution to critical medical humanities.
Given the embodied, sensory nature of affect, it is worth taking a moment to consider its role in the visual media of film and television (the primary objects of textual analysis in this thesis).
Film theory has, at times, distanced itself from the bodily experience of cinematic consumption, and genres that are overly concerned with the sensory pleasures of the body, otherwise known as “body genres” (e.g. horror), have historically generated a lower cultural status (Clover 1987; Williams
1991). Yet, as media theorist Vivian Sobchack argues, all cinema has a sensory impact on the body and to pretend otherwise (to conceive of film as abstract and representative) is misguided and overly simplistic (2004, p. 59). Sobchack writes:
At worst, then, contemporary film theory has not taken bodily being at the
movies very seriously–and, at best, it has generally not known how to
respond to and describe how it is that movies ‘move’ and ‘touch’ us bodily.
Page 57 of 277 […] Yet as film theorists, we are not exempt from sensual being at the
movies […] Even at the movies our vision and hearing are informed and
given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our
capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and
always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and
movement in the world. […] [M]ovies provoke in us the ‘carnal thoughts’
that ground and inform more conscious analysis. (pp. 59–60)
These (aptly named) “carnal thoughts” and the emotions they allow us to develop are perhaps more easily understood in zombie media, given that the zombie sits primarily within the body genre of horror (albeit, often intersecting with other genres including fantasy, science fiction, romance, comedy, period drama, westerns, pornography, and more). The zombie is frequently constructed as a creature designed to prompt affective responses; it grotesquely decays, it leaps out at the audience suddenly, it graphically and viscerally kills its human victims. But the zombie also can inspire complex emotions, for example in the confusing and distressing situation of learning a loved one has become a zombie and coming to understand what this could mean in terms of one’s personal identity and relationships. Both are of interest to this thesis, as is the relationship between the two— for example, how does the audience reconcile the disgust of watching a zombie romcom protagonist consume human brains in order to achieve a goal that the audience is emotionally invested in (more on this in Chapter 5)? As Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen propose in their introduction to Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010), affect need not be placed “in opposition to textual analysis”; rather, affect and textual analysis can be intimately and mutually constitutive (p. 2). Thinking about affect and embodiment in dialogue with emotion and the figure of the zombie can produce different kinds of knowledge and modes of ethical thinking.
Page 58 of 277 For this reason, and the reasons outlined above, I propose that the zombie in popular culture offers important, creative, and productive contributions to the field of critical medical humanities.
2.3 Methods
I use qualitative, pluralistic, transdisciplinary methods of analysis throughout this thesis. I am motivated, in part, by philosopher Gail Weiss’s introduction to Body Images: Embodiment as
Intercorporeality (1999). Weiss writes:
Rather than approach this investigation through a singular methodology, I
have drawn from a wide range of sources, theories, and experiences. […]
Although much of the research I have done has focused on scholarly
sources, I have also profited greatly from nonacademic approaches. […] I
have focused on multiple points of intersection between various disciplines,
methodologies, and approaches to bodies and body images, an approach I
believe is essential to do justice to the richness and complexity of what I am
calling intercorporeal existence. (p. 3)
I support Weiss’s advocation for a pluralistic approach to research and add that critical medical humanities is a field that both requires and is designed for such an approach. Like Weiss, I do not confine myself to a particular discipline, nor even to academia in pursuit of modes of methodological intervention; in the spirit of transdisciplinarity, I argue that different approaches within and without academia can not only sit alongside or complement each other, but inform, enrich, and co-constitute each other.
This approach to transdisciplinarity moves beyond an “exclusive concentration on joint problem solving of problems pertaining to the science–technology–society triad,” notably represented by Michael Gibbons (Gibbons et al. 1994), Helga Nowotny (Gibbons and Nowotny
Page 59 of 277 2001), and Julie Thompson Klein (Thompson Klein et al. 2001) (Nicolescu 2014, p. 118). Instead, according to professional home economist and transdisciplinary researcher Sue L.T. McGregor
(2014), it “strives to remove the boundaries between higher education and the rest of the world, to address the wicked problems of the world” (pp. 200–201). This distinction recognises that the
“problems” transdisciplinarity seeks to address cannot be solved solely through the dissolution of boundaries between hegemonic academic disciplines; transdisciplinary knowledge also encompasses what is beyond (ignored, excluded, cannot be contained by) discipline (Hodge 1995, p. 37; Nicolescu 2014, p. 187). Furthermore, the production of transdisciplinary knowledge necessitates a relinquishment of “sovereignty of […] domain” from those involved so that new knowledge may emerge—knowledge that is embodied by all who created it rather than bound to a particular discipline or sector (McGregor 2013, p. 212). This transdisciplinary approach draws not only on (intra-, inter-, and extradisciplinary) theories but also policies and practices, resulting in a knowledge that is “complex, emergent, cross-fertilized, and embodied” (pp. 212–213).
For this reason, my analysis draws upon methods from across disciplines in the arts and sciences, as well as knowledges produced within disciplines in the academy (including cultural studies, law, medicine, philosophy, film and media studies, health ethics, etc.), but also socially and culturally produced knowledges: fan-produced understandings of the zombie figure, religious and
New Age philosophies of healing, spiritual understandings of the body and “soul” (or similar), affective understandings of personhood and death, and so on. These come together to produce a complex and socially informed knowledge that cannot sit neatly within a discipline; it instead must sit in the space between and exterior to disciplines.
The qualitative analysis employed throughout this thesis uses four principal techniques, detailed below.
Page 60 of 277 1. Close Textual Analysis
The first technique I use is close textual analysis, a distinctive cultural studies offering.
Cultural studies emerged alongside the late French structuralist movement, and therefore has taken on elements of structuralist textual analysis in its approach (Saukko 2003, p. 113). However, the approach of cultural studies has distinguished itself from structuralism in important ways; where structuralist textual analysis has a tendency to focus on textual patterns, aesthetics, and formal analysis, cultural studies is interested in the broader politics of cultural texts (Ibid.). While cultural studies can borrow tools from structural analysis to help understand the underlying structure and value-principles of a text, this alone is insufficient (p. 102); as social science and medicine scholar
Paula Saukko writes:
[a strictly formalistic approach to analysis] often renders the analysis sterile
or not particularly illuminative, since it tends to miss the small shifts and
variations, historical details and contexts, which often account for much of
the appeal of these stories. (p. 103)
A cultural studies close textual analysis, therefore, is deeply interested in the inextricability of text and context. As touched on earlier in this chapter, Marxist theory has something to offer in this domain, given its interest in the impact of dominant ideology on cultural products and the relationship between culture and power. Cultural studies, however, moves beyond this reflective/ coercive account of the relationship between text and context to understand texts as “site[s] of contestation over meaning, where different groups compete to set forth their understandings of the state of affairs of the world” (p. 100). This more complex approach to text and context allows for a diversity of perspectives and an illumination of inconsistencies and missed points of inquiry.
We might also be tempted to describe this cultural studies offering as close contextual analysis. However, building upon the “misrepresentations” of contextualism described by cultural
Page 61 of 277 studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg (1997, p. 321), there are some caveats and cautions that must accompany such as a characterisation. First, context is not behind or before cultural texts; the two are mutually constitutive (Ibid.). Second, one cannot isolate a “local” context from its broader,
“taken-for-granted” context; furthermore, to do so risks locating the researcher outside of the context (pp. 321–322). Instead, the local can be understood as an abstract (yet potent) context that emerges through its relationality with broader and narrower spatial, temporal, and social contexts
(p. 323). Third, though contextualism rejects essentialism, it is also not strictly anti-essentialist (p.
322). Or, as Grossberg explicates later in Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010):
[Cultural studies] refuses the universalization of contingency that
characterizes many versions of anti-essentialism, which too easily deny any
stability or reality to relationships or the structures they define. Cultural
studies is committed to the reality of relations that have determining effects,
but it refuses to assume that such relations and effects have to be,
necessarily, what they are. They did not have to be that way, but, given that
they are that way, they are real and they have real effects. (p. 22)
This ability of cultural studies to operate “in the space between” (Ibid.) is a particularly valuable contribution to critical medical humanities, as it allows for a negotiation of the material “reality” of bodies and the discursive function of such materiality, without which cultural studies might find itself entirely excommunicated from the biomedical sciences. This is especially important in
Chapter 6 of this thesis.
Fourth, a recognition of the contextuality of the researcher’s position should not translate into a privileging of the researcher’s social position (thus erasing historicity), which is in turn manifest as a simplistic confession of the limitations of the researcher (1997, p. 322). Finally, it would be an impossible task to attempt to accumulate every contextual aspect that surrounds an
Page 62 of 277 object of analysis, and even more so to then understand every detail of the determining relationships between them (Ibid.). Instead, Grossberg proposes that we locate and map out the vectors between cultural practices and individuals (p. 324). Through this mapping, we can begin to see how cultural practices shape a lived cultural space, and how these spaces are moved and fixed by culture.
For this thesis, context will play a different role depending on the goals of the case study.
Every case study chapter employs close textual analysis to some degree. In Chapter 3, for example, there are many contextual factors that inform my reading of the 1932 film White Zombie: the cultural history of Haitian Vodoun; the historical relationship of the U.S. to colonialism and imperialism; 1930s attitudes towards gender and race; different cultural attitudes towards organ transplantation; global stories and rumours surrounding illegal organ trade markets; and more. By contrast, popular and scientific narratives of biomedical phenomena and the affective pleasures of film consumption are more important contextual considerations for Chapters 5 and 6.
As explained earlier, each case study chapter will focus on a specific zombie (or zombi) type. The diverse, pluralistic, and contradictory popular understandings of what constitutes a zombie present an opportunity to explore the unique mechanisms of various zombie types—the servile zombies of White Zombie and the aggressive, consuming zombies of Night of the Living
Dead (1968) have very different utilities, both in their individual narratives and in my analysis. To ensure the greatest specificity, each chapter will focus on one or two fictional texts (or in the case of
Chapter 4, one or two series of fictional texts). Part of my close textual analysis, therefore, will involve interrogating the unique mechanisms of the zombie in the text, what purposes those mechanisms serve, and how this impacts audience reception.
Furthermore, as each of the case study texts are visual (film and television), the theoretical approach I take to this close textual analysis is informed predominantly by film theory. This is another disciplinary offering that I believe presents an opportunity in critical medical humanities;
Page 63 of 277 the historical privileging of art and literature in medical humanities has led to a prevalence of art and literary criticism approaches, and within these approaches there is frequently a focus on narrative, representation, or ethical, political, and philosophical questions. This is an important contribution (and one I do incorporate into my analysis), but I am also interested in what a consideration of elements such as sound design, mise-en-scène, colour, or shot type in screen media can offer. A shift to a concern for visual aesthetics (Allen 2016; Biernoff 2016; Czerwiec et al.
2015; Juler 2016; Squier 2008; 2018) and the technical aspects of textual analysis (Squier 2004;
2007) has been taken up in parts of critical medical humanities, and I continue this work in this thesis.
2. Discourse Analysis
The second technique I use is a critical approach to discourse analysis. The meaning of discourse analysis varies from discipline to discipline and not all disciplines emphasise a clear delineation of textual and discourse analysis. I do, however, want to take a moment to explicate why discourse analysis is a more appropriate descriptor for some of the analysis I undertake in this thesis.
Where close textual analysis (with a cultural studies approach) takes a focus on texts (films, television shows, articles, etc.) and considers how these texts are in dialogue with the contexts within which they are situated, discourse analysis focuses first and foremost on the web of ideas, institutions, and practices that comprise the social context:
The fusion of material texts with other forms of communication, such as
body language, interactions, symbolic acts, technologies, and the like
constitutes a Discourse, or a culturally-specific mode of existence. It is
through the recognition and interaction of the various discourses in which
Page 64 of 277 we are embedded that meaning is created, power is conveyed, and the world
is rendered recognizable. (Dittmer 2010, p. 275)
This shift in focus from textual analysis to discourse analysis informs my theoretical starting point.
For example, Chapter 6 critiques dominant scientific and popular narratives of the biomedical phenomenon of foetomaternal microchimaerism. While material texts such as scientific articles and blog posts play a substantial role in mapping out these narratives, it is the broader discourse that constitutes the object of critical inquiry. Thus, rather than focusing on theories from literary or media studies to critique these narratives, I draw predominantly from feminist approaches and theories from science and technology studies. While all four case study chapters of this thesis utilise discourse analysis to some degree, it is employed most prominently in Chapters 3 and 6.
3. Thought Experiments
While the previous techniques sit comfortably within the discipline of cultural studies, I borrow the scientific method of the thought experiment from its primary homes in physics and philosophy. Though the term “thought experiment” dates back to 1793, with its first recorded use by physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, practices resembling the thought experiment have existed for thousands of years, beginning in the works of poets and philosophers (Sorensen 2010, p. 1506).
In these early works, speculative storytelling was employed to test out ideas about the nature of the universe and human ethics in metaphysical terms. Take, for instance, the famous ship of Theseus paradox proposed by Plutarch in (most likely) the second century AD:
The ship on which [Theseus] sailed with the youths and returned in safety,
the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of
Demetrius Phalereus. They would take away the old planks, and put new
ones in their place and thus make it solid again, so that the ship also has
become a controversial example (amphidoxoumenon paradeigma) for the
Page 65 of 277 philosophers in the context of the Growing Argument, some declaring that it
[i.e. the ship] remains the same, others that it does not. (Plutarch in
Ierodiakonou 2018, p. 33)
This example, to which I return in Chapter 4, imagines a ship in which every plank has been replaced over a period of time, thus posing the question: is an object the same object after every material component has been replaced? Philosophically generative in and of itself, thought experiments such as this have great ethical utility when applied to the human: is a person the same person if all their cells are replaced? Or, at a smaller scale, if my heart (or lungs, or liver, and so on) is replaced, is it now my heart (lungs, liver, …)? What of my eyes? What of my brain?
The elasticity of the thought experiment (and its capacity to engage with questions at both an emotional and conceptual level), makes it an excellent tool of ethical debate. Philosopher Georg
Brun (2018) suggests several typologies of the thought experiment as it can be employed in ethics:
1. Epistemic thought experiments: present a reason in favour of or in opposition to a claim;
demonstrate what is possible or challenge assumptions (p. 199).
2. Illustrative thought experiments: make abstract ideas more concrete through the use vivid
imagery (p. 200).
3. Rhetorical thought experiments: employ similar techniques to the illustrative and epistemic
thought experiments to convince someone of a particular position; can be used as a
component of propaganda (Ibid.).
4. Heuristic thought experiments: employ exploratory methods to generate ideas and
systematically investigate different possible branches from the core question (Ibid.); can
also be considered a type of epistemic thought experiment.
5. Thought experiments with a theory-internal function: perform a specific function within a
theory (p. 201).
Page 66 of 277 The zombie figure has been used by scholars and critics in each of these modes, as well as in the primary popular texts themselves. Given the long and varied depiction of the zombie in Western popular culture, fictional works that use the zombie need to establish an internal logic for the creature that manifests in the diegesis. These internal logics are often constructed in great detail, drawing on principles in physics, biology, and theology to support how the zombie exists in the natural world. Furthermore, as philosopher Ross P. Cameron argues, when speculative stories establish such internal logics, what then feels unrealistic or impossible to audiences stands out as important (2015, p. 41); in a world of fantasy or science fiction, where anything is ostensibly possible, why do some things still feel impossible? This “imaginative resistance” (Ibid.) can be seen in the passionate fan debates over which speeds and modes of zombie walking are “legitimate”— the fact that some fans will use anything from affective resonance, to genre convention, to the laws of thermoregulation to argue against the existence of fast-walking zombies suggests that the zombie is a compelling figure for not only its entertainment value, but also its epistemic value
(Zombiepedia n.d.).
This internal coherency and plasticity makes the zombie an excellent candidate for epistemic/heuristic thought experiments. Zombies who are created through virus or bacteria can help us model ethics in managing disease control and prevention. Zombies who irrevocably “lose” their personality can help us think about personhood. Yet the visual and genre aspects of zombie films and television also make them strong tools in illustrative, or even rhetorical thought experiments; perhaps, epistemologically, we decide the zombie who has lost their personality is not the same person they (it) once was—does this judgement change when faced with a zombie who looks, or even acts, as it did before zombification? Finally, for a functional thought experiment, we can recall the hypothetical zombie apocalypse noted in Chapter 1, which is used to mathematically
Page 67 of 277 model rates of zombie creation and destruction (Munz et. al. 2013). The zombie is a highly productive and compelling figure for all types of thoughts experiments.
I employ the technique of the thought experiment in Chapter 4 of this thesis. Applying epistemic/heuristic and illustrative methods of the thought experiment, Chapter 4 draws upon ideas from law, health ethics, philosophy, medicine, and animal rights and applies them to the zombie type made famous by George A. Romero.
4. Radical Qualitative Comparison
The final technique used in this thesis is comparison as a qualitative research method. This mixed-method approach to research involves selecting a small sample of comparable cases and investigating their similarities and differences (Elliot et al. 2016). Qualitative comparison is used across many social science-related disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and political science (Palmberger and Gingrich 2013, pp. 96–99), and the methodological approach varies from discipline to discipline. A common approach taken to qualitative comparative analysis is to compare a small set of culturally diverse communities or nations with a particular research question in mind; for example, how the political systems or national economies differ between these groups (p. 99). Particular units of data and procedures for data collection are determined depending on disciplinary standards and research goals.
A qualitative comparative method can also be used outside of the social sciences to investigate other research subjects, such as texts, theories, scientific processes, or people (Walk
1998). These cases can be weighted equally in the comparison (where they are compared and contrasted) or through a lens comparison (where one case is used to critique another case) (Ibid.).
As with the examples of qualitative comparison above, this method requires a rationale for why each case was chosen and a description of the context within which the cases will be compared.
Page 68 of 277 Approaches to comparative analysis typically bring together two or more conceptually analogous cases: two people, two theories, two nations, two texts, etc. By contrast, this thesis employs a radical qualitative comparison method to bring scientific and science fiction narratives and ideas into dialogue. Building upon the logics of the thought experiment, this technique makes use of the imaginative value of speculative fiction as a metaphor to make abstract and complex concepts more concrete and understandable. However, unlike with the thought experiment, the relationship between fiction and reality in this method is not unidirectional; instead these two phenomena are put in dialogue across a reality/fiction divide in service of mutual conceptual exploration. As in the examples of qualitative comparison outlined above, this parallel approach allows both sides of the hegemonic divide to illuminate differences and similarities between each other, find paradoxes, observe inconsistencies and recurring patterns, and discover new entry points for critical inquiry, thus deconstructing the divide itself. Both the scientific and fictional cases are made more knowable and more accountable through this process.
This method of radical qualitative comparison is employed explicitly in Chapters 3 and 6 of this thesis; however, the value of comparison between the biomedical body and the fictional site of the zombie emerges implicitly in all chapters of this thesis.
In combining these techniques, I criss-cross disciplinary boundaries and extradisciplinary bodies of knowledge to produce a methodology of radically transdisciplinary sampling and comparison. Through these movements, I arrive at a reading of the zombie as more than a reflection of or metaphor for social and medical knowledges. These techniques instead allow for the zombie to constitute a source of critical theory that may be employed in critical medical humanities scholarship to promote more emotion-inflected approaches to bioethical discourse.
Page 69 of 277 PART 2 CHAPTER 3: THE VULNERABLE BODIES OF THE ORGAN DONOR AND THE EARLY
ZOMBI/E
This chapter utilises radical qualitative comparison (through the methods of close textual analysis and discourse analysis) to better understand two types of narratives: stories of the zombi of
Haiti along with its fictional (and highly distorted) translation into early Hollywood cinema, and organ transplantation narratives produced through urban legends and cultural phenomenology.
Through this comparison, I identify recurrent themes of compromised bodily integrity, including cultural anxieties relating to the commodification of and unauthorised access into the human body.
In doing so, I argue that zombie stories make visible the ways that the body becomes uniquely vulnerable in different social and cultural contexts. Additionally, this chapter troubles dominant, rationalistic, Western approaches to medical knowledge (which construct the body as flesh and unlinked to notions of spirit, an afterlife, or similar) by advocating for pluralistic approaches to understanding the body, including those informed by emotional, phenomenological, and spiritual corporeal investments. This approach centres the experiences and feelings of potential organ donors and recipients in debates about organ transplantation in cultural studies and medical ethics discourse, which is crucial if interventions into organ transplant decision making are to be made.
At its most basic, organ transplantation is the transfer of a (usually) healthy organ from one individual to the body of another whose own organ has been damaged or is missing. In reality, organ transfer can be significantly more complex. Parts of organs (such as the liver) can be donated from a donor that may be living or deceased. The organs of a single deceased person may be donated to multiple recipients or may be processed through a laboratory rather than being directly transferred (Waldby and Mitchell 2006, p. 22). In the case of living donation, depending on the location, donors may gift or sell their organs (either directly to the recipient or through a market).
Organs can also originate from strangers, family members, friends, from a different species entirely,
Page 71 of 277 or even be artificial. All these factors intersect to create a complex picture of organ transplantation as both a medical and sociocultural phenomenon.
The ability to move parts of human bodies to other bodies raises ethical questions relating to bodily integrity, identity, agency, and vulnerability. Biomedical advancements over recent decades encourage us to reconsider the plasticity of the body and the ways in which the body and the self are conceptualised (Martin 2001, p. 20). Living bodies can be cut open and fundamentally altered, with parts removed, inserted, or replaced. Though on the face of it, this may not seem particularly remarkable, the increasing changeability of the body, and our methods for corporal manipulation, are in many ways at odds with still-dominant cultural values around bodily integrity, hygiene, and sanctity (see Chapter 5 for an interrogation of the idea of purity and the sacred body). This idea is encapsulated in the following quotation from English literature scholar Emily Russell’s introduction to Transplant Fictions: A Cultural Study of Organ Exchange, published as part of the interdisciplinary series, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine:
Take a moment to truly consider this fact: We take organs from dead bodies
and place them in the living. This practice flies in the face of many of our
most enduring concepts, most particularly the strict separation between the
dead and the living and between the self and others. Organ transplantation
violates the most fundamental categories by which we understand health,
identity, illness, and death. (2019, pp. 1–2).
This use of the word “violate” here is significant. It is not simply the boundaries of inside and outside that are increasingly being challenged by modern science; it is also those between self and other, and living and dead. When these boundaries are compromised, it can feel like a moral transgression—a violation.
Page 72 of 277 Much of what makes organ transplantation so ethically and philosophically contentious is its intercorporeal nature. Organ transplantation is not simply a modification of the body, but a complex relationship between two (or more) bodies. This relationship is further complicated by the potentially differing situations between these bodies—financially, socially, and medically. Even between two consenting, healthy, lucid adults, there is still the risk of economic, cultural, social, and political inequalities that could create a power imbalance between these two individuals.
Furthermore, cultural, religious, and spiritual ideas and morals also all impact upon how humans think about and interact with bodies and body parts. For example, spiritual beliefs about whether humans have souls and if so, whether they are intrinsically tied to the body or to specific body parts, may significantly affect how an individual feels about their body in a biomedical context. Many of these questions are relevant to other areas of biomedicine, but they emerge with particular clarity and gravity when we consider the very nature of organ transplantation—that it rarely exists without the involvement of another (usually human) body. This means the ethical and philosophical concerns of transplantation are largely unique.
The relationship between the organ donor and the organ market can be mapped onto the relationship between the zombie and its creator to expose interesting cultural tensions and preoccupations that emerge in distinct ways in the Latin American and U.S. contexts: the zombie and donor are vulnerable (often due to their race/ethnicity, gender, or financial situation); the body of the zombie and the donor are accessed by individuals with greater power or authority than them; the body of both zombie and donor serves the needs of other humans; the identity of the zombie and the donor is compromised through the process of zombification/transplantation; particular parts of the zombie and donor body—usually the eyes—are of high significance and tied to understandings of a personality/life/soul; and the list continues. In conceptualising the organ donor as a zombie, I foreground the important work done by and through popular cultural forms to provide a model for
Page 73 of 277 illustrating broader cultural and social concerns regarding organ transplantation. This model encourages an empathy and understanding towards such concerns in medical ethics debates.
This chapter, therefore, responds to a need for new ways of ethical thinking (and feeling) through the complexities of organ transplantation. Specifically, it offers ways of creatively understanding how organ transplantation becomes narrativised in popular imaginaries and presents an illustrative metaphor for unpacking selective resistance to organ donation. These tools provide important interventions into debates in medical ethics and cultural studies that seek to map out cultural and social behaviours around organ donation (and the logics that support such behaviours).
Importantly, they provide a way of affectively and empathetically understanding these behaviours in ways that are limited in more rationalist approaches to medical ethics. By mobilising the popular form of the zombie film in a comparative analysis, I argue that viewers who engage with such films are already helping us develop new modes of creative reasoning that can be employed in organ transplant ethical discourse.
This chapter is organised into three parts. Section 3.1 provides a synopsis of White Zombie and connects it to the Haitian origin of the zombi. It also briefly introduces two key social concerns that are explored throughout this chapter: the loss of autonomy and the vulnerability of the body.
Section 3.2 interrogates the veracity of the argument that horror narratives about organ theft serve to both disturb and reassure audiences (Russell 2019, p. 228). To do this, it conducts a qualitative comparative analysis of organ theft narratives and stories of the zombi/e in Latin America and the
U.S. In analysing the patterns that emerge through this comparison, I argue that while horror narratives do disturb audiences, their capacity to reassure is dependent on who the audience is and how (un)likely such fears are to eventuate. Section 3.3 continues the analysis of White Zombie, this time comparing its thematic focus on the eye to studies in bioethics into the reported reasons for selective refusal of corneal donation. This qualitative comparison analyses the symbolic, aesthetic
Page 74 of 277 utility of the eye fragment in film (and the affect it produces) in relation to the cultural and social weight that is attached to the eye as a part of a human body. Through this comparison, I encourage a more empathetic approach to understanding ontologically and phenomenologically informed decisions relating to corneal donation. I argue that this approach is crucial not only from the perspective of interpersonal ethics, but also if interventions into such decisions are to be made.
3.1 White Zombie
The primary example of the zombie I use in this chapter is the zombie of the 1932 film
White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin. White Zombie opens with a funeral. Madeleine Short and Neil Parker have arrived in Haiti to be married, when they come across a burial taking place in the middle of the road. Their driver explains that the funeral goers “are afraid of the men who steal dead bodies” and thus bury their dead underneath busy roads. While they wait for the road to clear, the carriage is approached by the menacing zombie master Murder Legendre, who is followed by several docile men. These men scare the driver, who quickly flees with Madeleine and Neil.
We soon learn why these men have frightened the driver: “they are not men […] they are dead bodies.” The driver explains that these bodies are “zombies. The living dead. Corpses taken from their graves who are made to work in the sugar mills and fields at night.” This, the driver assures them, is a state worse than death. The driver’s perspective mirrors the Haitian perspective on zombification: becoming a zombi in Haitian tradition is considered a fate worse than death
(Davis 1988, p. 9). Fear derives from becoming a zombi, not from the zombi itself. To become a zombi is to be enslaved, to lose all identity and autonomy. It is the dual fear of losing both identity and autonomy that makes zombification particularly terrifying. In the driver’s warning, we have the thesis statement of White Zombie: it is better to die than to relinquish all autonomy.
Page 75 of 277 Unfortunately, this is the fate that awaits Madeleine. Shortly after they arrive at their destination—a manor owned by the aristocrat Charles Beaumont—we meet a missionary named Dr
Bruner who warns the couple that Charles may have nefarious motives for inviting them to his home. Indeed, it turns out that Charles is in love with Madeleine and he conspires with Murder
Legendre to turn Madeleine into a zombie. However, not long after being gifted with his zombie bride, Charles realises that the light has left Madeleine’s eyes and her soul is now gone. He admits that he desired more than her beauty and expresses regret at his decision. He asks Legendre to bring life back to Madeleine, as seeing even hatred in her eyes would be better than emptiness. By now, however, Legendre has decided that he wants Madeleine for himself, so he has Charles turned into a zombie as well—though, unusually, a zombie who is aware of his zombifying state. Legendre also commands Madeleine to kill Neil, who has figured out what has happened and arrived to rescue her.
Madeleine appears to retain a small amount of control over her actions and her moment of hesitation before killing Neil is enough for her to be stopped by Dr Bruner. Legendre then sets his zombie slaves after Neil but is interrupted by Dr Bruner, who knocks Legendre unconscious; the zombies (now apparently without direction) wander aimlessly off a cliff. Legendre gains consciousness again, but is pushed off the cliff by Charles, who seems to have retained some control over his actions. Charles falls after him and Legendre’s death releases Madeleine from her zombified state, reuniting her with Neil.
As noted in Chapter 1, White Zombie emerged at a time when Hollywood was experiencing great success with classic literary monster movies including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). In comparison to these hits, White Zombie was received poorly by critics of the time, something that film historian George E. Turner attributes partially to a growing cultural fatigue with and possibly contempt for the horror genre (2001, p. 1). Though critical opinion of the film has somewhat softened since, White Zombie is most notable simply for
Page 76 of 277 its status as the first zombie movie (Dendle 2001, p. 190). The plot of the film was inspired by
Kenneth Webb’s 1932 New York stage production titled “Zombie” and William Seabrook’s The
Magic Island (1929), while the tone, set design, and even casting borrowed from Universal Pictures films such as Dracula and Frankenstein (p. 2). Through these various cultural stimuli, a creature was born that drew not only from the Haitian zombi that Seabrook inaccurately reported upon, but also from cultural investments and concerns throughout the U.S. (and reflected in Hollywood cinema of the time). The zombie type of White Zombie takes on elements of the Haitian zombi: the zombies are created through “voodoo” (rather than virus, radiation, scientific mistake, or unknown causes, as is usually the case with later zombies), they are docile in appearance, they function as slaves, and the film is even set in Haiti. Yet these interpretations of the zombi are highly
Americanised and the Hollywood zombie’s depiction of identity (including race/ethnicity, class, and gender) marks it even more starkly as a U.S. product. For the most part, the zombies of White
Zombie are coded as black, male slaves, yet the film focuses on (the horror of) the zombification of the white, wealthy heroine. In this way, the Haitian zombi and early Hollywood zombie represent two distinct, yet deeply connected cultural concerns; while the zombi/e ultimately speaks to a vulnerability of the body and a fear of losing autonomy, these zombi/es are produced by two very different contexts, and thus operate in different and specific ways.
3.2 The Evolution of Organ Theft Urban Legends and the Zombi/e
This section considers the intimately connected notions of power and vulnerability as they manifest in horror narratives about organ theft and zombification. It also interrogates and complicates the argument posited by Emily Russell that horror narratives about organ theft serve to both disturb and reassure audiences (2019, p. 228). In Chapter 6 of Transplant Fictions, Russell examines a series of horror texts addressing the terrors of organ transplantation to argue that such
Page 77 of 277 texts “dramatize fears, not to limit our acceptance of the practice, but to paradoxically reassure us that such transgressions are located safely at a generic extreme” (2019, p. 193). Russell argues that, in contrast to sentimental organ transplant narratives (which are more prescriptive in generating positive attitudes towards organ transplantation), horror provides a “venting mechanism” for cultural concerns (p. 195). To critique this argument, I conduct a comparative analysis of the narrative trajectory of organ theft urban legends from the 1980s in Latin America to the 1990s in the
U.S., and the zombi in Haiti to the zombie of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, I assess how power and vulnerability manifest in each category of narratives and the relationship between this representation and persistent cultural anxieties. This comparison makes visible a pattern within which particular sets of fears, and the basis for such fears, are represented in the narrative genre of horror in distinct ways pre- and post-translation into the U.S. context. By analysing these representations, I contend that Russell’s argument holds true only under particular circumstances; more specifically, horror has the capacity to reassure us that “transgressions are located safely at a generic extreme” only when such transgressions literally and metaphorically are an unlikely threat. Instead, (in contrast to U.S. representations) the urban legends of organ stealing in Latin America and the stories of the zombi in Haiti symbolically represent acts of violence that its audiences may very well encounter.
In 1993, a BBC documentary uncovered an underground network of organ harvesters in
Argentina who would target corpses and remove their corneas before the bodies were moved to the morgue (Frow 1995, p. 88). These corneas could attract up to $7,000 and were distributed to hospitals around the country. However, the documentary also revealed cases where living humans
(including children) were kidnapped or attacked and their corneas forcibly removed. These stories had been spreading across Latin America since the mid-1980s, often focusing on the kidnap of children and the removal of eyes and other organs for wealthy North American children (Campion-
Page 78 of 277 Vincent 1997, pp. 2–3; Samper 2002, p. 2). The fear of these organ thieves was so intense that in
1994, an American tourist was attacked by a mob in Guatemala and stabbed eight times after she was seen talking to a group of children not long after a local woman had reported her own child as missing (Samper 2002, p. 1).
The reports of unauthorised and unethical organ removal throughout this time period can be trusted with varying degrees of certainty, yet the narratives themselves are telling. For example, in in the late 1980s, rumours in Brazil began to gain visibility, warning of abducted and mutilated children whose organs were sold to wealthy foreign transplant patients (Scheper-Hughes 1990, p.
57). Nancy Scheper-Hughes notes in her anthropological research into organ-stealing rumours that it was specifically in the poor shantytowns of Brazil that these rumours surfaced (Ibid.). The reality of children living in these poor communities was one of real danger and trauma. The killing of children by militia, the increasing rates of adoption of children by foreigners, the disappearance of children into prisons and federal correctional facilities, and the increase in human organ trafficking all could contribute to the mythologies of kidnap and murder for black-market organ trade
(Scheper-Hughes 1990).
This connectivity between recurrent cultural anxieties and the horrors of narratives told about organ transplantation is a key focus of Chapter 6 of Emily Russell’s book, Transplant
Fictions: A Cultural Study of Organ Exchange (2019). The chapter opens with an anecdote about a
1978 Pennsylvanian court case in which a man named Robert McFall tried to force his cousin
(David Shrimp) to consent to testing for possible bone marrow donation, without which McFall would die (p. 191). McFall did not succeed for a crucial reason: forcing Shrimp to proceed with the testing and subsequent donation would go against the obligation of the legal system to ensure
Shrimp was protected against “being invaded and hurt by another” (Flaherty in Russell 2019, p.
191). Russell goes on to quote the court’s rationale for the decision: “For a society, which respects
Page 79 of 277 the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concept of jurisprudence” (Ibid.).
This rationale is revealing for two reasons. First, as Russell observes, the horror of the metaphor employed in the above quote is mobilised with the specific purpose of speaking to cultural fears (2019, p. 192). The vampiric imagery, along with the emotionally charged use of the word “revolting,” exposes an assumption that the public is already against this parasitic approach to maintaining an individual’s life—one individual may not be harmed to save another individual’s life and unauthorised access into an individual’s body constitutes a form of harm. Furthermore, the prospect of this occurring is not only morally repugnant, it is frightening.
Second, in addition to speaking to these cultural fears, the use of the horror genre in the rationale also reassures the public that appropriate action has been taken—these horrors will not eventuate (at least under the judicial and medical systems of the time). This, Russell explains, is a key utility of horror: to simultaneously disturb audiences while reassuring them that such a transgression is an “extreme,” and thus, by nature, located at a safe distance (2019, p. 193). The violation of the body and the transgression of boundaries that occur in organ transplant narratives serve a similar function: they are “universally told but also […] unfounded, both frightening and reassuring in [their] vibrant specifics” (p. 228). Here we can see the utility of the horror genre in providing an illustrative and instructive translation of cultural anxieties. Russell writes:
Horror narratives […] provide an outlet for resistant attitudes ranging from
the abstract—how does my notion of the self change when mingled with
alien parts?—to the practical—how can I protect myself from exploitation
by mad doctors or exploitive institutions? […] Horror narratives, by using
generic convention of exaggeration, both express these fears while also
Page 80 of 277 reassuring us that their most frightening limits have not yet been achieved in
the real world. (2019, p. 228).
I am interested in the extent to which this theory holds when these horror narratives emerge outside of the contexts of wealthy, often English-speaking nations; is it fair to say in these cases that these
“frightening limits” have not been achieved? To answer this question, I compare two trajectories of narrative horror: that of the Haitian zombi/e and the organ theft victim. With this in mind, I propose that the early zombi/e provides a generative metaphor in cultural studies scholarship for working through key philosophical and theological questions underpinning organ transplant narratives: am I still me if part of me is gone?; is my body vulnerable to unauthorised access?; how can I understand my body as a whole when I am constructed from interconnected but removable pieces? Most importantly, how do these anxieties and questions shift in different cultural locales?
Early iterations of the Hollywood zombie (including White Zombie) offer a particularly nuanced cultural perspective on corporeal vulnerability. This, I argue, is due to the Haitian origins of the creature. As discussed in Chapter 1, the zombi of Haitian Vodoun is not caused by infection— one cannot become a zombi in Haitian tradition through contracting a virus or being bitten by another zombie. In later representations (from the 1960s onwards), the zombie itself can be argued to be a somewhat egalitarian monster, at least in its fundamentals. Though many contemporary popular culture texts offer critiques of economic power through using such a zombie (for example, through the gated communities of the wealthy providing a barrier to the infection impacting on the rest of the society), from a purely physiological perspective, there is usually no reason why one person would be more or less vulnerable to zombie attack and subsequent zombification than another; ethnicity, gender, social class, and wealth are irrelevant to the zombie pathogen.
This is not the case with the Haitian zombi—a person can only become a zombi through the actions of another person and the act of zombification is often employed explicitly across social
Page 81 of 277 lines of power. Haitian Vodoun emerged alongside the introduction of Western Christian theology through colonialism in Haiti and was largely a form of resistance against the religious and cultural oppression of Haitian slaves. In the Haitian Vodoun tradition, unnatural death (such as that caused by sorcery) is essential to claim a deceased individual as a zombi (Davis 1988, p. 8). The bokor
(sorcerer) is able to gain power by taking the victim’s ti bon ange (from the French “petit bon ange” or “little good angel”; this is the victim’s essence or personality, and is distinct from the more general “gros bon ange” or “big good angel,” which is a general life force that keeps the zombi mobile) (p. 186). It is the lack of ti bon ange that gives the zombi its cataleptic persona. When creating a zombi, the bokor splits the victim into two separate zombis: the spirit zombi (zombi efface or zombi astral) and the flesh zombi (zombi corps cadavre or zombi jardin) (p. 8; 60).
Even these terms signal the complexities of the zombi as a symbol of both corporeal vulnerability and colonial oppression. First, the descriptors for the word “zombi” and the parts of the zombi are given in the colonial language of French and the French-based Haitian Creole—a direct product of the contact between French colonisers and African slaves. Second, the translations of the terms for the zombi point to the intended purpose of each zombi: the flesh zombie is known as both a corpse (“corps cadavre”) and a “garden zombi” (“jardin”),7 signalling its purpose as an undead field slave capable of movement from the presence of the gros bon ange but lacking in the personal identity afforded by the ti bon ange; in contrast, while “astral” refers to the non-physical nature of the spirit zombi, “efface,” means “erase(d).” This spirit zombi is stolen from the body and stored in a jar to be used later by the bokor, for example, through the transplantation of the spirit into another human or nonhuman animal (p. 60). As Peter Dendle writes:
7 I have had difficulty independently verifying the usage of the term “zombi jardin” outside of Wade Davis’s ethnographic work, as most academic usage of the term cites Davis directly. Unlike with the other terms for the zombi, which Davis appears to have learned through his primary research working with the bokor in Haiti, Davis cites Belgian science fiction author Charles-Henri Dewisme in his book “Les zombis: ou le secret des morts-vivants” (“Zombies: or the secret of the living-dead”) (1957). Page 82 of 277 The essence of the ‘zombie’ at the most abstract level is supplanted, stolen,
or effaced consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation of one
person’s will by that of another. It is no coincidence that the creature
flourished in the twentieth century, a century whose broad intellectual trends
were preoccupied with alienation. Existentialism vividly brought out
problems of solitude of the possibility of true connections betweens [sic]
individuals, and of the very nature of the self. (2007, pp. 47–48)
This tension between the spirit and the body in the two zombis demonstrates how the body becomes fragmented through the process of zombification, with every part marked by its usefulness to another person. In this way, the figure of the zombi is a productive model for understanding the fears of organ transplantation emergent in organ transplant urban legends across places like Latin
America in the 1980s, due to the exploitation of power inequalities inherent in the process of zombification, and the unauthorised and seemingly unnatural intervention into the body required by the bokor.
Though the cinematic zombie presents a much more simplified version of the zombification process, these themes of vulnerability, power, and corporeal fragmentation are persistent. The story of White Zombie (1932) in particular tracks the movement of power (and the currency of different kinds of power) between its characters. The differences in power and agency between the different characters in White Zombie are indicative of a number of values and fears of audience members of the time. These manifest in the varied ways through which power is distributed in White Zombie.
Charles Beaumont’s wealth allows him to purchase the services of Legendre, giving him access to
Madeleine’s body. Madeleine, as a woman, is vulnerable to this unwanted access. Her vulnerability is also tied to her whiteness, an idea that is replicated in other zombie films of the time (in addition to White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies [1936], Revenge of the Zombies [1943], and I Walked with a
Page 83 of 277 Zombie [1943] all feature a white woman who is zombified to perform romantic, emotional, and implied-sexual labour).8 White Zombie, like other zombie films of this time period, reflects the early twentieth-century fears of miscegenation and the uprising of colonised bodies through its alignment of whiteness with purity and innocence (Bishop 2010, p. 13; Pressley-Sanon 2016, p. 34).
Furthermore, the explicit use of slavery through zombification in White Zombie also holds the narrative function of standing as a “surrogate […] for meditation on the problems of human freedom” (Morrison [1992] 1993, p. 37). Nobel Prize-winning novelist and humanities professor
Toni Morrison argues that American writers have historically utilised black slavery as a
“playground for the imagination,” into which internal (white) fears could be transferred (p. 38).
Given the proximity of zombies and voodoo to blackness (or, rather, a particular form of blackness in the white Western imaginary), Madeleine’s zombification represents a specific threat to white femininity and the ideal of (white) human freedom. It also ties her to the zombie mass, who (due to the Haitian setting and their function as slaves working in fields and sugar mills) are coded as non- white. Thus, whiteness in White Zombie is constructed against the backdrop of the voiceless zombie slave mass.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the only unambiguously white zombies in White
Zombie (Madeleine and Charles) are also the only zombies who are shown resisting Legendre’s magic. This resistance speaks to the “disturbing” and “reassuring” capacity of horror identified by
Russell: the zombification of Madeleine and Charles is presented as an extreme in comparison to the zombification of the workers around them. In this very extremity, the true horror from White
Zombie is established as derived not from the mere presence of zombies (which are, for the most part, background workers in the mills and fields), but from the audacity of Murder Legendre in
8 United Artists originally suggested the following catchline for White Zombie: “They knew that this was taking place among the blacks, but when this fiend practiced it on a white girl … all hell broke loose” (Riley 2016, p. 163). Though this exact catchline was never used, other versions were released, including “Zombies Stole a White Girl, Then the Fury of Hell BROKE LOOSE” and “They knew this fiend was practising zombiism on the natives, but when he tried it on a white girl the nation revolted” (Ibid.). Page 84 of 277 zombifying two people to whom he had no right—the wealthy, white Madeleine and Charles.
Madeleine and Charles demonstrate their exceptional status by being the only two zombies capable of exercising any control or conscious understanding over their actions.
The evolution of the zombie figure from the stories of the zombi in Haiti and to the zombie films of early Hollywood can be productively mapped onto the evolution of organ stealing urban legends. Sociologist Veronique Campion-Vincent identifies three narrative subcycles in international organ theft narratives:
1. In Latin America in the 1980s, children are rumoured to be adopted by foreign parents for
the purpose of their bodies being harvested for organs.
2. Continuing in Latin America in the 1980s, stories describe children being kidnapped on the
streets and body parts taken, sometimes leaving the child alive (but missing eyes or
kidneys) with a “thank you” note.
3. In the 1990s, these urban legends arrive in the U.S., with victims often being adult men
visiting major cities, who are tricked by a beautiful woman (2002, pp. 34–35).
This evolution of the narrative indicates an important shift: where victims are initially targeted for their economic vulnerability by white, Western, often English-speaking9 individuals, later accounts generally feature wealthy men targeted by beautiful women. Thus, the attachment of corporeal vulnerability shifts from anxieties about North American and European power and influence to anxieties relating to an inversion of the established social order (that privileges whiteness, maleness, and economic power).
So too do we see the zombi/e evolve. The zombi is inextricably tied to colonial oppression and violence, and stories of the zombi therefore speak to these inherent inequalities of power. As journalist Mike Mariani writes: “For Haitian slaves, the invention of the zombie was proof that the
9 Many versions of these stories feature a thank you note written in English (Warinner 2012). Page 85 of 277 abuse they suffered was in a way more powerful than life itself—they had imagined a scenario in which they continued to be slaves even after death” (2015). Though this rationale may be a touch simplistic, the emergence of the zombi in Haitian culture has undeniable ties to the complexities of the transatlantic slave trade and the resulting African diaspora, and the oppression of French colonialism. Yet when the zombie entered the U.S. imaginary, the idea of corporeal vulnerability once again shifted—now, to be vulnerable was to be brought into proximity with blackness, with slavery, and with a loss of autonomy, when one’s class, wealth, and whiteness should have kept one safe.
The ties to gender in both organ and zombie narratives in North America are also significant.
Zombification for both Madeleine and Charles represents a gender-specific threat. For Madeleine, zombification is a method of sexual and romantic access to the body—something to which her womanhood makes her particularly vulnerable. Charles is also zombified so that Madeleine’s body may be accessed, this time by Murder Legendre. This zombification also acts as a display of power by Legendre over Charles. As Charles becomes aware of his new situation, Legendre sits beside him and casually carves a small effigy of a man, flaunting his ability to control the lives and bodies of other men. Legendre tells Charles:
Can you still hear me? It is unfortunate you are no longer able to speak. I
should be interested to hear you describe your symptoms. You see, you are
the first man to know what is happening. None of the others did. [Charles
grabs Legendre’s hand] You refused to shake hands once. I remember. Well,
well. We understand each other better now.
Charles’s zombification represents both a scientific curiosity and a retribution for a perceived slight for Legendre in which the intersections of class and race are apparent. Legendre’s manner is calm and authoritative, in contrast to the slow but desperate movements of the zombifying Charles.
Page 86 of 277 Where Charles had previously been confident in his social and economic power, as well as his entitlement to Madeleine’s body and her autonomy, now he is being forced to experience the victimhood he enacted upon Madeleine. Furthermore, while Legendre’s role as slave master links him to the role of the white coloniser, his use of “voodoo magic” ties him to a North American understanding of a particular form of blackness (i.e. the exaggerated and derogatory fictional practitioner of voodoo in North American cultural production, which appropriates religious and cultural practices from the Caribbean and Africa and is deeply rooted in colonialism). Hence, the above exchange represents not only a mystical threat to whiteness, but a social one—Legendre has rejected his role as a voodoo master in service to a wealthy white man and instead shows contempt towards Charles, forcing Charles into a socially submissive role. Once again, horror is derived from the inversion of the social order.
The rumours of organ stealing that began circulating the U.S. in the 1990s (including through word of mouth, email chains, and even being replicated in a 1991 episode of Law & Order titled “Sonata for Solo Organ”10) were also preoccupied with gendered vulnerability. A common retelling of this story involved a man being approached by a beautiful woman at a party, being drugged, and waking up in a bath full of ice with a note alerting him to what has happened
(Mikkelson 2001). Just as in the example with Murder Legendre, gendered representations here intersect with race, as the woman is often described as being Latina or the events of the tale take place in Latin America (Warinner 2012). In this case, the expectations of social power have been inverted once again. This leans upon social understandings of masculine invulnerability and the perceived “myth” of male rape—that a woman “cannot” violate a man’s body. In the context of the kidney heist, the horror not only lies in the bodily vulnerability, but in the idea of a body that is not usually vulnerable being made to be vulnerable.
10 This episode follows an investigation into an attack on a man who has been found with a single kidney removed, which is then linked to the transplant-recipient daughter of a wealthy man. Page 87 of 277 In these sets of organ and zombie stories, a pattern emerges: where the fantastical horrors of the zombi and organ theft were once utilised to make legible the cultural anxieties related to colonial violence, when translated to a U.S. context they become a terrifying “what if” tale: what if the normalised hierarchies of power were inverted, making the powerful vulnerable? Thus, I argue that
Russell’s claim of organ transplant horror stories disturbing and reassuring requires an audience that already has reason to be reassured. The “extremes” of the kidney heist and Madeleine and Charles’s zombification should not only be understood in terms of the literal likelihood of bodily violation, but also in the political likelihood that these people could become victimised. By contrast, when these narratives emerge in other contexts, they instead provide a way of working through a very real threat; perhaps children in Brazil in the 1980s were unlikely to be kidnapped for their organs, and perhaps Haitians were unlikely to be raised from the dead to continue to work as an undead slave, but the dangers posed to these children and the violence of slavery have been very much a reality. In contrast to the perceived threats against privileged identities in North America (where whiteness, maleness, and wealth become understood as threatened), the stories of the zombi in Haiti and organ theft in Latin America do not locate threats at a safe distance, but instead make sense of real-world horrors through fantastical devices.
3.3 The Zombi/e in a Mass and the Zombi/e in Pieces
This section considers anxieties and social preoccupations with the human eye and how these might motivate decision making relating to corneal donation. It uses a qualitative comparative analysis to put the aesthetic focus on (and implicit symbolic value of) eyes in White Zombie into dialogue with reported reasons for selective refusal of corneal donation. In doing so, it maps out social and cultural understandings of the body as simultaneously a whole (and part of a monolithic mass) and fragmented into pieces. I begin by analysing how White Zombie frames eyes as symbolic
Page 88 of 277 of personal identity, interpersonal relationships, and the metaphysical or spiritual dimensions of being. I then compare this framing to the vague and phenomenologically oriented reasons for selectively refusing to donate corneas (when other forms of organ and tissue donation might be deemed acceptable), as reported in a study conducted by Lawlor et al. (2010). Through this comparison, I argue that the eye must be thought of not only as a body part, but as a fragment with complex ontological and phenomenological attachments to the body as a whole. The zombie of
White Zombie, therefore, provides a generative visual metaphor for the organ donor’s body that allows for a way of understanding anxieties relating to donation that a rationalist medical ethics framework may not account for.
Before I begin, I first want to explicate the specific offerings of the zombie figure in an analysis of organ transplantation, as compared to another major speculative monster already employed in such analysis: the cyborg. The cyborg, as biologist and ecofeminist Donna Haraway describes it, “is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” ([1985] 1989, p. 174). Haraway introduced the cyborg in her
1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in which she argues that the evolution of communication technologies and biotechnologies in the late twentieth century erodes any supposed rigidity in the boundaries between human, nonhuman animal, and machine (pp. 176–177). Moreover, such essentialist boundaries produce hierarchies that contribute to oppression (not only of nonhuman animals, but of anyone who falls short of the top of the hierarchy in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, or class) and to the exploitation of nature
(p. 179). Haraway argues that the cyborg emerges at these sites of boundary erosion and in doing so, it identifies opportunities for transboundary kinship and crossing. The cyborg furthermore rejects a universalising of identity and embraces relations with technology, rather than a supposedly natural, originary state or category of being to which we may return (p. 204). Under Haraway’s framing, the
Page 89 of 277 figure of the cyborg allows for a mapping of the relationship between machine and human, the materiality of the body (and its leaky boundaries), and the construction and replication of subjecthood.
Scholars in the areas of biopolitics, postmodernism, science and technology studies, and economics have taken up the cyborg figure in organ transplant discourse in a variety of ways: to articulate the diverse- and multi-materiality of the body (Hoeyer 2009); as a site of intercorporeal mediating and mingling (Lindberg 2013); to reify the body as a commodity and object of consumption, and explicate the particularities of technological embodiment (Lai 2012); to elucidate the social anxieties produced through organ transplantation (Chozinski 2016); and to illustrate the technological reproducibility of bodies and trouble the physical and metaphysical boundaries of the self (Schwab 1987). The cyborg can thus help make sense of the heterogeneous materiality of the transplant recipient’s body and the intimate exchanges that take place between bodies through the process of transplantation.
I argue, however, that the zombie also deserves a place beside the cyborg as a metaphor for the organ donor.11 While the cyborg provides a useful metaphor for the increasingly plastic limits of scientific innovation, the entanglements of the zombi/e with slavery and the particular aesthetics of bodily fragmentation in films such as White Zombie offer an alternative way of engaging with social and cultural anxieties relating to the tension between the phenomenological experience of the body as a person and the idea of the body as property or biomedical resource. The zombi/e body is not only manipulated by and in service of humankind, it is an explicit tool of labour that is grounded in the exploitation of vulnerable human bodies. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the zombi/e body has clear aesthetic differences from that of the cyborg, which allows us to use the zombie to explore
11 This should not be confused with Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry’s proposed use of the zombie in their nod to Haraway’s cyborg: “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” (2008). Lauro and Embry propose the “zombii” as a posthuman figure which “rejects both subject and object categories” and is simultaneously “slave and slave rebellion” (pp. 93–95). Though there are some resonances between Lauro and Embry’s zombii and my use of the zombie metaphor, they are ultimately distinct from each other. Page 90 of 277 other forms of social and cultural anxieties. The embodied experience of zombification is an experience of affective fragmentation—in the literal splitting of the body by the bokor in zombification and in the filmic language of White Zombie, which isolates parts of the body through dialogue and shot framing.
The visual fragmentation of the body holds great symbolic value; as art historian Linda
Nochlin argues in her book, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994), bodily fragmentation in a visual medium creates meaning not only in its representation of a particular object (e.g. a foot, a head), but in the very fact of its fragmentation. While Nochlin suggests different interpretations of fragmentation throughout her book (with regards to the interpretation of different artworks), some key utilities of fragmentation as an allegory for social and political concerns emerge: literal fragmentation (through the presentation of dismembered body parts) shatters “the coherence of the body” (p. 19); in the case of the metaphysical isolation of body parts, fragmentation signals “a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value” (pp. 23–24). Moreover, these examples of fragmentation in art are associated with modernity in shifting but persistent ways, and thus these allegories should be read as particularly modern social and political concerns (p. 59). However, Nochlin cautions that each instance of fragmentation must also “be treated as a series of discrete, ungeneralizable situations” (Ibid.). In analysing White Zombie, therefore, I am mindful of notable modern values
(individuality, autonomy, colonialism, capitalism) while still paying attention to the particular and highly contextual ways that fragmentation operates in the text.
In the context of White Zombie, the frequent use of extreme close-ups of eyes and hands suggests that such body parts possess a different value when presented in isolation from the rest of the body—the eyes and hands become more than simply parts of a body and instead produce new and disjointed connections with the notion of the “whole” body. Importantly, unlike with the
Page 91 of 277 cyborg, which (in popular representations) fetishises a technological and mechanical connection with the body, the (dis)connectivity of body parts in the zombi/e is spiritual in nature. This spirituality is characterised in a way that departs significantly from Haraway’s cyborg figure, which is highly invested in the techno-scientific context within which it is produced. When applied to discussions of organ transplantation, the zombi/e can be mobilised to explore a different kind of relationship with body parts that brings a particular kind of attention to the loss of autonomy/ individualism and the connectivity between the physical and metaphysical. I therefore argue that the zombi/e metaphor has affective and epistemic utility in medical ethics as a companion to the cyborg metaphor in organ transplant discourse.
Before I analyse the fragmentation of the body in the figure of the zombie, I first want to locate the zombie body within the idea of the “horde.” As outlined in Chapter 1, the zombie has experienced a drastic evolution since the release of White Zombie and the role of the horde in zombie films has evolved as well. Today, the zombie horde is most frequently presented as a mass that threatens to overwhelm and is generally understood as a stand-in for more existential cultural threats—climate change, extreme wealth disparity, epidemics and pandemics, natural disasters, terrorism, foreign military powers, capitalism and mass culture, systemic social injustice, and so on.
Humanities scholar Roger Luckhurst argues that this notion of the zombie horde emerged initially in response to global politics around the time of 1945, which oversaw several key horrors within the context of World War II, including British and American forces discovering 60,000 starving prisoners (and 13,000 unburied corpses) in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Soviet forces uncovering the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, and the American destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2015, p. 110). In the context in which this thesis was finalised, which has seen the continued spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing global protests relating to the Black Lives Matter movement, we can confidently expect imagery of the
Page 92 of 277 zombie horde to continue to feature in popular media with even more symbolic gravity and precision.
However, though the form of the zombie horde as we know it today emerged with greater clarity after World War II, the zombie mass was very much a feature of films such as White Zombie as well as Haitian zombi folklore. What has changed most significantly since 1945 is the relationship between humans and the zombie mass—where the zombie horde today represents both a threat to safety (where one might be physically attacked by the zombie horde) and autonomy
(where one might become one of the zombie horde), White Zombie is concerned solely with the latter.12 The focus of White Zombie is not the zombie horde, but the “individual, dehumanised victim” (Servitje and Vint 2016, p. xi). The horde functions as a backdrop for these more important zombies; not an immediate physical threat but instead as a constant, lingering reminder of what the protagonist might become.
This dichotomy between the “individual, dehumanised victim” and the broader zombie hoard is an important factor in how White Zombie treats zombie bodies. Much like with the organ donor, who exists both within a complex medical system (comprised of countless human bodies) and as an individual, the zombie is simultaneously a body within a mass (a horde) and an individual that can be understood as comprised of parts (eyes, hands, etc.). Throughout White Zombie, zombies
(with the distinct exception of Madeleine and Charles) are rarely seen individually on the screen, and even when they are, they are always understood to be part of a larger mass—they are never given a voice or a name and shots of individual zombies are always cut between shots of a zombie mass. In one scene, inside Legendre’s mill, we see a large group of zombies working the machinery.
When one zombie loses balance and falls, the camera continues to pan away to show the other
12 Even though Legendre sets his zombie slaves after Neil at the end, the only real violence in the film is enacted directly by humans. Page 93 of 277 working zombies; in this environment, the single zombie is irrelevant. It is only the zombie as a mass that matters.
In the same scene, Legendre articulates the value of the zombie horde: “They work faithfully. They are not worried about long hours. You, you could make good use of men like mine on your plantations.” Charles, however, is not interested in the zombie workers—he only wants
Madeleine. Until this point, White Zombie has paid no attention to the notion of an individual zombie. From the point of Madeleine’s zombification, however, the individual zombie (and the line between the zombie and sentient human) becomes the primary preoccupation of the film.
Madeleine’s zombification takes place on her wedding day. She dines with Charles and Neil, and at Neil’s request plays at reading his fortune. Madeleine gazes into her wine glass and tells Neil that she sees happiness and love. Her expression then changes to confusion and the camera shows what she is seeing. Within the inky darkness of her wineglass a face slowly emerges: the dark face of Murder Legendre, wearing an intense expression with the whites of his eyes startling bright against the rest of the image. We see these same eyes earlier in the film and at various other points, always indicating Legendre’s mystically sinister presence and power.
Upon seeing Legendre’s face, Madeleine announces that she sees “death.” She looks away in terror and the scene cuts to reveal that Legendre is elsewhere burning a small effigy of
Madeleine. As the figurine burns, Madeleine collapses into Neil’s arms and the scene cuts once again, this time to a close up of Legendre’s eyes, surrounded in black, then back to Madeleine’s face as her eyes close. We return to Legendre, who smiles triumphantly before the scene fades to black.
Throughout White Zombie, eyes are a consistent indicator of autonomy and personal identity. Early in the film, Legendre tells Charles that he has looked into Madeleine’s eyes and determined that she is deeply in love with Neil. Later, after Madeleine’s zombification, Charles mourns the lack of light in Madeleine’s eyes. He laments, “I thought that beauty alone would
Page 94 of 277 satisfy, but the soul is gone. I can’t bear those empty staring eyes.” The lifeless, empty eyes of the zombified Madeleine become a counterpoint to the intense staring eyes of Legendre. Through this juxtaposition, the image of the eye is established as a symbolic indicator of personhood. This relationship between eyes and personhood is also present in the zombi in Vodoun tradition; reporting on their investigations13 into Haitian zombi folklore, microbiology professor Hans-W.
Ackermann and senior nurse Jeanine Gauthier claim that the zombi is “recognized chiefly by dull, glazed eyes and an absent air” (1991 p. 474). Once again, the eyes (in expression, aesthetics, and movements) become an indicator of zombification. This preoccupation with the eyes as a conveyer of life and personhood extends far beyond the zombi/e—research in the area of psychological science has shown that eyes are disproportionately considered to be indicative (compared to other bodily features) of sentience and life (Looser and Wheatley 2010, p. 1854); eyes are also considered to be notoriously difficult to realistically reproduce in CGI animation, and failure to do so risks CGI humans having an “uncanny” appearance (Bérard et al. 2014; Molinsky 2018); even the Bible describes the eyes as being the “lamp of the body,” where healthy eyes denote a body “full of light” (Matthew 6:22, NIV).
In the context of organ transplantation, eyes continue to constitute a site of cultural preoccupation and anxiety. Eyes are a frequent target of the organ stealing narratives discussed in
Section 3.2, appearing in stories across the world with varying degrees of credibility. This recurrence of the eye can be understood from within two contexts. First is within the social context of global capitalism, which promotes the idea that eyes exist as property that can be sold within a global market and become valued against other organs. This is enabled by an understanding of the body as a machine, where parts can be replaced as needed (Shaw 2010, pp. 136–137). In this case, the less useful the body part appears to be, the more willing an individual may be to donate it; for
13 Ackermann and Gauthier’s (1991) study reviews the existing literature on the zombi (including the various ways scholars have attempted to explain the phenomenon) and reports newer data relating to the previously under- investigated zombi efface. Page 95 of 277 instance, as sociologist and bioethicist Rhonda Shaw notes in her research into organ donation and cultural phenomenology, an appendix or single kidney, which have more limited use in the body, may hold relatively low symbolic value when compared against the brain, which can be perceived as the centre of intelligence and consciousness (p. 137).
This competitive valuing of organs as commodities, however, does not fully explain why eyes are so prominent in organ stealing narratives; after all, an eye is less useful than a brain.
Instead, the eye must be understood within a phenomenological context. Shaw notes that her interviews with donor families demonstrate a perceived intersubjectivity created through the process of organ transplantation, where the identity of the donor is integrated into the body of the recipient (2010 p. 135). This, she reports, is especially true with donating eyes, as families expressed their discomfort with seeing the eyes of a loved one on a stranger. This makes sense when the eye is understood as a conveyer of personhood, or even a soul or spirit—in this context, the eye represents the conduit between the aesthetic (outside) and self (inside) of the body, and thus the donation of eyes becomes a metaphysical splitting of the soul from the body.
With this in mind, the zombi offers a way of making sense of this experience of donation.
Here we can imagine the donor body as the zombi corps cadavre (flesh zombi), with the donated eye possessing the ti bon ange that forms the essence of the person. This modelling of the body as flesh and spirit is reflective of a social understanding of the body, rather than the Western biomedical perspective that is so often privileged. Though frequently dismissed by Western medical professionals as an invalid experience of corporeal hybridity, many recipients of organ transplants are reported to believe they have adopted elements of the personality of their donor (Bunzel et al.
1992; Sanner 2003; Shildrick 2008). In this way, organ transplantation can be read as an experience of transferring the ti bon ange or spirit (or parts of the spirit) from one individual to another; hence, personality quirks, tastes, and knowledges are shared through transplantation.
Page 96 of 277 This phenomenological experience of organ transplantation is a key focus of research conducted by the PITH project (the Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart) (Shildrick
2019). This multidisciplinary project began in 2006 as “a phenomenological enquiry […] into the experience of heart recipients with the aim of testing the proposition that the shock of the bodily transformations of transplantation might invoke psychic disruption to the recipients’ sense of self” (p. 207). In reporting upon the “problematic” nature of data generated in the life sciences,
Margrit Shildrick (who holds the position of “philosopher” in the PITH team) notes that data produced in bioscientific research tends to be thought of as “neutral,” “self-evident,” and open to confident interpretation without a consideration of the situatedness of knowledge production—that knowledge production is always formed and informed by hegemonic understandings of what it means to “research” and what embodied experiences are considered valid (p. 210). This is, of course, not a new idea to feminist researchers in the biosciences (Shildrick makes particular mention of Donna Haraway, Gillian Einstein, and Diana Bianchi). Yet these normative, usually quantitative approaches to research and knowledge production in the sciences are, as Shildrick argues, “marked by a grounding assumption of the integrity of the subject, and of the stability of interpretation and of categories themselves” (p. 211). Shildrick writes:
If we really want to produce knowledge of value then we must start by
acknowledging the impossibility of keeping our hands clean, by accepting
uncertainty, and recognizing that data does not provide any once and for all
answer to research questions but is part of a changing and changeable
process. (Ibid.)
This approach to research has informed the PITH project’s aims in investigating experiences of heart transplantation. Research in the project has found that even transplant recipients who do subscribe to a model of corporeality that more closely aligns with medicalised perspectives of
Page 97 of 277 bodily hybridity (that is, that the body is a biological machine that can have parts replaced, where
“personality” has no attachment to flesh) still demonstrate “ontological unease” post-transplant (p.
217):
What the PITH study shows is that most recipients do want to express their
unfamiliar embodied experiences, and many are very invested in knowing or
guessing the personal characteristics of their donors precisely because they
feel that some characteristics will carry over. It matters not at all whether
such reports are ‘true’ in the sense that the transplant has indeed caused such
a change— what matters is that recipients report such phenomenological
changes and attribute them to the graft. (pp. 216–217).
This research speaks to a desire to narrativise one’s own experiences of transplantation—to make sense of a process that may seem cold and scientific or messy and contrary to nature. The “reality” of whether organic tissue can retain (and transmit) personality traits matters less than how recipients come to understand and experience such a process.
Here, I argue, is where the figure of the early zombie can be put to work. The zombie offers a way of narrativising the experiences of organ donation that speaks to the anxieties donors and recipients may feel about the metaphysical consequences of organ exchange. Consider, for example, the issue of selective refusal of organ donation. Studies in the U.S. and Australia have shown a disproportionate number of donors do not consent to corneal donation compared to other forms of organ and tissue donation (Lawlor et al. 2010, p. 657). In a study investigating reasons for specific unwillingness to donate corneas, Lawlor et al. concluded that in addition to general lack of knowledge of the procedure for corneal donation, a significant number of respondents were concerned about issues of disfigurement, even when noting that a donor’s “eyes are closed” after
Page 98 of 277 donation (p. 661). Below are the most common reasons reported by respondents as playing a role in refusing specifically cornea donation:
• “I am uncomfortable with the thought of someone cutting into my eyes” (35%)
• “I am not sure of the reason, I would just not feel comfortable about donating my
corneas” (35%)
• “The thought of donating my corneas gives me a yucky feeling” (28%)
• “I am short sighted or long sighted” (18%)
• “Corneal donation would cause mutilation or disfigurement of my body” (18%)
• “I am concerned corneas are being bought and sold on the black market” (14%)
• “I do not trust the system of corneal donation in Australia” (12%)
• “I don’t want to give up such an important part of my physical appearance” (11%)
• “Corneal donation is against my religious beliefs” (10%) (p. 659)
These responses overwhelmingly signal a phenomenological and affective preoccupation with the eye as a site of corporeal anxiety. The top responses are vague and indicate a general “feeling” of discomfort without pointing to a specific cause (it should be noted that the only higher responses than these were “I would not want to donate any of my organs or tissues” [49%] and “I don’t feel I have enough information to agree to donation” [41%]). This is supported by responses in a later study conducted by Lawlor and Kerridge (2014), which identified “visibility and disfigurement, identity, and beauty” as the three main concerns contributing to corneal donation refusal (p. 49).
Again, even after reassurance that disfigurement and funeral viewings would not be practical issues, many participants expressed discomfort at the symbolic implications of cornea removal (p. 62).
Lawlor and Kerridge surmise that “the role of eyes relating to identity and beauty meant that the eyes were a conduit for memories, intimacy, and communication” (Ibid.). For some respondents, the emotional attachment to a loved one’s eyes was explicitly more important than improving the sight
Page 99 of 277 of two other people, at least at the time of potential donation (Ibid.). In this way, the eyes represent both an interpersonal conduit and a proxy for identity.
The visual fragmentation of the body in White Zombie demonstrates an understanding of this symbolic value. The eyes must be understood as a fragment of a person: not only a physical fragment, but a metaphysical fragment. It is through the eyes that we come to know a person and it is also how their vulnerability is exposed. The constant framing of eyes in isolation throughout
White Zombie—both in the dialogue (which obsesses over the soulless eyes) and in the extreme close-ups of Murder Legendre—reminds audiences of the interpersonal and metaphysical importance of the eyes. In this way, the zombie presents an illustrative figure of the body, within which embodiment can be understood as a series of relationships: the relationship between the fragmented body part and the whole body; the relationship between flesh and the spirit/soul/ identity/ti bon ange; the relationship between one body and the mass.
Thinking of the body this way helps make sense of the “irrationality” of attitudes towards different forms of organ transplantation. Metaphysical and interpersonal concerns are bound up in the zombie body in ways unaccounted for in dominant Western narratives of organ transplantation.
The stability of identity is threatened through the process of organ transplantation, arguably in all cases but most starkly in body parts that are perceived to bear a significant relationship to personal identity (the heart, the eyes). A rationalist approach to ethics is ill-equipped to unpack a discomfort or “yucky feeling” related to corneal donation, yet films like White Zombie employ discomfort of the fragmented body and the associated crisis of identity produced through zombification as a primary mechanism for horror. Furthermore, figuring the zombie not only as a fragmented body, but also simultaneously as part of a horde, where non-exceptional individuals are unimportant and expendable, can also help illustrate the source of distrust of transplant systems indicated by respondents refusing corneal donation. Arthur L. Caplan identifies that one major anxiety that arises
Page 100 of 277 from and further impacts upon organ scarcity is perceived inequity in organ allocation—a belief that organs are significantly more likely to go to wealthy and otherwise privileged patients (2015, p. xvii). Thus, by studying White Zombie, we can complicate our empathetic responses to specific corneal donation refusal by contextualising such refusal within two broader social concerns: the phenomenological attachment to eyes as symbolic of personality, interpersonal relationships, and spirituality, and the sociopolitical fear of the de-individualisation produced through lack of wealth
(where the body parts of poor, minoritised subjects are taken for the benefit of the wealthy). The visual fragmentation utilised throughout White Zombie provides a way of mapping out the associations of connectivity between body parts, the body, and a mass of bodies. This affective understanding produced through film consumption provides a novel but much-needed methodological addition to approaches for thinking through intercorporeal engagement in medical ethics. This approach is developed further, with specific attention to conceptualising corporeal heterogeneity, in Chapter 5.
This first case study chapter demonstrates the utility of the zombie as a creative prompt in cultural studies and medical ethics in the method of radical qualitative comparison. The figure of the organ donor is made more knowable through the process of mobilising the figure of the zombi in
Haiti and the zombie in White Zombie as a point of comparison against narratives of organ transplantation. This comparison produces two specific insights: first, that horror narratives about organ theft and zombification have distinct utilities in Latin American and U.S. contexts (where the former allows for a working through of existing acts of violence produced through histories of colonialism and the latter reassures audiences that their fears of loss of power are extreme and thus unlikely to eventuate); second, that understanding the simultaneous fragmentation of the zombie body, and its situation as part of a horde, can prompt a more empathetic approach to understanding seemingly irrational organ donation behaviours. While it may be possible to develop similar
Page 101 of 277 conclusions and perspectives through a singular analysis of organ transplant narratives, the process of searching for patterns between these two phenomena, and highlighting similarities and differences, prompts an emotionally informed mode of creative thinking and allows for a more confident appraisal of dominant social and cultural concerns.
Page 102 of 277 CHAPTER 4: PERSONHOOD, AGENCY, AND THE POST-ROMERO ZOMBIE
This chapter moves from the zombie of early Hollywood cinema that was the focus of
Chapter 3 to explore what can be considered a second wave of zombiism in Western popular culture: the zombie introduced by George A. Romero. As discussed in Chapter 1, Romero is one of the most influential figures in zombie popular culture and is responsible for a great deal of zombie lore as we know it today. Beginning with the film Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero introduced (or codified) many conventions of the zombie genre that would persist even beyond the genre shift of the early twenty-first century: the lumbering zombie gait, the craving for human flesh, the spread of infection through the zombie bite, the threat of the zombie mass, and more. Due to the highly influential and visible nature of the Romero zombie, this zombie type has become a frequent reference point in Western culture, used to describe a range of human behaviour: smartphone users are “zombies,” recreational drug users are “zombies,” corporate office workers are “zombies,” and
(importantly for this chapter) people with Alzheimer’s disease are “zombies.” This cultural shorthand has many social implications, some of which will be explored in this chapter, but the broad familiarity with this zombie type also makes it an ideal figure for ethical thought. In this chapter, I consider what the post-Romero zombie can offer health and medical ethics when mobilised through the method of the “thought experiment.”
As I explain in Chapter 2, the thought experiment is a mainstay of scientific and philosophical thinking and is used to “illuminate and test our theories and intuitions” (Derksen and
Hick 2011, p. 11). This chapter employs the zombie through two specific types of thought experiment: the illustrative thought experiment (which uses imagery to make abstract ideas more concrete) and the heuristic (or, more broadly, epistemic) thought experiment (which systematically poses exploratory questions to generate ideas and challenge assumptions). The zombie is a particularly powerful tool in these areas, given its flexibility and rich cultural legacy. The figure of
Page 103 of 277 the Romero zombie, mobilised via an illustrative thought experiment, makes visible the kinds of emotional and affective attachments we have to different representations of personhood, prompting us to interrogate ethical relations to humans who possess comparable types of personhood (from a legal, medical, or social perception). This kind of ethical thinking already takes place implicitly through the act of watching zombie films, but the utility of such thinking is limited if it is not debated, tested, and shared. Formalising this process into a thought experiment allows us to articulate with greater precision the implications of affective meaning-making via media consumption.
In contrast, deploying the post-Romero zombie through the form of the heuristic thought experiment allows for an exploratory approach to different ethical questions, where the hypothetical zombie is tested by various scholarly schools of thought (including those in the areas of medicine, law, and philosophy). The increasing presence of the zombie in academic discourse has been discussed already in the Chapter 1, but it is worth noting once again that the zombie has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool in philosophical and ethical thinking in scholarship and pedagogy. This, insist Derksen and Hick, is because the zombie has “a great deal to teach us – about our emotions, and about ourselves” (2011, p. 11). The emotional and ontological value of the zombie is expounded in the illustrative thought experiment through the zombie’s capacity to clarify abstract concepts through sentimental and affective provocation, but this value also bears significance for the heuristic thought experiment: while the heuristic thought experiment facilitates a working-through of different branches from a core question (e.g. “is it okay to kill a zombie?”), the answering of such questions sometimes requires a feeling-through (rather than the often- privileged rationalist thinking-through) of consequences.
This chapter employs the zombie in heuristic thought experiments in two primary ways.
First, I consider how the zombie has been utilised as a metaphor in discourse around Alzheimer’s
Page 104 of 277 disease and some prominent (and important) critiques of this usage. In doing so, I suggest some ways we can complicate and contextualise these criticisms to consider how the zombie metaphor offers a model for thinking about notions of personhood and autonomy in humans that has the capacity to encourage more compassionate approaches to care (rather than less, as is suggested in prevalent criticisms). Second, I turn to ethical debates around legal personhood, organ donation, medical criteria of death, and more to systematically investigate how the zombie might be treated if it were hypothetically a part of our social world. In doing so, I demonstrate how treating speculative fiction seriously, and employing it in the form of the heuristic thought experiment, constitutes a reproducible method for testing ethical schools of thoughts (from medical, social, and legal perspectives), within which inconsistencies and instabilities are made visible.
While there are many technical aspects to the post-Romero zombie that make it a strong candidate for ethical thought experiments, its status as a figure of popular culture in particular cannot be understated. We do not only have an intellectual understanding of the pop culture figure of the zombie—we also have an emotional understanding. Our varied emotional responses to the zombie figure inevitably colour how the zombie is understood in thought experiments and this is why various scholars have expressed both excitement and horror at its comparison with human beings. This emotional aspect, I argue, is where the true power of the zombie lies. Rather than constituting a sterile space for lateral thinking, the zombie brings with it an emotional messiness that is important in informing how we think through various ethical ideas. Moreover, the specific and diverse contexts that shape audiences’ emotional responses to the zombie figure produce a greater complexity in feeling-inflected approaches to ethical dilemmas.
This chapter is split into two sections. Section 4.1 investigates the usefulness and risks of the zombie as metaphor by surveying its use in both specialised medical literature and popular culture about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. For this section, I focus specifically on George A.
Page 105 of 277 Romero’s representation of the zombie and the complex questions surrounding corporeality and personhood introduced throughout the Dead series. I look at the use of the zombie as metaphor in medical and public literature aimed at families, loved ones, carers, and medical professionals who have relationships with persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Engaging with scholarship in the areas of health politics and policy (particularly in regards to ethics and ageing), and philosophical questions of personal identity, Section 4.1 looks at how the use of the zombie in medical and public narratives about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia is illustrative of broader cultural understandings of how personal identity is connected to bodies and memory. Furthermore, a hypothetical analysis of personal identity in Romero’s zombies provides an interesting perspective on the relationship between continuity of consciousness and personal identity, and complicates critiques of the zombie metaphor.
Section 4.2 broadens inquiry into the potential of the zombie figure in ethical thought experiments to pose the following question: is the zombie a “person?” In addressing this cumbersome and complex question, I consider legal, medical, social, and political perspectives that usually inform ethical debates and decision making relating to cadaver organ donation. By bringing these debates to the relatively “safe” intellectual space of the fictional zombie, greater flexibility is allowed for testing out complex ethical ideas and considering arguments from multiple perspectives. For Section 4.2, I continue my engagement with the broad zombie type of the “post-
Romero” zombie, but this time I focus on the zombies of the AMC television series The Walking
Dead (2010–present), and in particular, the scientific justification for why the zombies are “dead” and “not people” put forward in season 1, episode 6: “TS-19.”
Page 106 of 277 4.1 The Usefulness and Risks of the Zombie as Metaphor: Romero’s Zombies and Alzheimer’s
Disease
The conceptualisation of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as zombies is born from an underlying understanding of such individuals as lacking personal identity and autonomy, something academics and public writers alike have both interrogated and reproduced for effect in their writing. In their essay on agency and selfhood in patients with dementia, psychiatry researchers Carmelo Aquilina and Julian C. Hughes critically consider whether people with advanced dementia can be considered a “living dead,” and invoke the phrase “the return of the living dead” in reference to the popular 1985 zombie film of the same name (2006, p. 148).
Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman play with this cultural understanding of Alzheimer’s disease in their fictional work, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (2012), where a preventative
Alzheimer’s medication marketed as extending youth and halting the ageing process actually causes the zombie apocalypse. This presents the zombie allegory in a way that inverts, but does not necessarily subvert, the ageing- and dementia-as-zombification trope (Switaj 2014, p. 29). In addition to these examples, persons with Alzheimer’s disease are also compared to zombies in medical literature (including monographs, journal articles, and handbooks aimed at caregivers) as a form of colourful shorthand. Academic titles such as Alzheimer’s Disease: Coping with a Living
Death14 (Woods 1989) and “Hospice care for the living dead”15 (Schuman 1991) use language that is not only understood by most consumers of popular culture, but is also already used when describing the experience of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia by both patients and their loved ones
(MacRae 2008, p. 400; Taylor 2008, p. 322).
14 Published in London and Canada by Souvenir Press, Alzheimer’s Disease: Coping with a Living Death: provides basic information about Alzheimer’s Disease and related disorders on the assumption that coping is easier when you are well informed, […] [suggests] possible ways of managing some of the problems encountered in caring for the person with AD, and on dealing with some of the feelings—the stresses and emotional strain, for example—that may accompany having an AD sufferer in the family. (1989, p. 8)
15 Published in the New York nursing journal, Nursing & health care : official publication of the National League for Nursing (LocatorPlus n.d.). Page 107 of 277 Some scholars have raised concerns that this use of language has the potential to cause real harm to individuals who live with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, as there is the inherent implication that such individuals may be violent non-persons, or even effectively dead (see for example Behuniak 2011; Karlawish 2017; Matthews 2016; Michell et. al. 2013; Peel 2014). The popular perception of people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as no longer the person they once were allows experts and loved ones alike to believe they could reasonably be compared to the zombie figure. This same understanding raises concerns about the ability of patients to refuse life- sustaining treatments. For example, in 1985 the New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled that nutrition and hydration can be withdrawn from a person with severe dementia if it is clear they would otherwise have refused treatment (or if there was reasonable belief they would have refused treatment and the burden of such treatment outweighed benefits) (Van Norman 2003, p. 765). The ability of an individual to refuse life-sustaining treatment is a crucial consideration in discourses of organ transplantation in public health ethics, as the dead donor rule (addressed in detail in Section
4.2) prohibits any donation that would cause the death of the donor. The autonomy to make end of life decisions therefore has direct implications for organ transplantation, as individuals must be allowed to die before donation can proceed.
It can therefore be argued that the persistent use of the zombie metaphor in texts about
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia reinforces in public and medical consciousness an understanding of patients as lacking personhood, thus constructing people with Alzheimer’s disease as
“nonhuman.” A useful concept to explore in relation to this notion of “nonhumanness” is that of
“killability,” which has been an important theme in critical animal studies and the environmental humanities more generally. Speaking on the subject of fruit flies and their disposable status in a laboratory setting (in this specific case, a laboratory studying Alzheimer’s disease), feminist technoscience studies scholar Tara Mehrabi argues that there exists “a spectrum of killability on
Page 108 of 277 which different animals and organisms become killable differently, depending on their biological specificities, sociocultural imaginaries, ethical dilemmas, the laboratory’s style of reasoning and technical practicalities” (2016, p. 138). Within such a relational framing, cultural and scientific factors come together to provide a rationale in which “material-discursive cuts” can be made “that enact the boundaries of that which is killable” (p. 234). In the example of fruit flies, killability is enhanced by cultural histories of flies as associated with death and decay (an association that has become codified in mythology and religion, such as with the biblical plague of flies in Exodus), and has permeated cultural representations, with the fly being presented as an abject and monstrous figure in popular media, as in the 1986 film The Fly (pp. 141–144). When this history is entangled with a social benefit produced through the death of fruit flies (their death contributes to scientific research), the killable status of fruit flies gains further social support.
We can see this killability produced in the figure of the zombie. The zombie is a supposedly
“mindless” monster, who is part of a mass of similarly mindless and also dangerous monsters and is already associated with death. Because of these associations, the zombie becomes understood as a non-subject. Thus, subjecthood is situated as prior to zombification. In the book Frames of War:
When Is Life Grievable? (2009), philosopher Judith Butler argues that moral prohibitions towards the ending of life require said life to be visible and recognisable (p. 51). In Butler’s example, war obscures the visibility of individual lives, rendering casualties of war expendable and lacking grievability. Given the temporal framing of life (and, therefore, subjecthood) as ending as zombification begins, the Alzheimer’s patient, through their comparison to the zombie figure, similarly comes to occupy a space of ambiguous or non-recognisable life, even as they continue to be living. To quote Butler:
a living figure outside the norms of life not only becomes the problem to be
managed by normativity, but seems to be that which normativity is bound to
Page 109 of 277 reproduce: it is living, but not a life. It falls outside the frame furnished by
the norm, but only as a relentless double whose ontology cannot be secured,
but whose living status is open to apprehension. (p. 8)
Importantly for Butler, the grief we feel for those who die is an affective response, and this affect is
“highly regulated by regimes of power” (p. 39). In the case of war, affect is heightened or controlled according to a political need for different lives to be grievable—for example, U.S. media amplified the grievability of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks through graphic images, names, and stories, while some conservative media outlets argued that showing images of tortured prisoners in
Abu Ghraib would be “un-American,” thus controlling audience’s affective response (pp. 38–40).
Affect also informs the grievability of the Alzheimer’s patient; if the Alzheimer’s patient is considered an empty vessel, a creature without subjecthood, their life is no longer grievable and they are thus rendered killable. Indeed, to return to the question of temporality raised by the process of zombification (where zombification, and thus Alzheimer’s disease, is itself a form of [un]death), one could argue that the life of the Alzheimer’s patient has already been grieved. Furthermore, if the
Alzheimer’s patient is not only lacking subjecthood but is also comparable to a violent creature, they might then be imagined as a “threat to life,” rather than a life themselves (p. 42). The
Alzheimer’s patient, figured as a zombie, is doubly denied life.
In this way, cultural understandings of people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as empty vessels and a “living dead” form a symbiotic relationship with the allegorical employment of the zombie in medical and public literature, where they both reinforce the legitimacy of each other’s narratives. Taken a step further, an analysis of this relationship can help illuminate the broader ethical complexities of organ donation and personhood. By interrogating this existing cultural relationship between the zombie and people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, I propose that hypothetical ethical questions relating to the experimentation upon and killing of a zombie prompt a
Page 110 of 277 more complex understanding of the “person” and agency in humans. In other words, rather than simply repudiating a dominant cultural narrative that seemingly won’t die, it may be ethically and intellectually better to interrogate, reframe, and rework it.
For this section, I focus on arguably the most famous zombies of all time: the zombies of
George A. Romero’s Dead series. Beginning with Night of the Living Dead (1968), these films follow the lives of different groups of humans during the zombie apocalypse and are responsible for establishing much of zombie “lore” as it is known today in Western popular culture. In particular, I am interested in the second, third, and fourth instalments of this series and how they increasingly complicate the question of agency and memory in the zombies of Romero’s fictional version of our world. In the first film, Night of the Living Dead, the zombies are introduced as mindless, violent, and flesh-eating undead monsters. Unlike in the majority of previous zombie films, these zombies
(known in Night as “ghouls”) have no voodoo or Vodoun master and their origins are largely unknown. The film tracks the efforts of a small group of humans in a remote farmhouse as they try to survive the zombie attacks. Though the zombies themselves form the catalyst for the film’s action and provide a constant threat for the main characters, most of the drama in the film is derived from the actions of the humans, how they treat each other when in danger, and how they respond when the humans they know are re-animated as zombies.
The second film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), is similar to Night in many ways, with the setting moved from a farmhouse to a shopping mall. Though the premise and action are broadly the same (the zombies violently attack the mall while the humans seek refuge inside), Dawn begins to present a more complex picture of how agency can be understood in the zombies. From a philosophical perspective, rational agency is derived from the ability to act as a product of a conscious decision, rather than a biological response to stimuli (Derksen and Hick 2011, p. 15).
Where the zombies of Night appear to have little motivation beyond their desires to attack humans
Page 111 of 277 and consume flesh, the zombies of Dawn seem to retain some mannerisms of the humans they once were and are (slightly) more capable of reasoned decision making. The zombies instinctively gravitate to the shopping mall, trying to gain access to the terrified humans who are trapped inside.
After barricading the entry points, the humans are able to somewhat enjoy their new temporary living space, indulging in the many facilities the mall has to offer, from hair salons to video game arcades. The mall is later overtaken by human bikers who plunder the mall of its valuables, allowing the zombies to enter. One of the protagonists, Stephen, is eventually bitten by a zombie and is reanimated, but he is not quite the “mindless” zombie we have come to expect from
Romero’s films thus far. At the climax of the film, Stephen appears to remember a false wall that has been erected by the trapped humans. He breaks down the wall, leading the other zombies to his old human companions. The humans manage to escape and the zombies are left to wander the now- empty mall in a striking visual parody of their previous, consumeristic lives.
In their 2011 article, “Your Zombie and You: Identity, Emotion, and the Undead,” Craig
Dersken and Darren Hudson Hick employ the figure of the zombie in philosophical thought experiments to explore the nature of fear. Though the zombie horde is effective in instilling fear into audiences (for example, the hypothetical fear of being torn apart by a zombie mass), Derksen and
Hick draw particular attention to the power of the single zombie figure when said zombie appears to possess a form of rational agency (p. 15). This appearance of reasoned decision-making is a reminder that the zombie is born from a human—an idea that could perhaps be forgotten when confronted with an animalistic zombie horde. Yet the question must be asked: is the individual, rational zombie a human? And more importantly, is the individual, rational zombie the same human whose face it wears?
Derksen and Hick offer two prominent schools of philosophical thought to address this problem: a theory of bodily continuity and a theory of psychological continuity. Put simply, a bodily
Page 112 of 277 continuity perspective posits that one is the same person they were yesterday because they inhabit the same body, with key supporters of this theory including moral philosopher Bernard Williams
(1970). This perspective is complicated by Plutarch’s famous Ship of Theseus paradox—if a body changes almost all of its cells over time, is it still the same body and therefore, by reasoning of the theory of bodily continuity, is it still the same person (see Rea 1995 for a detailed problematisation of the bodily continuity perspective through the Ship of Theseus paradox)? By contrast, drawing on the works of seventeenth-century philosopher and physician John Locke ([1690] 1860), a theory of psychological continuity privileges a continuation of consciousness and memory in determining personal identity (Derksen and Hick 2011, p. 18).
In the example of Dawn of the Dead, Derksen and Hick claim that the zombies are not acting on real memories but false ones, as the events they are recounting did not actually happen to
“them,” but the human who once possessed that body (2011, p. 19). Therefore, according to the psychological continuity perspective of personal identity, they are not truly the same persons, but instead a false approximation. However, as Romero’s series progresses, many of the zombies do not seem to be simply acting on remnants of memories from their bodies; instead they increasingly appear to develop an understanding of tools, emotions, and social relationships. By the fourth film,
Land of the Dead (2005), the zombies have established a hierarchy and are led by an intelligent zombie named “Big Daddy.” Big Daddy learns to use tools and weapons, demonstrates tactical skills, and is selective in his attacks, targeting the rich city-dwelling humans but leaving the poor surviving humans alone at the end of the film. This leads the protagonist of the film, Riley, to spare his life, claiming: “They’re just looking for a place to go. Same as us.” This connection between
Riley and Big Daddy encourages us to feel empathy for the zombies in a way the first two films do not permit. However, I would argue that the true turning point for the zombies of Romero’s films in
Page 113 of 277 terms of personhood, agency, and encouraged audience empathy takes places in the third film, Day of the Dead (1985).
Day of the Dead was released in the middle of Reagan’s presidency in the United States and clearly comments on the increasing military focus in U.S. politics (Fallows and Owen 2008, p. 77).
In Day of the Dead the zombie outbreak has now reached pandemic proportions and military- protected scientists are searching for a solution. Despite the military and government’s role in ostensibly protecting humanity from the zombies, they are far from the heroes of the film. Instead, the film establishes those in the most marginal social positions to be the most heroic: a black man, an Irish immigrant, and a woman. By framing the military as antagonistic forces in the film, Day invites audiences to critically question the military’s treatment of the zombies in the film. This is most apparent in the work done by the leading scientist, Dr Logan, nicknamed “Frankenstein.”
Logan is known for his experimentation on and command of zombies and believes that they are able to be trained. This training, however, can only take place after the suppression of part of the zombie brain. Logan explains:
There’s a loss of initiative, caution, many of the human cognitive functions.
Apparently the result of decay in the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital
lobes. On revival, the rate of decomposition slows substantially. […] I’ve
gone into the centre here and attacked the R complex discretely. I’ve
removed it from the equation. […] [The zombie’s] primitive instincts have
been erased. It still has motor function, probably still has powers of
deliberation. It can be domesticated Sarah, don’t you see? It can be
conditioned to behave the way we want it to behave, and all that’s required
is hours of fancy surgery.
Page 114 of 277 Here, Logan is claiming that the zombies are not mindless creatures (they have “powers of deliberation”) but their behaviour can be conditioned, so long as the “primitive instincts” are first suppressed. This perspective marks an important distinction from how the zombies are presented in
Night of the Living Dead, as well as a significant portion of the zombies inspired by Romero’s series. Later in Day, we are introduced to a zombie named Bub, who is a pet project of Dr Logan.
Bub is a prime example of Logan’s success—a docile zombie who has limited but undeniable memories of his former human life. Logan clearly has affection for Bub and has allowed him to live, or “continue to exist,” due to his great progress. Logan brings Bub “toys” for him to play with: a toothbrush, a safety razor, and a copy of the book Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. Bub attempts to shave with the razor, cutting off thin peels of his decaying skin in the process. He eventually picks up the book and looks as though he is trying to read it. This pleases Logan, who exclaims, “He remembers! He remembers everything that he used to!” This is reinforced further a few minutes later when Bub meets a soldier named Rhodes and performs a clumsy salute. Logan explains that
Bub used to be in the military. This implies that the zombies are not mimicking human behaviour around them or acting on innate human impulses; they are remembering specific elements of their past lives.
There still remains the question of whether Bub’s actions can be considered examples of displaying true human memory, as (like in the Dawn of the Dead example) it can be argued that the events Bub “remembers” happened to the human who was formerly in his body. Nevertheless, there is something ethically troubling about Dr Logan’s experiments and his continued surgical interventions into the bodies of the zombies. Logan rewards and punishes his zombie research subjects as a way of reinforcing desirable behaviour. Despite their lack of need for nourishment, he feeds them to “satisfy the urge.” He believes that rewarding the zombies is a crucial part of training them; conversely, when one zombie subject overturns a medical cart, Logan chastises him and
Page 115 of 277 leaves him in the room, turning off the lights before telling the zombie, “you can just sit there in the dark and think about what you’ve done.”
Logan’s relationship with Bub is especially complicated. Despite Logan’s experimentation on the zombies, he clearly sees them as human or human-like. He claims: “They are us. They are extensions of us. They are the same animal, simply functioning less perfectly.” Here, unlike in the previous films of the franchise, Day of the Dead is encouraging the audience to feel empathy for the zombie figure. This is a key utility of popular fictional film (particularly science fiction) in ethical thinking—the ability of films such as Day of the Dead to make us feel empathy in the face of fear is one of the features that make it a useful tool for enriching overly rationalist ethical debates. This empathy is achieved not only through dialogue by characters like Dr Logan, but also through how the film visually portrays Bub. When Bub and Logan converse, the shots are edited in a similar way to how a film might present a conversation between two humans: through the use of a shot/reverse- shot pattern. A shot/reverse-shot pattern (in the context of a human conversation) shows alternating shots of two characters, with only one character shown on the screen at a single time, editing with similar framing and the use of an eyeline match (where the direction each character is looking appears to line up) to create spatial continuity (Bordwell, Thompson, and Smith 2017, p. 233–234).
In using this editing technique between Bub and Logan, with only slight changes in camera angles to reflect the height difference between the two characters (Bub is taller), Day suggests to audiences that these two characters are comparable. This is not to say they are the same, particularly when it comes to social status and power, but they can occupy the same space in a way that makes an interpersonal exchange believable. When this technique is combined with the use of hyper- recognisable diegetic music (“Ode to Joy”), human objects (the toothbrush and razor), and a popular fiction book (Stephen King), the result encourages audiences to think of Bub as approximate to human.
Page 116 of 277 This is reinforced by the plot and dialogue elements in which Logan insists that zombies should be considered human. Under a medical model of disability, which categorises bodies as healthy or unhealthy when compared against a normative ideal (Hickey-Moody and Harrison 2020, p. 642), the description of the zombies of Day of the Dead as the same as humans but “functioning less perfectly” would make them (at least according to Dr Logan) comparable to humans with disabilities. This is a comparison that law academic Bruce Baer Arnold entertains in the article, “Is the Zombie My Neighbour? The Zombie Apocalypse as a Lens for Understanding Legal
Personhood.” Arnold writes:
A more radical taxonomy, unlikely to gain public support during the
apocalypse, involves construing zombies as humans – humans with
disabilities, needs and rights. […] As the Apocalypse unfolds it would be
much better for you to practice an ethic of care, knowing that during the
crisis or its aftermath you may become one of the walking dead, in the same
way that in contemporary Australia you may experience vicissitudes
associated with unforeseen disability – a workplace accident, assault, stroke,
dementia. Put simply, care for zombies on the basis that you may join their
numbers. (2016, p. 40; 42)
With this justification in mind, the specific comparison to persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia is, for all its problems, not unfounded. Logan even uses musical therapy with Bub, a practice that is commonly employed in studies and care of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia
(Cuddy and Duffin 2005; Simmons-Stern, Budson, and Ally 2010). In the above scene, Logan puts headphones onto Bub and plays Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Bub’s face is instantly transformed into shock and he gazes out into the room around him as though lost in memories. Bub becomes upset when Logan stops the music, but is quickly placated as Logan teaches him to press the play button
Page 117 of 277 on the cassette recorder, an implicit promise that Bub will be allowed (and empowered) to listen to music again in the future. Bub’s reactions are constantly not only human-like, but coloured by childlike wonder and curious experimentation. In contrast to a character like Rhodes (who is often consumed with rage and accompanied by sinister non-diegetic music), Bub emerges as an innocent, deserving of compassion and protection.
The film also encourages audiences to empathise with Bub in other ways. When Logan is murdered by Rhodes towards the end of the film, the audience watches as Bub slowly comes to terms with what has happened. Bub first appears excited to see Logan, smiling and proudly showing him the end of his chain to demonstrate he has escaped his restraints. This smile then fades as Bub takes in Logan’s bloody body. The camera cuts back and forth between Logan’s body and Bub’s face before holding on Bub as grief overcomes him. He cries out, whipping his chain and punching the wall in obvious distress. Eventually, Bub spots two guns on the floor and his anguish morphs into determination. Bub eventually tracks down Rhodes and instead of devouring him like the other zombies would, he shoots him to death before saluting and walking away.
If we are to pursue the perspective that zombies such as Bub can be (and widely are) thought of as a metaphor for humans with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia who remember certain elements of their former lives, but may show little similarity in personality to who they previously were, Dr
Logan’s work might be viewed as monstrous (despite the fact that Logan displays far more compassion towards the zombies than any other human we have thus far met in Romero’s series).
This is, perhaps, appropriate, given that elder abuse, including intentional physical assault by carers, is still a recognised problem in dementia care (Dementia Australia 2019). However, this metaphorical use of the zombie complicates the ethics of framing the zombie consciousness as merely inhabiting a human body whose individual memories and emotions may be chemically (or supernaturally) recalled, but not truly “remembered.” What does it mean for us to think about
Page 118 of 277 persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as fundamentally different people with the capacity to recall memories from their previous lives?
The link between people with Alzheimer’s disease and zombies is common not only in the vernacular of everyday speech, but, as previously stated, is also present in Western medical literature and literature aimed at carers and loved ones of people with Alzheimer’s disease, who are frequently characterised as the “living dead” (Behuniak 2011, p. 71). Despite the prevalence of this comparison in presumably professional and well-meaning contexts, the reference to zombies when discussing people with Alzheimer’s disease is considered by many to be especially problematic or even, as feminist health policy scholar Susan M. Behuniak argues, harmful, as the zombie is almost exclusively presented in popular media as a monstrous figure. Furthermore, unlike many other monsters, it is particularly important to consider the application of zombie metaphors to people with
Alzheimer’s disease, as zombies were once ordinary people:
In applying the label of ‘zombie’ to those with [Alzheimer’s disease (AD)], I
want to suggest that the destructive power of the biomedical model of
disease is magnified when combined with the ‘undead’ metaphor. […] The
biomedical model alone cannot account for the degree of terror that
surrounds AD. Although a terminal disease can invoke a dread of death, it is
not so much death by AD that terrifies but the proposition that patients will
be dehumanised through social construction as the ‘living dead.’ (pp. 75–77)
Here, Behuniak identifies a key fear present throughout Romero’s films: that individuals will see the people they care about become zombies, or they will become a zombie themselves. The fact that zombies are not merely monsters, but monsters who were once humans and carry the faces of the humans they once were, is key to the terror of Romero’s Dead series. The zombie metaphor in
Alzheimer’s disease literature is reflective of similar fears humans have about their own futures and
Page 119 of 277 the futures of their loved ones: that they will slowly lose themselves, and the vibrant and unique human personalities they possessed, before dying as a non-person (thereby experiencing a “living” death). When such comparisons are drawn, people with Alzheimer’s disease are implied to be nonhuman, other, and “a terrifying threat to the social order” (p. 72). It is a form of othering that depicts such individuals as inherently different from and less human than the rest of society. This in turn not only socially marginalises people with Alzheimer’s disease, but renders them “politically invisible,” a social burden, and may open doors for discriminatory laws and policies (p. 86).
The situation is complicated further when end of life decisions are taken into consideration.
It is crucial to remember that people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia may have moments of awareness in a manner consistent with their previous personalities and are therefore capable of expressing an interest in becoming an organ donor or refusing life-sustaining treatment (or, indeed, the opposite of these). This is in contrast to, for example, persons in permanent vegetative states
(PVS). In the latter case, respecting advance directives regarding end of life decisions and organ donation could be considered a way to honour the life of the individual, but persons with
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia complicate this (Koppelman 2015, p. 14). Not only are patients able to experience pain and pleasure, it is also not necessarily possible to reliably predict what it would be like to become someone with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Thus, unlike in cases of
PVS where one can reasonably assume they will possess no awareness of their situation, the actual experience of having Alzheimer’s disease and dementia may cause some to re-evaluate their advance directives. PVS presents its own medical and legal challenges, which are addressed in more depth in Section 4.2, but the distinction here is important to consider. Should an individual with
Alzheimer’s disease, in a moment of apparent awareness, express a desire to invert any previously expressed wishes regarding the use of life-sustaining treatment or the donation of organs, it can be difficult to ethically determine what course of action will do the least harm (noting here that
Page 120 of 277 otherwise going against the advance directives of an individual, whether they refuse or consent to life-sustaining treatment or becoming a donor, should be considered a form of harm, regardless of whether the individual is aware of what is happening) (pp. 7–8).
Furthermore, as the personality of an individual with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia substantially changes, which persona should be considered their “true” self? While from a postmodernist perspective we may be tempted to embrace this fluidity, in situations where the loved ones of a person with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia have an emotional attachment to a particular, previously (apparently) stable identity, such a perspective is unlikely to be helpful; there persists a social (and possibly legal) need for a singularised and stable identity and this need cannot be easily dismissed through postmodernist intellectualising. For this reason, for those who know an individual with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, a metaphor that identifies a linear trajectory of transition from one stable identity to another (such as the metaphor of zombification) may offer a more comprehensible and perhaps even more desirable alternative to a fragmented and multiplicitous imagining of selfhood.
Behuniak identifies three major ways that the zombie trope is applied to persons with
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia: “appearance, loss of self, and loss of the ability to recognise others” (2011, p. 78). It is the latter two characteristics of the zombie that are particularly relevant to the troubling ethics of Dr Logan. While the body of the zombie remains animated, the person who previously occupied that body has gone, or died. Similarly, people with Alzheimer’s disease are often thought to be lost, which is frequently interpreted as a scarier, more tragic fate than total death
(an attitude, as we have seen, that is echoed in Haitian beliefs about the zombi and thematically reproduced in the films the zombi inspired). This, Behuniak claims, is in part due to a biomedical model of Alzheimer’s disease, which considers cognition and personality absent from the body (p.
80). A biomedical understanding of Alzheimer’s disease promotes the idea that the patient has
Page 121 of 277 irreversible brain damage and therefore considers them to be no longer a person, “but only as a body to be managed” (p. 74). In contrast, a person-centric approach “assumes that the person is present,” and instead accounts for social stigma and interpersonal contexts that may shape the experience of Alzheimer’s disease in addition to neurological factors (Ibid.). Furthermore, a biomedical approach that focuses on managing, rather than caring for, persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can encourage the over-prescription of antipsychotic medications, which, according to a consumer statement in a report by Alzheimer’s Australia, can in turn produce a
“zombie”-like state (Alzheimer’s Australia 2013, p. 10). Thus, we can see the cyclic nature identified in Behuniak’s work: a consideration of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as being comparable to the living dead permits an approach to care that focuses on medicating bodily symptoms, which then (re)produces the proverbial zombie.
Behuniak’s work actively critiques and rejects the use of the zombie as metaphor for
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. I argue, however, that it is not the comparison between zombiism and Alzheimer’s disease itself that is harmful, but the logical extensions commonly employed when philosophising zombie personhood. Instead, a more nuanced understanding of popular culture that takes seriously the complex identifications and feelings of care that we might experience as audiences could present an entirely different perspective on the allegorical use of the zombie in discussions of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. In “Your Zombie and You: Identity,
Emotion, and the Undead,” Derksen and Hick offer a way to negotiate the space between the zombie, “false” memory, and personal agency (2011, p. 19). Building on philosopher Derek Parfit’s
(1971) perspective on personal identity, they claim that a child is a different person entirely to the person they grow up to be, with personality, memories, and even most of their bodily cells having changed. This poses the question: does a zombie simply represent a new personal identity in the same way an adult does? If so, then we can consider Dr Logan to be a (complicated) villain and
Page 122 of 277 similarly conceptualise individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as entering a new stage of their life, rather than simply ceasing to be who they were.
One might reason, therefore, that Derksen and Hick’s more sympathetic reading of the zombie softens or makes acceptable the zombie analogy in literature about Alzheimer’s disease intended for consumption by both medical professionals and the public. It enables a cultural understanding of people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia as being in a different, rather than declined, state and can affect legal, medical, and social practices, all of which have the potential to either accommodate or marginalise such individuals. Yet I would argue that if such a careful and arguably contentious reading is required, there is still a great potential for harm because of how metaphors and tropes circulate in practice. Though there is room in Derksen and Hick’s analysis to offer an alternative narrative about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, a reasonable reading of the use of the zombie metaphor in related literature is that it represents patients as an inhuman ‘other’ in an attempt to prepare families and carers for a challenging and emotionally distressing ongoing relationship. While zombies like Bub may encourage a more empathetic and flexible approach to social policy and care relating to memory “loss” or “decline,” which reimagines such decline as a transformation, the majority of zombies in popular culture are still monstrous. Thus, the zombie metaphor is far more likely to encourage an association of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with monstrosity than with transformed personal identity.
This is not to say that the pursuit of the zombie metaphor in discussions of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia has no utility. The zombie metaphor exposes attitudes and approaches to the care of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in medical and social settings; if such a metaphor can be readily accepted (to the point of being used in actual medical documents), then a thorough examination of how the zombie figure is deployed in popular culture signals what kinds of attitudes are socially held towards persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Yet I would
Page 123 of 277 argue that the zombie metaphor has utility as more than a diagnostic tool. In mobilising the zombie in illustrative and heuristic thought experiments, the zombie becomes a tool of empathetic ethical thinking. This need for an empathetic, rather than strictly philosophical, approach to such ethical debates emerges with a particular intensity in the following (regretfully abridged) reflection by Paul
A. Komesaroff:
I do not care for my elderly mother who has Alzheimer’s disease just
because she has useful sentient life or residual personhood, or because she is
still capable of happiness, or because killing her does not maximise the
happiness or pleasure of the rest of us. I do not care for her because she is of
the human species, or because she has a soul, or because we are God’s
creatures, or because there is a rule or principle or moral law that says that I
have to, or because I am or want to be a good person. […] I care because I
have to; because it is the right thing to do; because she is my mother;
because caring is a condition of possibility of being human; […] I care
because there is never a simple dilemma, a single question with an
unequivocal answer. […] I care for her not because I can string together
arguments to make a case. In short, I care with my reason, my emotions, my
humanness. (2008, pp. xxv–xxvi)
Employing the zombie as a mere diagnostic tool produces a sterility in ethical thinking that cannot satisfy the human need for such thinking. Purely intellectual approaches to ethics, informed by a value for “rationalism,” are thus ultimately flaccid. Instead, the practical and philosophical considerations of ethical dilemmas must be enriched with empathy and feeling.
The act of watching zombie films allows us to have debates about what ethical care for vulnerable persons should look like by producing an affective response in audiences, thus allowing
Page 124 of 277 audiences to feel-through hypothetical scenarios. This affective response is not produced equally in all audience members—how we respond to film is necessarily informed by our own situatedness.
Yet this diversity of response is an important component of such a thought experiment, as the real ethical dilemmas we are addressing will also produce unique and varied resonances. This in itself addresses another limitation in rationalist approaches to ethics: there is no universal set of rules, logics, and values that can be applied in ethical thinking. In this spirit, we might ask ourselves
“would my approach to ethical care survive the zombie apocalypse?” In other words, in a hypothetical zombie apocalypse, would our own individual approaches to ethics produce results that we can be personally satisfied with? Bringing cultural studies methods of textual analysis to thought experiments in health ethics may not directly inform practical decision making in a clinical context, but what it can do is remind us of the complexities of feelings, the nuanced and context-dependent capacity for empathy and understanding, and the sociopolitical contexts in which these are mobilised, opened out to debate, or kept hidden or erased. Thus, if our approach to ethical care would not survive the zombie apocalypse, the zombie thought experiment can allow us to more clearly and sincerely articulate the limits of such an approach in the real world.
4.2 Legal Personhood, the Dead Donor Rule, and The Walking Dead
So what if we take up my prompt from the previous section to ask (through the method of heuristic thought experiment) what possibilities open up when we take the speculative space of the zombie apocalypse seriously? The heuristic thought experiment prompts us to ask “what if” in order to generate ideas and systematically pursue possible avenues of inquiry from a core question. In this case, what if we speculate along with zombie fiction, staying within the rules of its diegetic world?
That is, what if we take the zombie itself seriously and ask how we would practically deal with its existence—legally, medically, socially, politically—in our real world? As noted in Chapter 2, the
Page 125 of 277 zombie is an excellent candidate for such a thought experiment due to its plasticity and internal coherency—it is malleable enough to be readily placed in new situations, yet (as decades of passionate fan debate tells us) maintains an internal logic that is related to, yet distinct from, that of our real world. With this in mind, this section investigates the following core question (and the inevitable subquestions it provokes): is the zombie a “person”? A more irreverent version of this question could be phrased as follows: is it okay to kill a zombie? To answer this question, following from my framing of the zombie as organ donor in Chapter 3, I draw from transdisciplinary schools of thought that are used to inform ethical decisions and debates relating to cadaver organ donation.
This marks a shift in argument from Section 4.1, which took an existing metaphor in popular and medical discourse (the Alzheimer’s patient as zombie) and argued that the act of watching zombie films provokes feeling and empathy, both of which are necessary tools in ethical debates about Alzheimer’s disease, personhood, and agency. In this section, I instead argue for an intellectual exploration of the zombie itself—not the zombie as a metaphor, but the zombie, as a zombie, in our real world. Of course, this is not to say that feeling and empathy are not important tools in this thought experiment; indeed, speculative spaces such as those produced in film and television are themselves like thought experiments that are supercharged with affective potential, which have possibilities for complex identifications and empathy built into their workings (through the interplay of techniques such as music, editing, dialogue, etc.). Rather, where in Section 4.1 feeling and empathy were provoked through the act of watching the zombie film, this thought experiment instead requires us to apply feeling and empathy to a hypothetical situation informed by the logic of a television show—to feel our way through the speculative scenario of the zombie existing in our world and test to what extent, and in what ways, our existing capacities for empathy and understanding apply. In doing so, I expose the inconsistencies and instabilities in the foundational legal, medical, social, and political assumptions embedded in ethical decision making
Page 126 of 277 related to cadaver organ donation. I furthermore consider what other implications ripple out as a consequence of this interrogation.
This use of the heuristic thought experiment is an exploratory and primarily intellectual exercise, yet it does the important work of making visible the precarious position of vulnerable subjects under hegemonic systems of power. Where situating the human within these kinds of philosophical discussions risks a shutting down of particular, sensitive avenues of thought or (even worse) may require that emotional responses be temporarily placed to one side in order to uphold
“rational” thinking, the speculative space prompts empathy in two important ways: first, popular culture is already enmeshed within diverse affective investments that frequently divert from those of real-world scenarios; second, by taking a real-world question into a speculative space, the shift in context makes visible previously invisible questions, concerns, and affects. Thus, in identifying the gaps where speculative subjects are most vulnerable, the thought experiment (shaped by popular culture) invites a strengthening of ethical approaches, informed by empathy and understanding.
Where Chapter 3 explored the boundaries of inside/outside and self/other, and Section 4.1 explored the boundary of person/non-person, Section 4.2 mobilises the zombie figure to consider the boundary (or, perhaps more accurately, space and time) between life and death. The zombie that is the focus of this section is that of the AMC television series, The Walking Dead (2010–present).
Though both the show and the comic books it is based on debuted after the third wave of zombie films, the zombies and tone of The Walking Dead are greatly indebted to Romero’s representation.
The analysis of this section focuses on the scientific narrative of the zombie that is presented to us in season 1 of The Walking Dead television series, and how these diegetic knowledges are troubled by real-world legal and medical scholarship on the human brain, particularly in the finale of season
1 (episode 6, “TS-19”).
Page 127 of 277 Crucial to ethical and legal considerations regarding cadaver organ donation is a strict delineation of the border between life and death. Yet medical advancements and our evolving understanding of human physiology have shown that this border is not rigid, but constantly changing; scientific, sociocultural, philosophical, and spiritual knowledges are frequently in competition when determining who can be considered “dead,” and therefore which organs can be ethically donated. In particular, the advancement of medical technologies such as ventilators means that a human body can be sustained with respiration and a heartbeat, even when irreversible damage has been done to the brain (Crowley-Matoka 2016, p. 72). The ontologically and legally ambiguous nature of persons with brain death is often characterised as a “slippery state,” where precise definitions of death are unable to be clearly pinned down (p. 71). In this section, I suggest that the zombie can provide an illustrative tool in the form of a thought experiment for navigating this uncomfortable legal and social space between life and death. A consideration of the hypothetical zombie figure as existing in this in-between space, in a living or undead state, allows for a fruitful exploration of the ambiguous and slippery state of brain death. While a body might be alive and a personality dead, one might conceptualise the state of a body with brain death as “undead.” This in turn creates a philosophical space for considering the degree to which autonomy and personhood should be attributed to such a body.
As well as creating a conceptual framework within which to consider bodies with brain death, a comparison between the undead and brain dead creates a set of bioethical and legal parameters that can be applied in hypothetical considerations of the ethics of killing a zombie.
There exist various schools of thought in fan communities when it comes to the ethics of killing a zombie and “expert” voices are often called to weigh in on such fan debates. In an interview with tech and pop culture blog “io9,” David Daigle, a spokesperson from the U.S. Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention, said he could “think of no scenario” where it would be recommended to
Page 128 of 277 kill a person who had become a zombie, citing comparable real-world epidemics and their corresponding recommendations (Daigle in Davis 2012). Science writer and biological psychologist
Pete Etchells (2013) ponders what constitutes a zombie, whether the zombie still has memories, whether the zombie can be considered a “person,” and whether the life of a person is more valuable than the “unlife” of the zombie. From a bioethical perspective, Kyle Munkittrick (2012) outlines three criteria to consider before killing a zombie: whether a body’s “dignity” should be protected, what the state of infection is, and whether the process of zombification is reversible. Philosophy writer Rhys Southan (2015) compares the debate to that of animal rights, claiming that the perspective of many animal rights activists is that the sentience of animals makes it morally impermissible to kill them, but that zombies themselves are not sentient (and thus, by extension, such a perspective would permit the killing of them). In seeking to provide its own answer to this question, and in the spirit of McKee’s (2002) provocative call to see popular culture as a potential source of theory, this section by contrast will use The Walking Dead’s own thesis on what makes the zombie “dead” to determine how the ethics of “killing” a zombie can be understood by the debates surrounding the personhood of bodies with brain death.
This case study is grounded in the areas of jurisprudence and bioethics—specifically, a selection of the legal and ethical debates surrounding the dead donor rule and legal personhood.
These two areas highlight the complexities of defining death, particularly when implementing laws regarding death and organ donation. The dead donor rule (DDR) is an implicit ethical principle underpinning organ procurement across the world and is born from the idea that it is unethical to remove a person’s organs if it would result in that person dying (Koppelman 2015, p. 6; Rodríguez-
Arias 2018, p. S40). A person must therefore be medically defined as dead before their organs can be donated. This, however, poses significant challenges. Medical and legal definitions of death are inextricably entangled with cultural understandings, with efforts to redefine death over the last few
Page 129 of 277 decades having ultimately been made unsuccessful due to entanglements with social and ethical agendas (Ibid.). Though it relies on medical understandings, death is first and foremost a social issue, yet even medical understandings of death are contentious.
Twentieth-century advancements in medical technologies, which isolate brain function, heartbeat, and breathing, have allowed people who previously would have been considered dead to be kept in an otherwise stable state, complicating our ideas of both living and being dead
(Koppelman 2015, p. 5). This means that previously accepted legal (and even social) definitions of death have been updated to adhere to medical understandings. Unfortunately, there is no universal medical consensus on what constitutes a medical death. The whole-brain criterion of death calls for damage to the entire brain and for brainstem reflexes to have ceased, along with respiratory efforts
(Chiong 2015, p. 34). Two prominent alternatives to a whole-brain definition include the higher- brain criterion (which “only” calls for irreversible damage to the neocortex, rather than a cessation of respiration or brainstem reflexes), and the cardiopulmonary criterion (which advocates for an irreversible loss of circulatory and respiratory function, rather than brain function) (Ibid.). Yet none of these definitions are wholly satisfactory. Even patients determined to be “brain dead” (e.g. through the cessation of brainstem reflexes) can still show signs of brain functionality in other ways, such as through thermoregulation16 (p. 33). Conversely, cardiopulmonary definitions of death are problematic as the cessation of respiration and circulation do not immediately result in death.
These functions may start again, and even in cases where they do not, it would be misleading to define death from the moment they stop, rather than later when brain activity ceases as well. There is additionally no universal consensus on how long after the cessation of a heartbeat someone can be pronounced dead (Bernat 2015, pp. 68–69). Waiting too little time eliminates any hope of a patient potentially being revived, while too long can cause enough damage to organs that they can
16 The regulation of optimum body temperature. Page 130 of 277 no longer be gifted in organ transplantation. While most agree that between 2 and 5 minutes is best, some argue that as low as 60 seconds would be sufficient (Ibid.).
The higher-brain criterion of death is particularly interesting due to its privileging of the neocortex as the “higher brain,” and therefore the part of the brain that should be most associated with personhood. The neocortex is “the part of the brain responsible for consciousness, memory, personality, and perception” (Chiong 2015, p. 34). Thus, by such a definition, we can determine that advocates of the higher-brain criterion consider a person to be someone who is conscious, possessing memories, has a personality, and can perceive the world (or at least, possess one of these qualities). Applying this definition to the discussion of Romero’s films in Section 4.1 we can already see how the higher-brain criterion complicates an understanding of the zombie as being dead. Dr Logan provides us with a detailed account of what takes place in the zombie brain in Day of the Dead:
[The zombie is] working on instinct, a deep, dark, primordial instinct.
Decomposition occurs first in the frontal lobes, the neocortex, and next in
the limbic system, the middle brain. But the core – the core is the last thing
to be attacked by decay. It’s the R complex, Sarah, that central bit of
prehistoric jelly that we inherited from the reptiles.
Here, Logan is claiming that the decomposition of parts of the brain such as the neocortex (linked to emotions, personality, and memory [Levesque 2014]) removes the zombie’s ability to intelligently reason, while the survival of the central core (which regulates basic life processes such as breathing, pulse, and movement) allows it to function on a purely instinctive level. Yet, as I explored in
Section 4.1, zombies such as Bub, Big Daddy, and even Stephen are conscious and perceptive, possess memories (however questionable the “legitimacy” of such memories may be), and have unique personalities, even if others in the zombie mass do not.
Page 131 of 277 The Walking Dead television series offers its own critique of the importance of the neocortex and by implication, the personhood of the zombie. In the finale of season 1 (episode 6, “TS-19”), scientist Edwin Jenner explains first what makes a human, and then, by contrast, what physiologically takes place in the brain of a “walker” (zombie). In the Atlanta Centre for Disease
Control, Jenner shows a group of surviving humans a scan of a human brain. He begins by explaining the “lights” shown in the scan: “It’s a person’s life. Experiences, memories, it’s everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you. The thing that makes you unique, and human.” A black web begins to spread through the brain scan. He continues:
“The adrenal glands haemorrhage, the brain goes into shutdown, then the major organs. Then death.
Everything you ever were or ever will be. Gone.” In the diegetic world of The Walking Dead, the brain later restarts during resurrection, but crucially, not the whole brain—only the brain stem. The neocortex, which Jenner describes as “the human part,” remains dead.17
This scene of The Walking Dead seems to offer a clear-cut judgement of the personhood and state of the zombie: it is not a person and it is dead. Yet the use of the neocortex as a defining status of life or death in a human arguably misses the point of its significance in the higher-brain criterion of death. The neocortex is only able to be suggested as a test for brain death due to its connection with qualities attributed to a living human: consciousness, memory, personality, perception. If it were a different part of the brain that was responsible for such qualities, surely it would be that part that would be considered the “higher brain” in the higher-brain criterion. Therefore, by extension, a zombie who is capable of exhibiting signs of these qualities, regardless of the physiological state of their brain, could be considered a person.
17 Despite this fixation on the brain in The Walking Dead, the zombies of the series do not show any particular interest in brains over other body parts (instead opting for the neck or limbs of their victims). The brain-eating zombie, though often misattributed to Romero’s films, actually originated in the horror comedy Return of the Living Dead (1985). Though the story of Return was co-written by John A. Russo, who also co-wrote Night of the Living Dead (1968) with Romero, it is not part of the Dead franchise and the “brain-eating” trope is, therefore, rejected by many Romero loyalists. I interrogate the affective and intellectual implications of the brain-eating trope, and how it informs audience understandings of zombie personhood, in Chapter 5 in relation to the film Warm Bodies (2013). Page 132 of 277 Legal scholar Mitchell Travis offers further commentary on the significance of brain stem discussion in The Walking Dead to the real worlds of law and medicine, specifically the definitions of death that trouble understandings of persons in a PVS (2014b). He writes:
It is clear that the activities that zombies engage in place them outside of
traditional understandings of death but by focusing on the brain stem they
would, under current legal and medical models, be considered to be alive.
Their lack of capacity and rationality, however, places them outside the
realms of full legal personhood. (p. 793)
Travis argues that the zombies of The Walking Dead, and specifically, the show’s perspective on the connection between the brain, life, and personhood, make it an apt point of comparison to PVS caselaw.
The subject of personhood in cases such as PVS highlights the complexity of medical responsibilities. While it usually would be unethical for a doctor to refuse treatment to a patient with the knowledge that doing so would lead to their death, the death caused by withdrawal of medical treatment can be justified in cases where treatment was not in the patient’s best interests
(Travis 2014b, p. 794). There is a distinction, however, between actively killing an individual, and allowing their death to take place. As Travis notes, “it can be inferred that the active killing of an individual in a PVS interferes with both their autonomy and their bodily integrity. The distinction between act and omission, therefore, is based upon the personhood of the individual” (Ibid.). Travis goes on to argue that this ethical framing of causing death as relating directly to autonomy could be applied to the zombies of The Walking Dead. Even if the zombies were no longer “themselves,” it would be unethical and illegal to actively kill them excepting in cases of self defence or, where relevant, lawful execution.18
18 It should be noted that even the question of execution (in Western countries and states where lawful execution is practiced) is complicated by the idea that the zombie is not in their right state of mind. Page 133 of 277 This distinction between the active and passive killing of a person in a PVS has significant implications for the dead donor rule. As noted previously, a person may be removed from life support to allow “total” death to take place, therefore legally permitting organ donation to proceed.
Yet such a practice has many drawbacks. When an individual is removed from life support, if their death does not occur quickly enough, the damage done to the organs prevents donation. This can cause the families and loved ones of the deceased to face a second loss, particularly if great value was placed upon the idea of the organs of the deceased living on in another body (Truog 2015, p.
20). These situations could be prevented by anaesthetising the patient and removing the organs before removing life support, yet this would actively result in the death of the patient, rather than passively allowing it, hence violating the DDR. In attempts to both preserve the health of organs for transfer and adhere to the DDR, multiple methods for prolonging organ viability after the removal of life support are employed by physicians. One method is to provide extracorporeal life support to the organs immediately after the declaration of death, but this risks blood flow returning to the brain, thereby halting the necessary destruction of the brain for the criterion of circulatory death to be officially met (Bernat 2015, p. 69). One technique to get around this is to use a balloon to contain blood flow into the organs that need oxygenated blood. Another is to provide life support to the organs after they have been removed from the body. These techniques of legal and procedural contortion ultimately prompt the following question, posed by Bernat: “To what extent should society permit manipulation of an organ donor or alteration of the determination of human death for the good of organ recipients?” (Ibid.). Extensive scientific manipulation of a body in order to preserve organ viability may be viewed by some to be a pragmatic solution to the problem of organ availability, but it can also be viewed as insensitive to the loved ones of the deceased, a perversion of nature, or even an example of physicians “playing God.”
Page 134 of 277 Even attempts to circumvent the DDR for patients on life support by donating only non-vital organs can be made impossible. An individual “must give direct consent for living donation,” which cannot be done when the patient is non-responsive, regardless of any consent given for organ donation upon death (Truog 2015, p. 20). This means that an organ donor in a PVS who is not yet legally dead is unable to donate non-essential organs prior to technical death in order to preserve the integrity of the organs for the recipient. Where kinship is frequently determined to be an acceptable authority on the fate of organs from deceased bodies, regardless of the wishes of that body when they were alive and conscious (e.g. in many cases, families can prevent organ donation from an individual who expressed desire to be a donor), families are unable to consent on behalf of a technically living person to donate organs, even if said donation would do no true harm to the individual and is consistent with the individual’s expressed wishes of organ donation upon death.
While the above example demonstrates a denial by law and medical institutions to intervene in the body of an individual in a PVS to save another individual’s life, the law can similarly be used to forcibly preserve one life to “save” another. In a famous Texas case, Marlise Muñoz was kept on life support despite an irreversible coma and the wishes of her family, because she was pregnant
(Magnus 2015, p. 49). This was in accordance with state law, which required hospitals to maintain life support for individuals who are pregnant. In this case, Muñoz was kept in a state of living death in order to function as a biological life support for a foetus, against the wishes of her family. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital remove her from life support in compliance with the family’s wishes, eight weeks after she was originally admitted to hospital.
These examples highlight the ethical and interpersonal challenges of defining and regulating personhood for individuals existing in the complex and ill-defined space between life and death, particularly when intercorporeal dimensions (e.g. organ gifting and pregnancy) are involved. There have been suggestions that the term “life support” should be abandoned by medical professionals,
Page 135 of 277 as it misleads and confuses families who will never see their loved one “alive” again and it can be used to push anti-euthanasia political agendas (Koppelman 2015, p. 9). But while describing someone in a suspended state as “alive” might be misleading, so too is describing the body as dead.
Furthermore, being too quick to describe “dying” or “permanently unconscious” individuals as
“dead” risks the safety and autonomy of vulnerable populations whose interests may not align with those of their family, physicians, hospital, or broader society.
It is here that I must return to the very idea of “personhood” and why personhood is relevant to definitions of death (and, by extension, the nature of both organ transplantation and the zombie).
From a cultural perspective, personhood can certainly be argued to exist in a dead body. The
Fromelles Project, for example, has seen the Australian Army using “DNA technology, forensic science, and historical data” to identify the bodies of one hundred and twenty-four Australian soldiers whose identity was lost after the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 (The Australian Army
2017). Domestic funerals continue to form points of contention, such as when the interests of the partner, the family, and/or the deceased are at odds, or in the case of Australian Aboriginal children raised in non-Aboriginal communities, where the desire to be buried on country conflicts with the desire to be buried with their family or partner (Story Carter 2016). This suggests that on an emotional level at least, dead human bodies are considered to be culturally “persons,” even by those who never knew them as living.
From a social and ethical perspective, personhood is sometimes tied to cognitive ability, such as an understanding of oneself and situation. The Nonhuman Rights Project, for instance, states one of its objectives as “[t]o change the common law status of great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales from mere ‘things,’ which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to ‘legal persons,’ who possess such fundamental rights as bodily liberty and bodily integrity” (Nonhuman Rights
Project 2018). Yet as legal scholar Richard L. Cupp Jr. argues, by codifying personhood as
Page 136 of 277 something possessed by beings with high cognitive ability, a significant threat is posed to vulnerable humans such as infants or people with intellectual disabilities (2016, p. 522). Instead, he argues that humans can be invested in animal welfare without shifting the boundaries of a legal person. This brings us back to the concept of legal personhood. The legal status of individuals can fluctuate from situation to situation, and within such fluidity lies the possibility (but by no means certainty) of any number of entities being considered persons; as Ngaire Naffine puts it, “animals, foetuses, the dead, the environment, corporations, states, indeed whatever the law finds convenient” can be considered a legal person in the right context (2009, p. 49).
Travis defines legal personhood as “a device created through the discursive and the institutional impacting upon the material […] used to mean the way in which autonomy and normativity are given legal value and recognition” (2014a, p. 534). Travis is primarily concerned with body normativity, in particular, the preservation of the normative body; in other words, legal personhood is used as a way to both determine who is an autonomous being and whose bodies should be protected against (a normative ideal of) harm. These two concepts are not always compatible—suicide and assisted suicide are illegal in many countries and elective amputation is routinely denied to those who desire it. As Travis notes on the case of elective amputative surgery,
“[a]utonomy, in these instances, is temporarily suspended” (p. 530). Thus, autonomy is ultimately permitted only in accordance with normative social beliefs.19
The question of autonomy is particularly complicated by organ transplantation. In Australia, while family members can veto an individual’s decision to become an organ donor after death, they cannot opt-in on behalf of a deceased person who has opted out (The Australian Government Organ and Tissue Authority 2014). Thus, the expressed wishes of an individual are conditionally carried out after their death. This has interesting implications for the figure of the zombie. As noted earlier,
19 For this reason, in many countries, particular forms of elective “healthy” tissue removal (such as breast reduction, circumcision, or intersex surgeries) are regularly excluded from the taxonomic category of “elective amputation,” as these are normatively permitted practices (Stryker and Sullivan 2009, p. 57). Page 137 of 277 though The Walking Dead uses a higher-brain criterion of death to determine that the zombie is dead and a non-person, such logic does not hold up to all medical definitions of death. Additionally, as
Naffine (2009) has shown, there would be room to consider the zombie a legal person, though such a definition is debatable. The zombies of The Walking Dead are shown to use tools and mimic actions and even, according to some, may possess some memories or personality; however their intelligence is low, they have no communication skills, and have minimal self-preservation instincts. Thus, they may be more comparable to nonhuman animals and therefore, their ethical right to personhood is unclear.
Even if the zombie was declared not to be an autonomous being, it would not necessarily follow that they had no right to legal personhood. As Travis writes:
The figure of the zombie invites a re-examination of the relationship
between autonomy and legal personhood. Part of the problem centres
around capacity; how can we evaluate the capacity of a zombie? However,
even if we were to determine that a zombie had no capacity this would not
necessarily mean that they did not have legal personhood. It might instead
mean that they do not have responsibility for their own actions, but this does
not definitively determine that others do not owe obligations towards them.
(2014b, pp. 792–793)
Take, for example, the Alzheimer’s disease analogy explored in Section 4.1. Persons with
Alzheimer’s disease are frequently denied autonomy on the premise of protecting their safety and dignity and are furthermore not seen to be at fault for actions considered to be out of character. Yet there is a social obligation owed to their wellbeing. If the zombie is viewed to occupy a similar space (legally or philosophically), any advance directives given by the human before they became a zombie would need to be carefully considered. Much as with Alzheimer’s disease, though the
Page 138 of 277 humans of The Walking Dead can make educated assumptions about what the experience of being a zombie is like based on the scientific evidence, they cannot know for certain. Thus, unlike with organ donation, where every attempt is made to honour donation decisions so long as the family also consents, the desires of the zombie arguably must also be considered. For example, in “TS-19,” the brain scan Jenner shows the surviving humans came from another human (Test Subject 19) who volunteered their body for observation after learning they had become infected. It does not necessarily follow that Jenner had any right to continue observations after the subject had been resurrected. To continue the logic established in Section 4.1, the consideration of a zombie as being in a declined or dead state assumes a lack of personality and awareness of situation in order to deny bodily autonomy. If the zombie were instead considered to be in a developed or altered state of being, consent would need to be re-established and without expressed consent, observation and non- essential medical intervention could not ethically be continued.
In summary, in the hypothetical situation that the zombies of The Walking Dead existed in our world, their legal status would be uncertain. Even if the zombies were determined to be dead, the cultural significance and legal ambiguity surrounding dead human bodies and property rights would at the very least complicate any decision to destroy and dispose of the zombie. It is possible that protections for the welfare of zombies would be implemented, meaning that although the zombies were not considered legal persons, strict legal frameworks would need to be established to determine in which situations (and through what methods) the killing of a zombie was lawful (e.g. would killing a zombie count as recreational hunting or pest control?). Should the zombie be determined to be a legal person, laws surrounding murder, assisted suicide, capital punishment, and imprisonment would presumably be consistent with those aimed at humans. Criminal justice would be complicated, however, by the fact that the intellectual capacity of the zombie is unclear. Finally, in situations of mass zombie infection, international humanitarian law may apply.
Page 139 of 277 At this point we have sketched out the medical, legal, and normatively ethical complexities of the hypothetical zombie apocalypse; so, where does this leave us emotionally? The figure of the zombie can allegorically lay claim to a number of real-world human and nonhuman categories and so, as was shown in Section 4.1, what is deemed to be acceptable treatment of the zombie may also spill out and apply to its comparable human and nonhuman counterparts (i.e. if the zombie is deemed to be a killable subject, are those humans and nonhumans who allegorically resemble the zombie also killable?). This second thought experiment, however, also allows for an appraisal of ethical approaches to the treatment of humans and nonhumans in the inverse: where dominant medical, legal, or ethical perspectives do feel immoral when applied to the zombie (perhaps, for example, the recreational hunting of the zombie), what can this tell us about those perspectives?
This can prompt a closer interrogation of the specific conditions under which medical, legal, and ethical approaches maintain their integrity.
These kinds of interrogations have always taken place in certain contexts (e.g. to determine organ allocation) and are happening in an especially public arena in 2020 with ongoing debates relating to COVID-19. As noted in Chapter 1, the global situation with COVID-19 has been characterised by many to be like a zombie apocalypse and indeed, the kinds of usually invisible or obscured decisions regarding which lives are more worthy of saving are playing out in increasingly public ways. While the average person (though certainly not every person) living in the Global
North may previously have never had to consider what would happen if medical resources were limited in an emergency situation, now the possibility of a lack of ventilator, protective equipment, or even medical staff has become a very real threat in many of these countries. Furthermore, while capitalism has always relied upon, to some extent, the exploitation of vulnerable populations for economic prosperity, perhaps never before have we (in the Australian context, but other global contexts too) been asked in such blunt terms: how many lives are we willing to sacrifice to protect
Page 140 of 277 the economy (and just as importantly, which lives)? These conversations are now being discussed and operationalised (with varying disagrees of visibility and palatability) on a much larger and far- reaching scale and I would argue that speculative fiction such as zombie films may have done some of the invisible work in priming our judgements and responses to such questions. The wide-spread comparison of 2020 to zombie apocalypse films already points to an affective cognitive cross- contamination between the real and the speculative.
These kinds of analyses of the zombie through the method of the thought experiment, therefore, demonstrate how a dialogue between medical narratives of the body and cultural imaginings of the zombie can sketch out the existing complexities of agency and personhood that are already being debated (in visible and invisible ways). Corporeal identity and personal identity are frequently linked in cultural thought, yet legal and medical discourses constantly disentangle and reconnect these identities as bioscientific knowledges evolve (and our practical needs shift).
Our understandings of death and the brain are informed not only by dominant medical discourse, but also by persistent cultural knowledges of what it means to be human and how our bodies impact on our sense of personal identity. This is especially illustrated in the gap between medical definitions of death and cultural understandings of death. This chapter shows how the undead or living dead status of the zombie allows for a way to negotiate such a gap. The zombie exists as a symbol of corporeal anxiety, but also as an affective and empathy-inflected tool for considering relationships between the brain, memory, and personality in ethical debates about approaches to care of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and decision making relating to cadaver organ donation. By considering the hypothetical implications of zombies existing in the real world, we can therefore re-examine to what extent medical and legal perspectives and policies, as well as cultural attitudes, currently support (or exploit) comparable real-world bodies. The situation of vulnerable bodies (such as those in slippery states or with brain death) is deeply affected by legal
Page 141 of 277 systems that uphold dominant cultural and scientific ideals. Placing the zombie adjacent to such bodies offers a complicated perspective on how these systems impact on different persons and how our current legal and medical understandings of personhood privilege particular schools of thought in ways that have the potential to either protect and respect vulnerable bodies, or cause them harm.
For this reason, the zombie thought experiment offers a valuable tool for emotion-inflected debate in health and medical ethics.
Page 142 of 277 PART 3 INTRODUCTION TO PART 3: BEYOND PERSONHOOD, TOWARDS RELATIONALITY
Part 3 of this thesis marks a conceptual turn away from the body as a seemingly singular (if fragmented) person and towards the body as inherently and always multiple. Part 2 demonstrated how the figure of the zombie can be mobilised not only in the arts-situated methods of discourse and textual analysis, but also through more interdisciplinary methods such as comparative analysis and thought experiments, to explore ideas of autonomy, agency, and personhood in the body from a health ethics perspective. This approach addresses some major limits of more rationalist models of medicine and medical ethics, where particular modes of knowledge production (largely informed by
Western medical perspectives) are privileged above phenomenologically and ontologically informed understandings of the self. In centring the affective mediums of film and television as a key tool of ethical research, Part 2 illustrated how feeling and empathy (provoked by the zombie itself but also through its relationships with the humans around it) constitute crucial tools for understanding personhood and cultural and social anxieties relating to the self in a health ethics context.
Furthermore, they provide imaginative ways of answering questions around human vulnerability: who is vulnerable?; how is vulnerability systematically produced?; how do we understand our own vulnerability?; and how can our most vulnerable be better understood and protected?
The following chapters continue these questions to examine what opportunities for healing emerge when we move beyond a focus on personhood and intercorporeal relationality to also consider intracorporeal relationality—that is, the relationship between bodies when those bodies are also understood as themselves composite. Specifically, they explore how seemingly transgressive boundary crossing can be thought of as capable of producing a healing form of corporeal heterogeneity. I call this concept “healing heterogeneity”: the production of heterogeneity produces the potential for healing in the body (in the various ways “healing” may be defined). I furthermore consider how composite monsters in fiction allow us to think about the internal relationality of the
Page 144 of 277 heterogeneous body. As explored thus far in this thesis, monsters offer different ways of thinking about the relationship between bodies. The zombie is the primary monster I employ and as noted in
Chapter 3, it joins other established composite creatures such as Haraway’s ([1985] 1989) figure of the cyborg. Another monster that needs to be highlighted at this point in the thesis is the chimaera— a mythical creature composed from multiple other creatures. The chimaera is a particularly notable monster as it is already used in the medical sciences, lending its name to various biologically heterogeneous bodies. In bringing the zombie figure to bear on existing medical discourses surrounding the chimaera, I explore how the affective messiness of the zombie figure allows us to push the chimaeric body in different epistemic directions. Furthermore, I posit that the zombie, when figured as a chimaera, allows for a reimagining of vulnerability, particularly when such vulnerability is established in nationalistic terms (where the body is imagined as a nation state that must protect itself against foreign invaders).
In many ways, Chapters 5 and 6 can be considered the inverse of Chapters 3 and 4—rather than thinking through the anxieties produced through the idea of giving away part of one’s body, I explore the healing potential of bringing the other within. There are, however, important disclaimers that must accompany such a conceptual approach. First, not all instances of “bringing the other within” are desirable or welcomed and not all corporeal boundary crossings should be romanticised as “good”—there are many diseases I would happily keep away from the boundary of my skin.
Second, the term “healing” requires some scrutiny. In a medical context, healing carries with it a particular set of assumptions: the body should be repaired or restored to its originary/natural self
(whatever that is conceived to be) and function should be prioritised. Some “functions” may also be prioritised over others based on social or cultural values; for example, people who experience pain associated with conditions such as endometriosis may be denied hysterectomies in order to preserve fertility (BBC News 2017; Ratcliff 2019; Schleich 2015). In a metaphysical context, healing may
Page 145 of 277 connect with spirituality or New Age philosophies, where “healing” is differentiated from a biomedical concept of a “cure” and may instead signal an awakening of something internal, a transformation, or a letting go (Barcan and Johnston 2011, p. 81). It may also refer to other abstract forms of positive transformation (for example, social healing) (Squier 2007). I use “healing” in both a medical and metaphysical sense throughout the following chapters and clarify the specifics of such healing when its particularities are relevant.
Chapters 5 and 6 are also more invested in ideas of “community,” as opposed to a primary focus on the individual (where the individual understands oneself through its relationships with others). The notion of community is important when considering the heterogeneous body of the chimaera—the chimaera is produced through the coming together of multiple bodies and the relations between those bodies are important. Community emerges in various ways throughout these chapters: in Chapter 5, community is considered in the context of Augé’s (1995) notion of the
“non-place” (where community is lacking), Esposito’s ([2004] 2008; [2008] 2013) biopolitical writing on communitas and immunitas, and through the intercorporeal communion created through the act of consumption; in Chapter 6, community is considered in the context of maternal kinship, the idea of the body as “nation state,” and Turner’s ([1969] 2017) notions of communitas and liminality. These ideas of community produce varied and complex perspectives on relationality within the body of the chimaera.
So what exactly is the “chimaera”? In Greek mythology, the chimaera was a fire-breathing hybrid beast comprised of body parts of multiple animals, usually depicted as a lion with a goat head protruding from its back and a tail ending in a snake head. According to Homer’s account in the Iliad (estimated to be written in the 8th century BC), the chimaera was a divine beast, “lion in front but a serpent behind, in the middle a she-goat, breathing the terrible force of a bright-flamed fire from her nostrils” (2007, p. 121). At a similar time, Hesiod also described the creature in his
Page 146 of 277 poem Theogony, which chronicled the genealogies of various Greek gods and divine beings. He identified the chimaera as being born of the fierce goddess Echidna (who was part beautiful nymph and part huge snake) and the monstrous Typhaon. In addition to the chimaera herself, Greek mythology was full of chimaeric creatures (some comprised of various nonhuman animals, some a hybrid of human and beast) such as the harpy, the centaur, the siren, the hippocampus, the minotaur, and many more.
In contrast to the mythological chimaera, determining a definition of the chimaera in the sciences is challenging due to variations in the use of the term across fields. Bourret et al. provide a concise summary of its usages:
In embryology, ‘chimera’20 refers to a combination of cells from different
individuals. In molecular genetics, ‘chimera’ describes the combination of
two DNA molecules from different individuals, or from different
chromosomes of the same individual. Conversely, in genetics, ‘chimera’
refers to interspecies hybrids, such as the mule (the cross of a female horse
with a male donkey). ‘Chimera’ may even refer to the grafting in a
postimplantation embryo of cells or tissues from another individual or
species, such as the injection of hematopoietic stem cells intraperitoneally
into a sheep fetus to produce a chimeric sheep that expresses human
myeloid and lymphoid lineages. (2016, p. 1)
Much as with the zombie, the flexible limits of the term “chimaera” create potentialities for exploring how we might think about the body as a chimaera. Before we can explore such potentialities, however, I first present some of the ways the above definitions have been realised.
20 “Chimera” is an alternate spelling of “chimaera,” usually appearing in U.S. English. Page 147 of 277 In the twentieth century, the chimaera entered the technological realm. Though interspecies breeding was not a new phenomenon (and crossbreeding within species—accidental or deliberate— was a long-established practice in animal agriculture), purposeful scientific intervention at the cellular level presented new possibilities for bioscientific manipulation. Interspecific chimaerism between sheep and goats in the 1980s was produced through the creation of composite embryos that were then carried to term (Fehilly, Willadsen, and Tucker 1984, p. 634). The resulting animals varied in appearance, with some primarily presenting as lambs, while others appearing as “overt sheep-goat chimaeras” (p. 635). The ethics and practical advantages of such technologies have since been widely debated, with some questioning where the line should be drawn in such biological boundary crossing, and others optimistically considering how these advancements might be used to such ends as implanting the embryos of endangered species into domestic animals (Robson 2017).
The twentieth century also introduced another form of ethically contentious chimaera production through the practice of xenotransplantation. Xenogeneic cells, tissue, and organs (i.e. originating from a different species) have long been (controversially) considered as a possible solution to organ shortages in humans, with attempts at renal xenografting from rabbit to human documented as far back as 1905 (though results were initially promising, the child died shortly after) (Reemtsma 1995). Interspecies organ farming has also been considered as a possible solution to growing and harvesting human organs, but ethical and legal concerns, in addition to technical barriers, have significantly slowed the progress of such research (Bourret et al. 2016, p. 3).
There have even been instances of trans-species fertilisation induced as part of research into human infertility, though with significant caveat that fertilised human–nonhuman embryos must not be allowed to develop.21
21 See Squier 1998 for a feminist critique of the social construction of scientific perspectives on human–nonhuman interspecific reproduction. Page 148 of 277 However, the chimaera today is not confined to association with interspecies or mythical creatures. A chimaera may refer to a single organism that contains cells from another organism from the same species. For instance, chimaeric mice have become an important part of biological research, with recent studies having explored the potential of epigenetic remodelling through the production of induced pluripotent stem cells in mice (Hochedlinger and Jaenisch 2015).
Additionally, microchimaerism—“the presence of a small amount of foreign cells or DNA within the tissues or circulation of an individual”—was observed in humans as early as 1893 (Gammill and
Nelson 2010, p. 531).
Part 3 of this thesis focuses on examples of chimaerism that involve the introduction of biological heterogeneity to an individual—specifically, when a seemingly singular organism (such as a human) is in part made up of cells, tissue, or organs containing DNA from another organism
(from the same or different species). This is not to suggest that there exists a prior, singular human into which something new is added (we are always already heterogenous), but rather to acknowledge a social understanding of the human body (which is considered “common sense” in a modern, Western context) as singular/individual/whole; such an acknowledgement in turn helps us identify how instances of corporeal boundary crossing such as biological chimaerism are pathologised as exceptional medical phenomena, rather than being considered one way, among many, that we are inherently multiple. By focusing on this notion of the individual, and exploring the forms of boundary crossing that involve bringing the outside inside, it is not simply the idea of advantageous corporeal heterogeneity but affective corporeal heterogeneity that are opened for further critical consideration. In other words, corporeal boundary crossing must be understood in relation to the social (moral) transgressions it commits; the material reality of boundary crossing cannot be separated from the affective response it provokes when that reality becomes known. As will be explicated at length, the heterogeneous zombie is particularly well equipped to illuminate
Page 149 of 277 this affective potential. However, before I address the heterogeneous zombie, I must first acknowledge some further issues that arise in narrowing the focus of the chimaera.
Defining the chimaera in relation to its possession of DNA from another organism poses some further conceptual issues. In both public and medical understandings, the consumption of dead tissue through the eating of meat and plants does not produce the chimaera, nor does the existence of gut microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract of humans, despite both playing a significant role in various bodily processes; the fact that we have (on recent estimate) as many bacterial cells as human cells in our body does not mean that we would all be popularly or scientifically considered chimaeras (Sender et. al. 2016). This is further complicated by the fact that such bacteria can be partially donated to another human through a faecal microbiota transplant (FMT). FMTs transgress not only the boundaries of inside/outside (where the “waste” product of faecal matter is reintroduced back inside the body) and self/other (donor/recipient), but also the border between contamination and healing.
There are also temporal issues with this definition of the chimaera. Pregnancy technically produces chimaeras in both maternal22 and foetal bodies due to the bidirectional flow of cells between the two bodies. However, it is the discovery that foetal cells might exist in the maternal body, and vice versa, years or even decades after pregnancy that has generally led to the label of chimaera being applied to such bodies. As journalist Katherine Rowland writes:
The body’s default tendency to reject foreign material begs the question of
how, and why, microchimeric cells picked up during pregnancy linger on
indefinitely. No one fully understands why these ‘interlopers’, as
22 I interrogate the gendered language produced through discourses of chimaerism in Chapter 6. However, it is worth raising here that for purposes of clarity, I use the phrase “maternal body” to describe any body that has gestated a foetus, irrespective of that body’s gender identity. “Maternal,” therefore, should not necessarily be understood to signal “motherhood” or any particular experiences or identities relating to gender. Page 150 of 277 [rheumatologist Lee] Nelson calls them, are tolerated for decades. (Rowland
2018)
Furthermore, it is the continued presence of foetal cells permeating the maternal body that raises a multitude of not only biological questions, but also ontological and phenomenological ones.
Rowland continues:
[T]he findings [that women carry at least three unique cell populations in
their bodies—their own, their mother’s, and their child’s—] gesture toward
an array of questions about what it means for one individual to play host to
the cellular material of another, prompting scientists to look into whether
this phenomenon affects physical health or influences behaviour, or even
carries metaphysical consequences. The Western self is a bounded,
autonomous entity, defined in no small part by its presumed distinction from
the other. But this unfolding field of research […] suggests that we humans
are not oppositional but constituent beings, made of many. (Rowland 2018)
The bidirectional sharing of DNA between pregnant body and foetus is an expected and understood form of corporeal boundary crossing that is necessary for foetal development. It might therefore be argued that to label every body that performs this normalised process of boundary crossing a
“chimaera” would not only be taxonomically unhelpful but would fundamentally alter our understanding of “normal” selfhood—if we have all been chimaeras in-utero, the affective (and technical) effectiveness of the label is significantly reduced. However, as Rowland highlights, the persistence of chimaerism in bodies post-birth prompts questions about health, human behaviour, and metaphysical identity. Here, the fact that non-self cells have stayed “too long” warrants the attachment of the label “chimaera.” The body has transformed, losing its ability to be perceived as
“normal,” and is now considered deviant.
Page 151 of 277 Thus, I argue that chimaerism exposes one way (among many) that scientific and public communities establish semantic borders based on far more than technical knowledges. An understanding of the chimaera is predicated in part on normative assumptions of the human body as a whole, pure entity, and such purity is often associated with the idea of one hundred per cent homogenous DNA. As is explored at length in Chapter 6, the language used by scientists and journalists alike signals this very assumption; as Rowland writes, microchimaeric cells do not stay in the body but “linger.” The body does not contain microchimaeric cells but “tolerates” them. The heterogeneous human is unsettling in that it defies established notions of purity through the traversal of borders popularly understood as mostly impenetrable.
To this end, I use “chimaera” not simply as a technical label, but as way of understanding transgressive heterogeneity—that is, forms of heterogeneity that are considered abnormal, as opposed to those that have been normalised as part of typical embodiment. Both the bioscientific and the zombie chimaera offer ways of negotiating the contradictions of corporeal plurality: the chimaera is one, yet it is many; the chimaera assimilates the foreign while maintaining its distinction.
This makes the zombie a particularly productive lens for exploring the chimaera. The zombie invites an association with plurality due to its habitation in transitional states—between life and death, human and nonhuman, and so on. In rejecting binaries, it simultaneously recalls the many spaces it is unable to entirely occupy, thus evoking a monster who (like the chimaera) is inherently multiple and relational. The chimaera is much more than the sum of its parts, and it is only by thinking about how these parts come together to create a whole, and the context within which the chimaera is born, that the monstrosity of the chimaera can truly be appreciated. Similarly, the messy space where various states come together can be illustrated with creativity and clarity in the zombie figure.
Page 152 of 277 The following chapters, therefore, mobilise the figure of the zombie to explore the messy entanglements of bodies produced through chimaerism. Together, these chapters emphasise that the affective capacities of popular culture consumption combined with the critical approaches of humanities scholarship allow for creative, empathetic, and transgressive ways of understanding hegemonic scientific ideas that are crucial to ethical thinking in medicine (and beyond).
Page 153 of 277 CHAPTER 5: HEALING HETEROGENEITY AND WARM BODIES
This chapter considers three fundamental premises of the idea of healing produced through the production of corporeal heterogeneity (a concept I call “healing heterogeneity”) by exploring how they are illuminated in the film Warm Bodies. In particular, Warm Bodies leads the viewer into unexpected and often unwanted identifications by centring the narrative on an undead protagonist named R, who breaks sociocultural taboos in visceral and violent ways with the goal of falling in love and regaining his humanity. In creating spaces to think about the complexities of heterogeneous existence via the principal character, Warm Bodies presents ways of creatively and affectively thinking through the types of heterogenous embodiment normally produced in human bodies. The themes of boundary crossing, consumption, and memory as the repository of personal identity presented throughout the film are similarly important in biomedical manifestations of healing heterogeneity. In exploring these abstract concepts in affective ways, Warm Bodies encourages audiences to feel (rather than think) through complex philosophical, ethical, and biomedical debates.
The three premises of healing heterogeneity explored in this case study are as follows:
1. The chimaera is produced through a particular type of boundary crossing—consumption—
and is inherently multiple. It is the multiple nature of the chimaera that facilitates its
healing.
2. In order for the chimaera to heal itself, the “foreign” material it consumes must maintain its
otherness. The chimaera is not a singular body that can be added to or subtracted from
while maintaining its identity, but rather an assemblage of self and other. Its internal
relationality is as important as its multiplicity.
Page 154 of 277 3. Consumption is not simply a form of transformative boundary crossing, but an affective,
visceral form of boundary crossing. The affective nature of consumption is a crucial
mechanism of healing heterogeneity.
These three premises and the ways they are elucidated throughout Warm Bodies are explored at length throughout this case study in order to illustrate the argument that thinking of the production of the chimaera (particularly in the emotional ways prompted through a pop culture film) as a potentially healing process opens up different ways of thinking about the body, its relationship with others, and the crossing of intercorporeal boundaries.
5.1 Boundaries and Non-Places
Warm Bodies is a 2013 zombie romance film directed by Jonathan Levine and based on a novel of the same name. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it tells the story of a zombie who (forgetting his human name) is known as “R” throughout most of the film. The film is set following a zombie apocalypse that has devastated humanity and has forced humans to hide within walled cities, sending soldiers into the now-zombie-infested outside world to scavenge medical supplies. Unusually for a zombie film, R (played by Nicholas Hoult) is the protagonist of the story; he eats human flesh (especially brains), lacks a heartbeat, has difficulty speaking clearly, and shuffles as a way of walking—all typical traits of the modern pop culture zombie. Unlike a typical zombie, however, he is also funny, charming, and (despite the zombie makeup) attractive. Though R is arguably the most conventionally attractive of the zombies in Warm Bodies, he is also not unique in his limited grotesqueness (for example, R’s best friend, M, is similarly charismatic, has minimal zombie makeup, and is played by popular actor Rob Corddry).
There are two types of undead creatures in Warm Bodies: the regular zombies (like R) look relatively human (though grey-skinned with icy-looking eyes, perhaps in reference to the docile
Page 155 of 277 eyes of the Afro-Caribbean zombi), crave human flesh, walk/shuffle slowly, and are incorrectly thought to be incapable of verbal communication; by contrast, “boneys” (the final state the zombies reach after their flesh has decayed and they have lost all their humanity) look like fleshless skeletons, are extremely aggressive and fast, and lack any human emotions. This binary is a crucial part of the premise of Warm Bodies: as is explored later in this chapter, while the former zombies are eventually deemed to be capable and worthy of redemption (ostensibly due to their proximity to humanity), the boneys are never extended forgiveness for their violence and are ultimately viewed as un-saveable. Despite the ambivalence provoked throughout the film by the grotesque and (at best) morally dubious actions taken by R, the film’s use of genre-crossing (between horror and romance) and voice-over narration by R encourages audiences to sympathise and identify with the human-like zombies. The striving for humanity is established as the ultimate goal and those who are unable to reach that goal within the 98-minute runtime of the film are determined to be irrevocably monstrous.
We first meet R in an abandoned airport, living amongst his fellow zombies. Through R’s narration we learn that none of the zombies can remember their past lives, but they can experience the memories of their human victims if they consume their brains. Crucially, the zombies can feel what their victims have felt and this becomes a significant (if ethically troubling) tool for redemption: remembering being human and feeling human feelings allows the zombies to “heal” themselves (regain their humanity).
The story of redemption embedded in Warm Bodies is also entwined with its Romeo and
Juliet primary plot. R meets Julie, a human girl who is the daughter of the leader of the humans,
General Grigio. R is instantly drawn to Julie… because he has (conveniently) just killed her boyfriend and eaten his brains, thus experiencing intimate and loving memories of Julie. R saves
Julie from the other zombies and slowly gains her trust over the process of several days as they are
Page 156 of 277 trapped together in an old airplane. Julie eventually returns to the human territory, only to be followed by R, who has now started to recover his humanity. With the help of Julie’s friend, the pair manage to convince Julie’s prejudiced father that the zombies are healing themselves and the humans and zombies team up to fight the boneys.
The centring of a zombie love story, the particularities of brain consumption, and the recurring motif of borders and transitional spaces in Warm Bodies make it a useful creative tool for exploring my concept of healing heterogeneity. Healing heterogeneity argues that the production of heterogeneity in the body creates opportunities for healing (though these opportunities may or may not translate to actual healing). This production takes places through the crossing of the boundaries in the body, both at a physical level (where the body’s physical boundary— the skin—is compromised and traversed, or via entry through the body’s various openings) but also at a social/ cultural level (e.g. through the breaking of taboo). This is the first premise of healing heterogeneity: multiplicity (produced through boundary crossing) creates healing potential. This premise is expounded throughout Warm Bodies in two primary ways: in the various forms of boundary crossing (physical and social/cultural) presented in the film, and through the depictions of heterogeneity and its potentialities.
Boundaries are a recurring visual motif in Warm Bodies and the thematic significance of boundaries is explored throughout the film. Boundary crossing is present in the nature of all zombies in their occupation of transitional and marginal states (neither alive nor dead, neither human nor nonhuman), yet Warm Bodies thematically centres boundaries more than most zombie films. Even the very setting at the beginning of the film—an airport—exemplifies this preoccupation; as R muses, “People wait at airports I guess, but I’m not sure what we’re all waiting for.” R describes the airport as a “home” for the zombies, but this description feels hollow. Though the zombies may (un)live there, it is far from a home. To paraphrase R, the zombies wander around
Page 157 of 277 the airport but never get anywhere; the airport is not a place of residence but rather a place of holding and transit.
Anthropologist Marc Augé’s (1995) notion of the non-place provides a way for us to think about this waiting space. Non-places are ephemeral places of waiting and transit where occupants are temporarily anonymous, such as shopping malls, waiting rooms, or (usefully for our purposes) airports. For Augé, the airport is a transitional space that “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (pp. 77–78). Conversely, the walled city occupied by the humans of Warm Bodies constitutes what Augé describes as an “anthropological place” (Ibid.)—it is defined as a place for humans, and is politically held together by a shared history (the pre-zombie world and the devastating apocalypse that ended it). Unlike the humans, the zombies (at least at the beginning of the film) lack a shared sense of community and identity and are unable to remember their own histories. R speculates on this past (“It must have been so much better before when everyone could express themselves and communicate their feelings and just enjoy each other’s company.”) and even on the identities of the zombies around him (“You were the rich son of a corporate CEO. You were a personal trainer.”) but these personal histories and the communities they formed are now lost. Temporality, spatiality, and identity are mutually constitutive in the zombie- infested airport; without a sense of personal history or home, the zombies are no one.
While Augé’s airport is a space of transit between geographical or even ideological places, the airport of Warm Bodies is a liminal space between a forgotten past and an unknown future.
According to Augé, in a real-life airport one first surrenders one’s identity to enter the non-place of the airport (with a passport, visa, boarding pass, etc.) and must eventually affirm their identity to exit the non-place (p. 102). Of course, this imagined shared space of identity-less persons ignores the persistent, if obscured, inequalities in how “waiting” in the non-place is experienced. As media theorist Sarah Sharma argues, there can be no common experience of time within the airport
Page 158 of 277 between, for example, the frequent business traveller and the baggage handler or the immigrant
(2014, pp. 145–147). Yet even these differences are flattened in the zombie. The identities of the zombies at the beginning of Warm Bodies are largely unknown. Thus, they are stuck in the non- place in perpetuity… unless they are able to claim (consume) an identity. It is only through consuming a human identity, and becoming a chimaera of zombie and human, that R is able to effectively cross the boundary of the airport (more on this later).
Another particularly significant boundary in Warm Bodies is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the boundary between human and monster. As has been demonstrated in various cultural and popular media examples thus far, the monstrous is not a purely exterior entity; the borders between self and monster are permeable and in constant change (Shildrick 2002, p. 1). According to Margrit
Shildrick, it is this relationship between self and monster that makes us vulnerable (Ibid.). Warm
Bodies takes this a step further by portraying zombies as capable of reclaiming their humanity. R is initially unique in his ability to protect, care for, and empathise with a human, but throughout the film many more zombies begin “healing” themselves (visually represented by their hearts turning red and beating). General Grigio’s desire to kill R near the end of the film, despite being shown evidence of R’s humanity, inverts the script of monsters versus humans and (like so many zombie and monster films before it) poses the question: who is the real monster? Finally, the romance between R and Julie is arguably transgressive in eschewing a focus on human-centric relationships, though as Nyssa Harkness points out, it still “uphold[s] the hegemonic monogamous heterosexual relationship as superior” (2014, p. 52). Additionally, R is white and conventionally attractive; however, as seen in Chapter 3, the “whiteness” of the zombie of Western media is complicated by its frequent role as a stand in for socially minoritised identities and its historical entanglements with racialised bodies (see McAlister 2012, for more on zombie whiteness).
Page 159 of 277 In Warm Bodies (as, I will argue, in human bodies) it is the act of boundary crossing that produces the chimaera and facilitates self-healing. Leaving the transitional space of the airport allows R to cross the boundaries of monster to human. The heterogeneous (human plus zombie) society produced by the end of the film is a crucial part of the healing; as R puts it, it is “the key to the cure.” Additionally, as I explore in Section 5.2, R’s desire to leave the airport at all only comes after he has consumed the brains (identity) of a living human and becomes a chimaera of human and zombie. Thus, heterogeneity—produced through boundary crossing—is necessary for healing in Warm Bodies.
So how might this vision of heterogeneity represented in Warm Bodies connect with the ethical questions raised by heterogeneity produced through cellular chimaerism in the human body?
As I stated earlier, this chapter ultimately characterises the type of boundary crossing that produces the chimaera as a form of “consumption.” This situates the chimaeric body in the position of the consumer; however, the inverse perspective must also be considered. While the (becoming-) heterogeneous self consumes, I argue that the other is not passively consumed, but instead gifts.
Here we can return to examples in the human body. There are many ways that the human body is a chimaera of self and other on a purely physiological level: the gut contains bacteria, transplanted organs retain their DNA signature, and science has shown that foetal materials can remain in the maternal body for years after a pregnancy and vice versa (Shildrick 2010, pp. 16-17). As is explored further in Chapter 6, the circulation of microbes, blood and other cells, and DNA between bodies, such as between maternal and foetal bodies, can be conceptualised as a kind of unpredictable and volatile “gifting” (Hird 2007, pp. 10-11). These “gifts” are biological packets that may support and nourish the foetal body, but also have the potential to harm either or both bodies. Thus, though the terms “consumption” and “gifting” may carry moral connotations, these acts of boundary crossing in and of themselves are neither helpful nor harmful. Instead, they carry only the potential for
Page 160 of 277 healing, and this potentiality is made possible by the multiplicity created by such boundary crossing.
The conceptualisation of biomaterial traversing the boundaries of the body as a “gift” is explored in depth in Chapter 6, but for this chapter I want to interrogate the value of the foreign. In the context of biomedicine and immunity, the foreign has historically been represented as an inherently threatening other that must be rejected in order to protect the vulnerable self. By thinking of foreign biomaterial as a not necessarily dangerous threat but instead as a potentially healing gift, different possibilities for understanding boundary crossing emerge. I consider these possibilities further in the following section.
5.2 Immunity and the Foreign Body
From here I must move on to the second premise of healing heterogeneity: that the chimaera is an assemblage of self and other, where the other must maintain its otherness to create opportunities for healing. It is not enough to simply produce multiplicity in the body; the heterogeneous body is both nation state and enemy and maintains this contradiction as a form of immunisation. The purposeful consumption of foreign material, and the persistence of its “foreign- ness,” is essential.
An immunological understanding of the body draws upon a history of thinking about the body as an object of state control and governance. Under this thinking, the state exercises its power not only in its potential to reduce or seize life (i.e. through “the right to take life or let live”) but also
(re)produce life: to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize” the bodies ostensibly under its protection (Foucault [1976] 1978, p. 136). In this way, the body becomes a site of regulatory power, through which useful and improved bodies are produced (Foucault [1975]
1977, p. 138). Furthermore, the technologies of power that produce these individual bodies also
Page 161 of 277 extend to address multiplicities of bodies; a “massifying” rather than “individualising” seizure of power over “man-as-species” (Foucault [1997] 2003, pp. 242–243). This political dialectic, known as “biopolitics,” has been advanced most famously by philosopher and historian Michel Foucault
(see [1975] 1977; [1976] 1978; [1997] 2003; [2004] 2008) and then in turn has been taken up by philosopher Roberto Esposito ([2004] 2008) to interrogate how immunity from contagion, where contagion is figured as community (and the political semantics that articulate such a framing), is achieved in the individual. This section is concerned with Esposito’s interventions in this area and how militaristic language has been mobilised via medical discourse as a way of understanding biological processes within the body. As such, thinking about the heterogeneous body through a biopolitical framework prompts questions that not only relate to biomedical ethics, but also to larger political debates.
A consistent narrative throughout Warm Bodies is the disconnect between how the humans understand the zombies and what we as viewers are led to understand as the true nature of the zombies. The leader of the humans, General Grigio, describes the zombies to his people towards the beginning of the film:
Corpses look human; they are not. They do not think, they do not bleed.
Whether they were your mother or your best friend, they are beyond your
help. They are uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse.
Here, the General establishes the irony of his name: he is unable to see the world in shades of grigio
(“grey” in Italian). Indeed, Grigio’s beliefs about zombies are eventually proven to be unfounded.
After Grigio’s daughter, Julie, is saved (or captured, depending on your viewpoint) by R, R demonstrates that he is capable not only of simple communication, but also empathy, the ability to enjoy music, and romantic love. This narrative is complicated by the fact that prior to R and Julie’s blossoming relationship, R kills Julie’s boyfriend Perry, and eats his brains. R reflects to the
Page 162 of 277 audience: “There’s a lot of ways to get to know a person. Eating her dead boyfriend’s brains is one of the more unorthodox methods.” This is significant because the consumption of human brains by a zombie in Warm Bodies allows that zombie to experience the memories of the deceased. R explains:
If I don’t eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he’ll rise up and become a
corpse like me. But if I do, I get his memories, his thoughts, his feelings.
I’m sorry, I just can’t help it. The brain’s the best part, the part that makes
me feel human again. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to feel what you
felt. To feel a little better, a little less dead.
Thus, the film submits to audiences the following thesis: since remembering is an inherently human capability, experiencing being a human through memories (no matter whose memories they are), makes you more human. This not only raises ethical questions of consent and deception (which are half-heartedly addressed by the film at best), it also complicates understandings of personhood, heterogeneous embodiment, material and social boundaries, and—most importantly for the second premise of healing heterogeneity—the paradigm of immunisation.
In his book, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy ([2004] 2008), Roberto Esposito exposits the value of the paradigm of immunisation for its relationship with the “biology” and “politics” poles of biopolitics. Esposito writes:
Where the term ‘immunity’ for the biomedical sphere refers to a condition
of natural or induced refractoriness on the part of the living organism when
faced with a given disease, immunity in political-juridicial language alludes
to a temporary or definitive exemption on the part of subject with regard to
concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances
would bind one to others. (p. 45)
Page 163 of 277 According to Esposito, the paradigm of immunisation allows for a way of navigating the delineation of positive/productive biopolitics (where power “enhances,” “protects,” “reproduces,” “subjectifies” life) and negative/lethal biopolitics (where power “negates,” “violates,” excludes,” “objectifies” life) (p. 46). Under the immunitary paradigm, the foreign is subjected to assimilation or rejection, which in turn promotes the protection of the self.
In this way, immunity in the body can be imagined as an inherently political encounter between the self and foreign entities. Immunity speaks to a still-dominant sociopolitical imaginary where the foreign is only allowed entry into the body under particular conditions—the foreign must assimilate and become a “helpful” citizen (indistinguishable from the originary body) or it will be rejected. As Žukauskaitė writes:
The immunitary paradigm is still retaining its arguments and strengths in
today’s Europe, where almost every country is erecting barricades and
walls. The political attempts to resolve the migration crisis resemble the
logic of vaccination: the foreign ‘pathological’ element is induced into the
body (or nation as body) but only on the condition that this element will be
homogenized and its natural development will be blocked. This logic of
vaccination fails not only because of the unprecedented scale of migration
but also because of its internal contradiction: it reduces multiplicity into
identity and heterogeneity into homogeneity. (Žukauskaitė 2017, p. 255).
Here, Žukauskaitė articulates a logic embedded within political immunitary discourse that immunisation involves a connection with the foreign that is predicated upon the assumption that the foreign, if not rejected entirely, must assimilate into the nation/body. This logic, however, requires closer scrutiny. Reducing “multiplicity into identity and heterogeneity into homogeneity” ignores one of the fundamental principles of immunity: that it is specifically the status of foreign material in
Page 164 of 277 vaccination as different from the body that allows immunisation to happen. If the other was able to seamlessly assimilate into the self, to homogenise, no immune response would be triggered. In contrast, the inherently heterogeneous chimaera allows for ways of understanding immunity as possible only through the persistence of the foreign in the body. Thus, Žukauskaitė posits that immunity must be conceived of not only as boundary crossing, but as an act of bringing the outside inside in a permanent, heterogeneous way.
As noted previously, the concept of healing heterogeneity conceptualises this bringing of the outside inside as an act of consumption, so it is useful to spend some time interrogating this term.
Simply put, consumption is the act of internalising something (or someone) other. Unlike in (most cases of) biological heterogeneity, consumption in Warm Bodies operates first and foremost as a substantive fact: the other (in this case, the human) is literally cannibalised. This cannibalisation also transforms the act of consumption in Warm Bodies into a sociocultural and psychoanalytical taboo; the visceral act of consuming a human body is socially prohibited in most real-world cultures and certainly in the cultures of the intended audience for Warm Bodies. This idea of taboo also plays a prominent role in the affective displeasure arising from many biological forms of boundary crossing. Finally, consumption functions as a political metaphor and a medical metaphor, both of which feed into an understanding of immunity.
These multilayered ways that consumption manifests are all represented in the types of boundary crossing committed by R throughout Warm Bodies. R is the political enemy, established in Grigio’s speech as existing in direct opposition to humanness, yet R is able to love, protect, and even (almost) die for a human. However, this is only made possible by an act of cannibalism, through bringing the flesh and memories of his rival (Perry) into his body, and through experiencing humanity through memories he never personally lived but now possesses. Perry’s memories allow
R to cross the physical political border of the humans’ city walls, and eventually cross the
Page 165 of 277 immunological border between diseased and cured, the material and ontological border between zombie and human, and the existential border between undead and alive. Though the role of affect in the visceral unpleasantness of cannibalising the enemy is explored in greater detail in Section 5.3, it is important to note here the many divergent yet overlapping ways that consumption in presented in Warm Bodies. It is the various boundary crossings committed by R (and others) that eventually allow the zombies and humans to work together to fight against the boneys. This once again highlights one of the strengths of popular media in exploring abstract ideas; in literalising multiple forms of consumption, the affective, metaphysical, and political questions prompted by Warm
Bodies encourage a nuanced exploration of the many intersecting spheres of boundary crossing that are being actively debated in the contemporary biosciences, as well as in popular responses to the movement of people in the contemporary era. In particular, Warm Bodies challenges assumptions about personal identity and corporeal “wholeness,” and opens up ethical, conceptual, and affective grey areas, inviting popular audiences to feel simultaneously disgusted by R’s actions and sympathetic towards his goals.
In the context of 2020 and our continued global situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, these spheres of boundary crossing in the bioscientific and public domains overlap even further.
While we await a working vaccine, state-imposed restrictions on the movements of people and more highly regulated hygiene practices are two major methods for stopping the spread of the disease. As I edit this chapter in July, 2020, 3000 residents living in public housing blocks are under
“hard lockdown” (banned from leaving their homes) in Melbourne, Australia, with 500 state police officers “securing the perimeter of the buildings” and “monitoring residents” (McArthur et al.
2020). There have additionally been calls from the State Opposition Leader to replace the police officers with the Australian Defence Force (Ibid.). Here we can see Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics most starkly at work—the state is exercising its power to “incite, reinforce, control,
Page 166 of 277 monitor, optimize, and organize” the bodies of its citizens in order to protect the physical health of the population en masse (Foucault [1976] 1978, p. 136). Much like the soldier-guarded walls of the human city in Warm Bodies, the police-guarded walls of the public housing buildings ostensibly protect the community from the ongoing public health crisis. Thus, in lieu of a vaccine, the policing of the movement of bodies becomes the primary regulatory mechanism for the conservation of human life (whether against zombie infestation or COVID-19). Under such a model, only state- approved bodies (such as police officers or soldiers) are allowed to traverse these physical boundaries.
Thus, even an immunisation model of public health protection is premised on a regulation of which bodies can or cannot traverse physical boundaries. Immunisation (in both a political and medical sense) relies on the regulated consumption of the other, where the other becomes naturalised and “helpful,” rather than harmful. As noted previously, the abstract notions of consumption and gifting must be divorced from any value judgements when considered in the context of healing heterogeneity. The act of consuming the other offers only a potential for healing.
Thus far, healing heterogeneity in the human body has been defined by paradigms of immunity as defence; as Esposito writes:
[W]e can say that immunization is a negative [form] of the protection of
life. It saves, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or
collective, but it doesn’t do so directly or immediately; on the contrary it
subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces
its power to expand. ([2004] 2008, p. 46).
Both the biological and political immunitary body introduce “a fragment of the same pathogen that it wants to protect itself from” (Ibid.). As Esposito later writes, rather poetically for our purposes,
“it’s almost as if to save someone’s life they need to taste death” ([2008] 2013, p. 61). However, just
Page 167 of 277 as Esposito exposits this exclusionary logic of immunity, he also argues for a consideration of the inverse:
Tracing the term back to its etymological roots, immunitas is revealed as the
negative or lacking [privativa] form of communitas. If communitas is that
relation, which in binding its members to an obligation of reciprocal gift-
giving, jeopardizes individual identity, immunitas is the condition of
dispensation from such an obligation and therefore the defense against the
expropriating features of communitas. ([2004] 2008, p. 50).
This relationship between immunitas (exclusionary) and communitas (inclusionary) highlights the paradoxical nature of immunisation: how two antithetical agendas operate in service of the same goal (healing). In the case of Warm Bodies, the creation of a community of zombies and humans allows the zombies to heal themselves (kill the zombie parts of themselves) and society to similarly heal itself (kill the remaining boneys). Once again, death saves life, but only with the support of community. If we relate this back to COVID-19, an approach of creating community between infected and non-infected people would likely also “work,” though at an unacceptably devastating cost (in the Australian context, with a population of 25 million people, a conservative estimate of
225,000 deaths would be required to achieve herd immunity) (Holden and Preston 2020). Healing, therefore, cannot be simplified as an inherent social good. It is instead always enmeshed with ethical complexities that cannot be neatly teased out.
For this reason, it is also worth paying attention to the potential negative outcomes of immune response: when the immune system becomes too aggressive, such as with autoimmune diseases, graft-versus-host disease, and organ transplant rejection. Even in these cases, I argue that healing heterogeneity offers a way to consider the healing (in the “restorative” biomedical sense) potential of the chimaera. Let us focus on transplant rejection: the use of immunosuppressants
Page 168 of 277 (medication used to inhibit the immune system) is generally considered to be a crucial practice to prevent transplant rejection, yet immunosuppression puts patients at risk due to side effects of impaired immune surveillance and drug-specific toxicities (Mahr et. al. 2017, p. 2). The induction of chimaerism in patients has shown to be a possible way of supporting the withdrawal of immunosuppressants post-transplant. In a study at Stanford University Hospital, four patients received a “combined kidney and hematopoietic progenitor transplantation from non-HLA-matched living donors” (Millan et. al. 2002, p. 1387). Simply put, patients were donated progenitor cells in an attempt to stimulate chimaerism that would then support the acceptance of the donated kidney.
Though not without its risks (see Mahr et. al. 2017), this approach highlights the power of language and discourse in scientific fields. If it wants to understand chimaerism as a potential healer, biomedical terminology must evolve to reconsider the status of foreign biological matter. Transplant material such as stem cells are no longer necessarily the “invader,” but rather the “‘useful’ migrant,” helping the body accept life-saving organ or tissue transplantation (Shildrick 2010, p. 19; see
Chapter 6 of this thesis for more on this use of language). Once again, the relationship between communitas and immunitas plays a central role in healing; by inducing chimaerism in the body
(communitas), the practice of immune suppression is allowed to cease.
In sum, the “other” incorporated into the chimaera is always foreign, but its relationship with the self can vary. In its most simple form, the other is a fragment of the enemy/invader that the body must be protected from. However, the other can also be the ally/immigrant, lending its own immune response to help the body incorporate the “helpful” and fight the “harmful.” It is therefore not only heterogeneity, but the specific relationship between self and other in the chimaera that facilitates healing. The politics of immunisation in which the chimaera is invested demonstrates how negative and affirmative practices are paradoxically and persistently enmeshed in the body
(Žukauskaitė 2017, p. 246). Žukauskaitė proposes that affect offers a way of understanding the
Page 169 of 277 multiplicity and relationality of the body by considering the body as an assemblage of self and other, being constantly affected and affecting (p. 244). The term “assemblage” is used by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus ([1987] 2013) to account for the complex interconnections between heterogeneous things (bodies, objects, elements, signs, etc.). These interconnections are dynamic, unstable, and porous, and together constitute an entity that is multiple. According to Deleuze and Guattari:
A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations,
magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase
in number as the multiplicity grows). Puppet strings, as a rhizome or
multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to
a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other
dimensions connected to the first […] An assemblage is precisely this
increase in dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as
it expands its connection. (p. 7)
In this way, assemblage allows for a way of understanding the intermingling between bodies in the chimaera. If the chimaera is considered a multiplicity, “assemblage” can describe the coming- together of the various entities in that multiplicity, the ways those entities are endlessly affecting and being affected by each other (Shildrick 2015, p. 14). The chimaera must be understood through its (inter/intra)relationality; the bodies that make up the chimaera are less important than the complex and ever-changing entanglements between those bodies. This use of assemblage provides a useful way to think through the affective plurality of the chimaera. The chimaera is not simply a composite creature; it is a volatile network of inextricably interconnected and juxtaposed bodies, an assemblage of self and enemy and invader and ally and migrant.
Page 170 of 277 If at this point we have answered the question “what is the chimaera?” we must now ask:
“who is the chimaera?” To answer this ontological question, I return to the character of R in Warm
Bodies. I argue that R’s consumption of Perry’s brain creates what we might call a metaphysical chimaera. Though initially physically unchanged, R begins to have memories and dreams that are distinct from his zombie persona. This binary of zombie and (pre-zombie) human experience is presented through two major and distinct visual styles in Warm Bodies. The majority of the film employs a mise-en-scène stylistically consistent with many similar Hollywood genre films of the time period, and employs a colour palette that is desaturated and depicted in cool tones. By contrast,
Perry’s memories are presented in a warm and highly saturated colour scheme. The flash-back sequences make greater use of shallow focus and close-up shots, often tightly framing faces (or parts of faces). Overt handheld camera work also features more prominently in these sequences and the narrative is less linear, with significant jumps in time. The aesthetic use of handheld camera work can be traced back to the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s and featured significantly in the documentary styles of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, which employed the handheld camera as a way of achieving a greater sense of realism (Hall 1991, p. 44; Rouch [1975] 1995, pp. 88-89).
Handheld camerawork was also a rule of the Dogme-95 filmmaking movement and allowed for a
“documentary proximity,” giving “the impression of immediate presence” (Pandža 2018, p. 89). In
Warm Bodies, the overt use of handheld filming achieves a similar sense of proximity and realism.
In contrast to the Dogme-95 tradition, however, the flashback sequences make frequent use of spatiotemporal cuts, but in a non-linear narrative. Thus, a feeling of objective realism is undercut in order to mimic the erratic and disordered nature of personal memory (a technique used frequently in films exploring ideas of memory, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004).
These film techniques signal the messiness of personal identity in the zombies of Warm
Bodies. The consumption of Perry’s brains (and the subsequent experience of his memories) allows
Page 171 of 277 R to begin the process of healing, yet by bringing Perry’s memories inside in a permanent, heterogeneous way, as an audience we may question what becomes of R’s identity. A Lockean view, as touched on in Chapter 4, would suggest that R in some ways has become Perry. If memory is posited as an aspect of personal identity, then Perry’s persistent memories necessitate an acknowledgement of Perry’s continued, albeit compromised, existence (this perspective is even encouraged by a comment made by Perry himself: “If we don’t [remember the past] it’ll just all be gone”). Of course, R’s personality also persists, thus making a delineation between Perry and R impossible.
In eating Perry’s brains, R becomes much more than simply himself plus Perry; he
(re)produces something else entirely—a zombie-becoming-human. R has become an assemblage of
R/Perry, zombie/human, alive/dead, ally/enemy, etc. and thus is especially equipped to negotiate a peaceful alliance between the humans and zombies, sitting in the liminal grey space that the ironically named General Grigio cannot. The entanglement of Perry’s memories with R’s also challenges the assumption that R can be thought of as existing simply on a sliding pathological scale of unhealthy to healthy. Healing, for R, involves his entering an entirely new category of existence, where he can no longer be thought of as a zombie, yet he is similarly not quite a human.
This healing can be understood as a system of material and metaphysical becomings, where healing lies in the messy, affecting space between states. To explore the affective potential of this space in negotiating the relationship between self and other in the chimaeric body, I turn now to the third premise of healing heterogeneity.
5.3 Consumption as Affective Boundary Crossing
The third and final premise of healing heterogeneity I explore in this chapter is how the affective, visceral nature of consumption as boundary crossing illuminates conceptually rich ideas
Page 172 of 277 about the heterogeneous body and makes us feel those conceptual challenges. Since consumption is a biological inevitability across all life forms, it is hardly surprising that all societies regulate it in material and symbolic forms, and through this regulation cultural taboos relating to corporeal boundary crossing emerge. The affective response prompted by taboo is a key mechanism in this third premise of healing heterogeneity. In exploring the transgressive and visceral boundary crossing in Warm Bodies, and placing it against the taboos of consumption, I argue that the body is not a singular object that may be added to or subtracted from. Instead, the flexible and permeable borders of the body produce a multiplicity that is defined by its difference from and integration with the foreign within.
Sociologist Pasi Falk’s writing on the historical anthropology of taste illuminates some of the mechanisms at play in anthropological responses to bodily boundary crossing. Falk argues that humans “[divide] the world into edible and inedible, into that which may be incorporated and that which may not” (Falk 1994, p. 69). This distinction, according to Falk, is closely related to “more abstract binary oppositions such as us vs. them, same vs. other, inside vs. outside, good vs. bad and culture vs. nature” (Ibid.). Here we can see how constructions of the “edible” are complicated by the immunitary paradigm outlined previously, where the outside is brought inside, the bad creates good, and the body becomes simultaneously both self and other. It is also important to remember that an edible vs. inedible binary should not only be understood as simply what the body can naturally incorporate, but also what the body is culturally allowed to incorporate. This is at the heart of taboo; though the body may physiologically benefit from particular forms of consumption, if such consumption disobeys cultural logics it generates feelings of disgust.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas’s ([1966] 2002) well-known work on taboo and food- prohibition systems classifies food as “polluting” if it crosses particular culturally defined boundaries. For example, food that has been bitten into may be deemed less polluting than food that
Page 173 of 277 has been inside another person’s mouth23 (p. 42). Pollution is also created through the act of matter travelling from the inside of the body to the outside; through this process, it transforms from being life-sustaining and a part of the whole, complete body to being filth and pollution: a waste product.
The “margins” or “boundaries” of the body are symbolically the most vulnerable parts; therefore matter that is able to traverse the boundary of the body is considered “dirty” or taboo (p. 150). This includes materials that can be secreted such as blood, milk, urine, faeces, saliva, semen, and sweat, but I argue that we can also extend this idea to consider organic tissue such as brain matter. In this way, the taboo of consuming internal bodily material is compounded in the example of the zombie; in being removed for consumption, the brain not only traverses the boundary of the body, but does so as a type of matter typically not allowed outside of the body and, unlike blood or sweat, rarely seen by non-medical professionals.
The affective and visceral bidirectional boundary crossings identified above can be collectively characterised as forms of “consumption.” Falk offers the following definition of consumption in The Consuming Body:
[C]onsumption in the universalistic sense is simply a synthesis of entropic
and negentropic processes; matter dissolving into energy and maintaining or
producing more complex and ordered forms of matter, or an endless chain of
transformations – of destruction and construction – which is based on the
same universal principle even if the historical and cultural forms change.
This is in accordance with the bivalence inherent in the etymological roots
of ‘consumption’ deriving from the latin ‘consumere’ (cum sumere), that is,
to use up entirely, which involves destruction of matter, and
23 Douglas also notes that these prohibitions are not found in all cultures and the level of danger they are perceived to pose similarly differs from culture to culture ([1966] 2002, p. 150). Page 174 of 277 ‘consummare’ (cum summa) or to sum up, to carry to completion. (1994, p.
93)
The duality identified here by Falk presents a way for us to understand how taboo manifests in boundary crossing. Specifically, taboo emerges in the direction of boundary crossing in consumption, as demonstrated below (Figure 5.3.1):
WHOLE ⟶ PARTS ⟶ WHOLE (destructive) (constructive)
Figure 5.3.1: The scale of consumption.
In the above figure (5.3.1) we can see how taboo can be broadly characterised as arising from either a destructive or constructive form of consumption. In other words, consumption takes place both through the transformation from a whole body to parts (destructive) and through the transformation from parts of a body to a whole (constructive). Both of these forms of consumption come from a crossing of the boundaries of the body—in the material sense, a membrane (skin) or orifice (mouth, nose, anus, etc.). The boundaries of the body act as both enclosure and permeable border that may “permit congress between inside and outside, whether that is conceived in material or metaphysical terms” (Cohen 2003, p. 63). As Sara Ahmed writes:
Within biomedical discourses, ‘the skin’ is policed as the boundary which
determines the ontological difference between one body and an-other. The
skin becomes a means by which beings are constituted as separate and
distinct. (1998, p. 47)
Internal bodily matter only becomes taboo from crossing this boundary. This can perhaps be best illustrated in the boundary crossing of blood (Figure 5.3.2):
Page 175 of 277 BODY ⟶ BLOOD ⟶ BODY (bleeding) (transfusion/ communion)
Figure 5.3.2: The consumption of blood.
As with consumption, taboo operates in two opposing ways; as Sigmund Freud posits, “On the one hand [taboo] means to us sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean” ([1913] 1998, p. 36). In Figure 5.3.2, blood outside the body constitutes the taboo of uncleanliness (produced through bleeding), while blood intended to be brought within the body is healing—either in the medicalised sense of blood transfusion or in the sacred sense of the consecrated and consumed blood of the Catholic tradition.
The example of blood also demonstrates how the nature of taboo transforms in those forms of consumption deemed to be constructive. Blood outside of the body is associated with disease, violence, death, and sacrifice, yet when transfused back into the body it can be life giving (Carsten
2013, pp. 2-7). The constructive consumption of blood can also be spiritually healing. In the
Christian tradition of Holy Communion, the blood of Christ is either symbolically or (according to the teachings of transubstantiation) literally consumed. Through Communion, divine blood and flesh become “superhuman nourishment,” believed capable of the spiritual healing of sins and even sometimes the literal healing of the body (Camporesi 1989, pp. 221–222). Interestingly for this model, the wine/blood of Communion is first divided and the bread/body is first broken into pieces before being brought within the body (Luke 22:17–22:19, NIV). This ritual of the breaking of bread and sharing of wine symbolises the sacrifice of Christ, which in turn enables the forgiveness
(healing) of sin in humanity.
Page 176 of 277 Other forms of potentially dangerous matter can be similarly capable of healing when internalised. For example, the historical technique of variolation was used to immunise against smallpox, and involved “taking material from lesions of mild cases – vesicular fluid, or scab, or pus
– and inoculating it in a variety of ways – into the nose, or scratching it into the skin” (Fine 2014, p.
687). The transformation of diseased bodily material into a source for healing in this instance requires a suspension (or even abolition) of some cultural taboos; few people would ordinarily welcome the consumption of diseased bodily discharge, but the scientific logic behind such a technique allows for these taboos to be broken. This can also be seen in other historical techniques, such as faecal microbiota transplantation. A version of FMT can be traced back 1700 years to the early Jin dynasty of China, where scholar Ge Hong recommends the consumption of faeces from infants (called “yellow soup”) to help with various medical ailments (Nieuwdorp 2014, p. 887).
Today, FMT is performed by mixing donor faeces in a saline solution and administering through colonoscopic insertion, nasoenteric tube, or retention enema (Andrews and Costello 2014, p. 63). It should be noted here that these medical practices can also worsen health or introduce new problems, hence healing through the crossing of boundaries is always only a possibility, but never a certainty.
We can see in the above examples how the act of internalising through bodily boundary crossing that is socially and scientifically framed as healing (though not without controversy, as the popular disgust at faecal microbiota transplantation and the rise of anti-vaxxing each suggest) highlights the affective doubleness of consumption; the idea of consuming faecal matter— particularly through the orifices of the mouth, nose, or anus—prompts an instinctive disgusted response. Yet the abject nature of such techniques must be understood in the context of their healing nature; healing, it should be remembered, is often unpleasant.
Law professor William Ian Miller meticulously appraises “disgust” as a cultural concept in his book, The Anatomy of Disgust (1997). Miller advocates for a more expansive approach to
Page 177 of 277 disgust than Mary Douglas’s more classificatory explanation of food-prohibition, accounting not only for the many ways that food-related disgust is generated beyond food being considered
“pollution,” but also providing a reason for why disgusting imagery appears in genres of entertainment such as popular film. According to Miller, “[d]isgust allows us to play at violating norms in certain restrictive settings” (p. 117). Drawing on Freud’s writing in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality ([1905] 1920) and feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s work in Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection ([1980] 1982), Miller contends that disgust elicited from horror simultaneously repels and attracts audiences (1997, p. 112). Horror, violence, and gore, when kept at an appropriate distance (i.e. in fiction), hold an allurement that other forms of disgust generally do not (p. 112).
With this understanding in mind, the affective doubleness in Warm Bodies should be understood as both a narrative and technical product—it is produced in the moral contradiction of
R’s actions (R’s antagonistic actions directly lead to his moral amelioration) and in the contraction of affective responses provoked in audiences (the audience should want to look away but also continue watching). When visceral (disgusting) consumption appears in Warm Bodies (e.g. when R consumes Perry’s brains as a way to strengthen his emotional connection with Julie), the affective doubleness of taboo forces viewers to contend with their ambivalent feelings towards R’s actions.
Consumption in Warm Bodies is not only a form of sustenance or pleasure, but also violation and communion. The act of consumption as a step to self-healing illuminates more of the contradictions inherent in immunisation—it is both disgusting and generative, restorative and productive. The human brain, though nutritionally edible, would generally be considered culturally inedible. Even in a more abstract sense of consumption, incorporation of the brain through transplant would, if possible, prompt a multitude of philosophical and moral objections. However, R—as a cultural, political, and anthropological outsider—is able to break the taboo of brain consumption. The film
Page 178 of 277 acknowledges that the killing of a human and consumption of their brains is an act that is disgusting and/or shameful24; before consuming Perry, R comments to the audience, “I’d appreciate it if you might look away for a moment here.” The following shots are intentionally disgusting: the sound design amplifies squelching and crunching noises as R eats, and chunks of brain fall out of his over- stuffed mouth. Yet the audience does not look away at R’s request and their transgression (and ultimate complicity) is rewarded: moments later the scene radically changes to the beautiful, warm- toned montage of Perry’s memories, a direct result of R’s act of consumption. As noted previously, it is these memories that form a crucial part of R’s self-healing—remembering being human allows
R to become more human. The grotesque act of eating brains produces healing through the experience of (beautiful) human memories.
This affective doubleness is also presented in Warm Bodies in the inverse—the visceral interior of the zombie is shown as providing protection for humans. Following Perry’s memory montage, R approaches the woman he now knows to address as “Julie” and smears some of himself onto her face. After a quick sniff, he assures her that she is “safe”—the zombies are less likely to pay attention to someone who looks and smells like them. By bringing parts of the zombie body onto her own skin, Julie is able to pass as a zombie and survive the night unharmed. She has been
(temporarily) immunised against zombie attack.
It is important to note here that responses to destructive forms of consumption can also produce affective doubleness. Returning to the example of bleeding, menstruation can constitute a taboo in both senses of Freud’s binary. On one hand, it is often considered dirty (or even interpreted as evidence of inferiority, particularly within some religious discourses), is frequently accompanied by stigma and physical pain, and is used as a way to police bodies and prescribe gender. On the other hand, it signals for many the entering into womanhood, is a symbol of femininity, and can
24 For further reading on popular representation of the cannibal, and how it redefines the limits of human-ness, see Chapter 4 of Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (Probyn 2000). Page 179 of 277 track health and fertility (albeit, all in ways that are exclusionary towards trans and non-binary folk, people with fertility issues, and people who do not menstruate for a variety of reasons). Blood in
Warm Bodies also occupies an ambivalent position. R’s ability to bleed at the climax of the film is evidence of his returning humanity and is the ultimate proof General Grigio needs to be convinced of the healing of the zombies (hence promoting the healing of society as a whole). However, as R insists, bleeding from a bullet wound still hurts.
The lens of taboo also further illuminates the philosophical complexities of the zombie- human personal identity explored earlier in this case study. Taboo establishes the spatial limits and signals that prescribe acceptable behaviour, and broken taboo threatens an unleashing of danger upon the community (Douglas [1966] 2002, p. xiii). In not only killing Perry, but consuming his body and experiencing his memories, R defiles Perry. This defilement illustrates the broader systemic ideology in which it is contained; defilement of the body in this situation is predicated on a value of the human body as sacred, an understanding of purity as tied to wholeness, and a disgust towards acts of cannibalism. Yet R’s consumption of brain matter complicates notions of purity, wholeness, and disgust by challenging how we may understand “personal identity” in the zombie.
By bringing another body (or part of another body) into himself, and using that body to stimulate emotional responses, (re)produce memory, and personally develop, R’s actions complicate his personal identity—he no longer exists as an individual entirely separate from Perry. The disgust generated in this scene stems not only from the visceral scene of cannibalism, but also through the morally dubious act of experiencing the most intimate moments of another person… and then forming an intimate relationship with that person’s former romantic partner. As noted earlier, the ethics of this act are never adequately addressed (after all, the film wants us to sympathise with R), but the implications are nevertheless troubling.
Page 180 of 277 The film techniques employed in the previously mentioned memory montage scene illustrate the potential of film in offering affective ways of resolving these philosophical complexities. Tight shots of faces and the intimacy of the handheld aesthetic and non-linear narrative highlight the deeply personal nature of Perry’s memories. The sequences are edited to cut quickly between individual memories, often presenting close-up reaction shots of Perry, and POV shots of Julie. The audience is constantly reminded that these memories are not R’s, but stolen from another human being. The sound design further reinforces this; Perry’s memories of Julie are often characterised by soft, alternative folk music, but this non-diegetic sound is played at a similar volume to the dialogue, which has been distorted to echo. Sentences like “I love you” become a part of the general soundscape of the scene. This blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic sound brings the audience closer to R, making them feel complicit in his transgressive experiences. The previously posed question of
“who is the chimaera?” is affectively answered through the paradoxical proximity to and distance from both R and Perry; R is a zombie-becoming-human.
The concept of assemblage once again proves useful as a way of thinking through how these flash-back sequences encourage multilayered audience engagements. R, Perry, and the audience are tied together in complex and inextricable ways that are understood best by exploring these fluid and somewhat tangled connections. The audience is simultaneously reminded of their (and R’s) distance from Perry’s personal experiences, while being made to feel they are a part of the memories. Where
POV shots and enveloping soundscapes invite a closeness with Perry, reverse shots are a constant reminder of the deep human betrayal necessary for R to experience Perry’s most personal moments.
A dualistic understanding of Perry and R cannot adequately express the messiness of Perry and R’s relationship. Instead, R can be more fruitfully understood as traversing the border of “self” (R) to
“other” (Perry) in a way that is both productive and destructive.
Page 181 of 277 Despite this messiness, by centring the narrative of the film on the zombie experience
(rather than the human one) Warm Bodies encourages the audience to ultimately identify with R and sympathise with his desires. While the audience may be troubled by R’s murder and cannibalism of
Perry—and furthermore by the fact that the film never adequately resolves this tension—the charm of Hoult’s performance, the playful indie soundtrack, and the toned-down gore compared to other zombie flicks successfully mobilise audiences to accept R as a rom-com protagonist (see Bernstein
2013; Cooper n.d.; Leitch 2013; Saito 2013; Snider 2013; Thomson 2013). No matter how many interesting philosophical questions Warm Bodies raises, a 98-minute Hollywood romantic comedy intended for mass consumption will almost always end with a protagonist who is morally palatable and approximately human (in spirit if not physiology).
Thus, we must acknowledge the philosophical limits of Warm Bodies (and popular films broadly) as a tool in understanding healing heterogeneity: the affective, generative potential of film is ultimately bound by the need of (most) popular films to resolve conflicts by the finale. This is illustrated with particular bluntness in the divisions drawn between the regular zombies and the boneys. Though the physical and behavioural differences between these two zombies are apparent,
R’s voiceover also makes a crucial moral distinction: “[Boneys] eat anything with a heartbeat. I mean, so will I, but at least I'm conflicted about it.” At the end of Warm Bodies the regular zombies manage to “heal” themselves, yet we are told through a line of narration minutes before the closing credits that the boneys are un-saveable. Despite the many other differences between the boneys and regular zombies, we can infer from R’s journey through the film, and his declared feelings of conflict, that it is the moral difference of the boneys that prevents them from being saved. Of course, this is a perceived moral difference—the regular zombies had previously been considered un-saveable by the humans for similar reasons. In this way, the film does not offer answers to the questions raised in healing heterogeneity, but rather offers productive complications. The affective
Page 182 of 277 journey Warm Bodies takes us on forces us to feel the kinds of debates that biomedical and bioethical discourse might treat in more abstract ways.
What I find most productive about bringing the particular incarnation of the zombie presented in Warm Bodies together with concepts of immunisation and microchimaerism is that both the zombie and the bioscientific chimaera constantly challenge the idea of the body as a homogenous entity that can be added to or subtracted from while still retaining the same label or identity. Films such as Warm Bodies are engaged in the kinds of ethical and ontological work prompted by and needed for these new biologies and their interventions into the body. The philosophical and ontological complexities of bringing the other within cannot be resolved by assuming that the other will transform to become one with the dominant body. Instead, thinking about the body through the framework of healing heterogeneity—where the body is an assemblage of various bodies, identities, and contexts—allows us to consider how boundary crossing
(consumption) can offer destructive and constructive potentials for healing, as well as forcing us to reconsider what these terms might mean.
Page 183 of 277 CHAPTER 6: FOETOMATERNAL MICROCHIMAERISM AND THE ROCKY HORROR
PICTURE SHOW
For this final chapter, I centre my analysis on the most controversial zombie type of this thesis thus far: the “artificial zombie.” This zombie is created through the reanimation of a dead
(usually) human body that is often comprised of multiple dead bodies (TVTropes n.d.). The artificial zombie is largely inspired by the 1931 film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) and is thus often concerned with themes of motherhood, the risks and ethics of scientific advancement, and the materiality of the body. This case study investigates how these themes are enmeshed in the figure of the chimaera through an experimental comparison between the horror- comedy cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the biological phenomenon of
“foetomaternal microchimaerism” (FMc). It argues that the chimaeric body (in both Rocky Horror and FMc) is discursively produced through persistent and self-citing social and scientific narratives, and that the stability and comprehensibility resulting from such production has ambiguous potential social consequences—sometimes working to reinforce normative conceptions of selfhood and at other times opening up new ways of thinking.
This thesis thus far has in many ways focused on a tension between two approaches to understanding the body: the overly rationalistic model produced in the Western canon of medical ethics, and the socially and culturally produced medical knowledges that are informed by a set of
“irrational” affective investments (spiritual or religious associations, cultural taboos, diegetic constructions in fiction, and so on). In earlier chapters, a primary aim was to champion the value of these supposedly irrational concerns—to demonstrate that medical and health ethics have a great deal to gain from taking these concerns seriously. This chapter, conversely, looks at the many ways that scientific narratives already rely on affective investments and fictional tropes to communicate
Page 184 of 277 ideas. It thus investigates the double-edged nature of our affective investments, which may work to secure normative conceptions of selfhood as well as help to dislodge them.
This chapter explores three dimensions of these normative conceptions of selfhood: the construction of agency in intercorporeal engagements; the binary of the self versus the non-self
(divided by a fixed boundary); and the gendering and sexing of identity. These dimensions, and the popular narratives that reinforce them, demonstrate the complicated nature of affective investments
—they can open up important pluralistic ways of understanding the body, but they can also be uncritically reproduced in problematic ways. I explore these dimensions through an investigation of the ways that popular narratives and tropes permeate popular science writing—that is, writing that communicates scientific concepts to non-expert audiences (whether that be by experts in science- focused popular media or by non-experts in broader journalism or even forums and blogs). Popular writing relies on the cultural literacy and emotional investment of audiences, and thus popular science writing frequently cites normative yet highly affective conceptions of selfhood to produce a legible narrative. In doing so, popular science writing suggests to non-expert audiences that these normative conceptions of selfhood are not simply popular and pervasive, but scientifically proven.
While the previous chapter presented an analysis of alternative imaginings of the chimaeric body in general, this chapter focuses specifically on the phenomenon of foetomaternal microchimaerism. Foetomaternal microchimaerism is a form of chimaerism produced through pregnancy, where foetal and maternal DNA persist in mother and/or child long after pregnancy has ended. Together with the chimaera of FMc, I analyse two “produced” chimaeras in The Rocky
Horror Picture Show—the artificial zombie Rocky and the “sweet transvestite” Dr Frank-N-Furter.
These chimaeras—the biological chimaera, Rocky, and Frank—illuminate the ways that the chimaeric body is discursively produced in popular (fictional and scientific) narratives. I elucidate
Page 185 of 277 the political implications of such discursive production by analysing the ways narratives about these chimaeras cite normative ideals, which are themselves shaped by affective engagements.
Of all the case studies presented in this thesis, Rocky and to an even greater extent Frank-N-
Furter are the clear outliers; The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a typical “zombie movie.”
Indeed, as noted in Chapter 1, the debate in fan culture over whether Frankenstein’s creature can be considered a zombie is a long and contentious one—see, for example, Zombie Research Society’s emphatic insistence that “Frankenstein is Not a Zombie” (2012). With all due respect to the ZRS, I ultimately reason that the creature in all of its many iterations in pop culture may lay claim to the title of zombie if at a minimum it can meet the characteristics outlined in Chapter 1:
• The zombie is neither completely alive nor completely dead. It is best characterised as
“undead” or “living dead.” (The creature is comprised of multiple dead bodies yet, in the
immortal words of classic actor Colin Clive’s Dr Frankenstein, “it’s alive!”)
• The zombie was once alive and is usually a human or nonhuman animal. (In most pop
culture adaptations of Frankenstein the creature is built from dead human bodies, but some
variations also include parts of nonhuman animals, aliens, demons, or robots.)
• The zombie may be produced through magic, religious ritual, science/technology, virus,
bacteria, or an undefined cause. (The creature is generally produced through almost-
ritualised scientific experimentation.)
• The zombie’s personality usually differs in some way from the personality of its living
predecessor. (The creature may have some similarities to the previous owners of one or
more of its body parts, but it is always somehow “wrong.”)
• The zombie has a physical presence. (The creature is material—indeed, material
production is a core component of the Frankenstein story.)
Page 186 of 277 Going by the above criteria, I argue that Rocky can neatly fit the category of zombie, allowing
Rocky Horror to stake a claim to the zombie genre. Dr Frank-N-Furter, admittedly, has a harder time fitting the above description and I have no interest in proving him to be a zombie. Rather, I argue that his inclusion in this chapter allows for interesting points of comparison when considering the position of Rocky. Frank-N-Furter is not undead, nor is he constructed from the literal parts of others, but he is performatively, ritualistically, and reflexively produced. I explore these mechanisms of production in detail in Sections 6.2 and 6.3, but it is important to note here that though Frank-N-Furter may not be considered an “artificial zombie,” he is nevertheless a chimaera who can offer a compelling figure of comparison to Rocky.
As a film that is invested in affectionate citational practices as a way of creating meaning,
Rocky Horror presents an interesting final case study for this thesis. Where my previous case studies have focused on zombie representations in a mostly chronological order, tracking the zombie from its Haitian-inspired origins, through the genre changes pioneered by Romero, to modern interpretations such as The Walking Dead (2010–present) and Warm Bodies (2013), Rocky
Horror represents the plasticity of the zombie figure and how versatile the zombie as a critical tool can be. The term “zombie” has become an increasingly expansive label that, if following the logic of its various possible mechanisms of production, may be opened up to include an ever-increasing list of zombie movies without zombies; from the various creatures of Frankenstein-inspired media, to the victims of a mysterious virus in Contagion (2011), to the hypnotised and enslaved black bodies of Get Out (2017), the zombie figure (somewhat ironically) can no longer be contained.
Though few would immediately describe Rocky as a “zombie,” he is undoubtedly an example of the artificial zombie figure. As I explain below, this chapter is also the most experimental of my thesis and it is therefore fitting that I use it to demonstrate some of the ways the zombie can be utilised
Page 187 of 277 beyond its more common manifestations—and moreover, illustrate how a blurring of the boundaries that normally define “the zombie” opens spaces for different critical perspectives on the body.
With this in mind, it is worth taking a moment here to reflect on a particular irony: the juxtaposition of setting the most overtly artificial of zombie figures (the zombie re-animated by science) against arguably the most natural and ubiquitous form of human chimaerism. By placing these ostensibly antithetical chimaeras against one another, I argue that provocative and interesting ideas are illuminated, as these two phenomena complement and complicate each other. First, both speak to a feeling of betrayal: the betrayal of the “mad scientist” against society; the betrayal of the body against itself; the betrayal of new science against classical. Second, both chimaeras offer commentary on the notion of natural versus unnatural forms of biological creation and explore crises of personal identity. Third, there are undeniably maternal elements to these two types of chimaera, and these maternal relationships are complicated by their entanglement with the biosciences.
These points of comparison provide a logical starting point when it comes to considering how cultural literacy provides an affective foundation for FMc narratives. In much of the public science writing on FMc, the biological process of chimaeric production is presented as intentional rather than incidental. FMc does not just happen in the body, but rather, the foetus (or at least its cells) acts as a character with motives that are sometimes nefarious, sometimes benevolent. These motives are generally constructed within one of two rhetorical frameworks. The first is militaristic, where the threatening foreign cells of the foetus invade the sovereign state of the host maternal body. The second is maternalistic, where FMc is the natural cellular expression of mother–child relationships and biological evidence of the truth of the lasting and inalienable connection between mother and child.
Page 188 of 277 The strength of such narratives arises from popularly understood social and biological truths: a mother loves and desires to protect her child; the body, like the state, must protect itself from foreign invasion. These social truths help constitute a cultural literacy that enables audiences to understand the ascribed (positive/negative) purpose and potential of FMc in the body. In order to interrogate the role of such cultural literacy and the narrative choices made by writers on FMc, I explore the ways these “truths” manifest in complex and reflective ways in fictional narratives, and how the assumed cultural competency of audiences of popular culture provides a way of understanding the narrative choices employed by writers on FMc. Additionally, I posit the zombie body as a productive figure for exploring the ontological and phenomenological complexity of the chimaeric body.
This chapter uses Rocky Horror to explore this idea in three ways:
1. The first section of this case study examines the role of agency in FMc narratives and
introduces the two dominant narratives of FMc in detail. I additionally begin to
demonstrate the value of the Frankenstein–Creature relationship in Rocky Horror as a way
of thinking through the functional, structural, and affective power of these narratives.
2. The second section returns to the critique of boundaries begun in Chapter 5, interrogating
the assumption of boundaries upon which militaristic narratives of FMc are predicated.
Using Karen Barad’s (2014) conceptualisation of diffraction and Victor Turner’s ([1969]
2017) notions of communitas and liminality, I consider how the character of Rocky and the
liminal viewing experience of the midnight movie present a way of destabilising these
boundaries.
3. The final section focuses on maternalistic narratives of FMc and explores how these
narratives perpetuate Western cultural assumptions of maternal kinship. I also consider
how the chimaeric body of both FMc and Rocky Horror is gendered and sexed, and use
Page 189 of 277 Judith Butler’s (1993) work on performativity and citationality to unpack how this
gendering and sexing persists in popular (scientific and fictional) narratives.
This chapter also marks an experimental turn in my methodological approach. An underlying question of this thesis thus far as has been broadly, “what can popular culture do?” and more specially, “what can the pop culture figure of the zombie do?” This question remains relevant in this chapter, but here I shift my approach to consider the value of proximity. Rather than directly applying popular culture as a tool for thinking through biomedical ideas, I see what ideas are illuminated through the act of placing science and popular culture next to each other and exploring parallel ideas in each. So: what can the zombie do when it is allowed to resonate on a thematic and conceptual level with ideas in popular scientific narratives? Does the relationality between the biomedical chimaera and the artificial zombie illuminate complexities in each that might be obscured or go unnoticed in a singular analysis of either figure? To answer these questions, I make intentional movements back and forth between a discourse analysis of FMc and a textual analysis of
Rocky Horror, allowing each to develop in their own ways without forcing one to directly comment on the other.
We might imagine this approach as a form of intellectual “companion planting.” In gardening, companion planting involves the planting of two different species of plants in close proximity to one another. Each plant is intended to grow and be fruitful in its own right, but by cultivating these specific plants beside one another they can be beneficial to each other (for example, one plant may repel or trap pests that typically feed upon another plant) (Allaby 2015).
This requires a thoughtful approach to gardening where appropriate companion plants are selected and strategically located to promote a higher yield; thus, the gardener thinks about not only the location of individual species of plants, but how those plants might have a beneficial impact on the growth and yield of each other.
Page 190 of 277 As the metaphorical gardener of this chapter, I have chosen two subjects (FMc and The
Rocky Horror Picture Show) and cultivated my analysis of each in a way I believe produces an overall richer analysis of each subject individually. I see parallel opportunities for critical thought in the two subjects; both subjects offer productive ways of thinking through concepts such as intercorporeal gifting, the spatiotemporal complexities of bodily boundaries, and the sexing and gendering of bodies and relationships. I explore these concepts in each subject separately, making thoughtful moves between my analyses to see what further ideas emerge through their proximity.
This rocking back and forth between ideas is a methodological choice in and of itself. Here I take inspiration from Karen Barad’s “Diffracting Diffraction” (2014), whose rhythmic movements between concepts in quantum physics, Trinh Minh-ha’s ideas about figuring difference differently, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas about identity and borders guide the reader through Barad’s own insightful reflections. The specifics of Barad’s work play a key role in Section 6.2 of this chapter, but this chapter as a whole is also indebted to Barad’s writing style. In not only bringing a curated selection of topics close together and signalling the parallel ideas they engender, but also making purposeful and considered movements between these ideas, I submit this chapter as an experiment in proximity as a catalyst for thought—both in and of itself and also in the particular context of the citationality of popular affective narratives in science communication. I invite the reader to move with me through these rhythms of analysis and reflect on both the broader conceptual ideas explored and how these ideas may be critically (re)turned to analysis of both FMc and Rocky
Horror.
6.1 The Production of Agency in Chimaera Narratives
This first section explores popular representations of intercorporeal exchange (or “gifting”) in the chimaeric body in order to understand how social and fictional narratives reference existing,
Page 191 of 277 highly familiar, ideas about “agency”—whether that be the agency of the foetal cells in the maternal body or the agency of the creature in a Frankenstein story. Through this citational practice, these narratives assign roles to bodies (e.g. the “loving mother,” the “manipulative child”) in order to produce affective responses in audiences, which in turn informs how audiences understand these narratives. Popular science narratives in particular generally construct the chimaeric body as a nation state under foreign threat or imagine a specific (and sometimes internally contradictory) type of emotionally guided mother–child relationship. This section canvasses scientific theories about the biological purpose25 behind foetomaternal microchimaerism and how that purpose is translated into public science writing (and then taken up in broader media). It then proposes alternative ways to imagine the relationship between the maternal and foetal body in FMc through the language of the “gift.” Finally, this section analyses how the trope of the birth of Frankenstein’s monster is represented in Rocky’s birthing scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and considers how this scene evokes similar themes of gifting and agency in the relationship between Rocky and Frank-N-
Furter.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a genre-spanning 1975 film directed by Jim Sharman and adapted from a musical stage production of the same name. The story begins with the strait-laced
Brad and Janet stumbling across a Gothic “Frankenstein” castle while lost one rainy night. The castle is inhabited by Dr Frank-N-Furter who (like his namesake Victor Frankenstein) has successfully reanimated a composite dead body: Rocky. Rocky is a muscular and sexually appealing creature who has sex first with Frank, then Janet, while Frank also engages in sex with Brad and
25 The word “purpose” here presents a dilemma that is worth briefly reflecting on in the context of this chapter. “Purpose” as a term has two major flaws: first, it implies the existence of an intelligent or divine designer who has a “purpose” for FMc in the body—an existence that this thesis has no interest in supporting or denying; second, “purpose” implies a positive impact, or at the very least an intended positive impact—which of course, is a contested theory. Yet alternative words present their own problems. “Consequence” has both a negative connotation and fails to speak to the drive behind the popular narratives of FMc in science writing. “Advantage” and “benefit” pose similar issues, but in the positive. “Intent,” though relevant to the broader narratives investigated in this chapter, is once again a loaded term—same with “goal,” “aim,” “function,” etc. In lieu of a better term I have stuck with “purpose,” yet my discomfort with the word points to the larger issue at the heart of this chapter—we create coherence through descriptive language and that same language in turn shapes how we understand the very ideas we seek to describe. Page 192 of 277 Janet individually (initially in disguise). Various other shocking activities take place throughout the course of the film, including the murder of Eddie (Rocky’s brain donor) by Frank, the (for most of the characters, unwitting) cannibalism of Eddie, a musical orgy, and the eventual murder of Frank by his servant for having a lifestyle that is “too extreme.”
The film is dense with references to horror and science fiction screen media from the 1930s–
1960s. The opening musical number (“Science Fiction/Double Feature”) cites a range of classic science fiction horror films, including Doctor X (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Day the
Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Day of the Triffids (1962), among others. The use of an omniscient narrator is reminiscent of a number of 1950s sci-fi films and television shows, and the plot, visual imagery, costuming, and even real props and set pieces are borrowed from Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and The
Revenge of Frankenstein (1958). This citational practice will be considered in greater detail in
Sections 6.2 and 6.3, but it is important to note here that Rocky Horror brings with it an array of assumptions that rely on the cultural literacy of its audience. Of particular interest to my discussion of cellular agency is the film’s thematic and narrative ties to the story of Frankenstein and its successful mobilisation of various emotionally charged themes: the volatility of new sciences; betrayal by one’s own creation; and the fear of alien interference into the body. These themes are important in understanding both scientific and popular narrativisations of foetomaternal microchimaerism in the human body.
Before I continue, I must briefly address the use of gendered language throughout this chapter. As I explain below, FMc is most readily identified through the testing for the presence of Y chromosomes, which have historically been believed to be sex-determining chromosomes. Research over the last few decades into the testis-determining factor gene has complicated this understanding
(see Berta et al. 1990), and chromosomal genotypes are only one of many sex characteristics
Page 193 of 277 associated with biological sex, which may present in various combinations in intersex humans. I use the adjectives “male” and “female” to connote bodies or cells containing primarily XY or XX chromosomes respectively, and “maternal body” to identify the bodies of individuals who have gestated a foetus. While I have reproduced the language of my sources wherever possible, this language may not necessarily correspond with the gender identities of the research participants.
Similarly, though my sources do not make reference to intersex participants, I use “male” and
“female” only to describe relevant sex characteristics (primarily chromosomes and reproductive anatomy) and do not suggest that these characteristics exist in a binary. Any other gendered language (e.g. “women”) is consistent with the language used by my sources.
A key feminist concern in the study of FMc has been the purpose or agenda behind the representation of the foetomaternal chimaeric body in public science writing and the media more broadly. This agenda is particularly pronounced in public-facing writing, such as online news articles, where writers may rely on emotive narrative devices to communicate a scientific idea. For example, as discussed in the previous chapter, writing on the concept of immunity often metaphorically presents the biological phenomenon of the immune response as a geopolitical war between a vulnerable nation state (the body) and threatening foreign invaders (pathogens). Military metaphors permeated many areas of biomedicine throughout the twentieth century (including organ transplantation and immunology) and this language was readily adopted in microchimaerism discourse. Researchers in the field of microchimaerism have historically used geopolitical terms to describe the movement of foetal cells (“traffic,” “migrate,” “repopulate”) and this vocabulary is consistent with that of broader immunological language where the body is characterised as a nation state (Martin 2010a, p. 24; also see Chapter 5 of this thesis). Here, Martin canvasses the lexicon of such discourses:
Page 194 of 277 In addition to trafficking, it is easy to find examples in printed technical
material of cell ‘migration,’ ‘deployment,’ ‘harbouring’, ‘sequestering,’
‘taking up residence,’ ‘population’ and ‘repopulation’. Less common but
particularly colourful offshoots of this metaphoric network are
‘smuggled,’ […] ‘colonize’ and ‘fetal stowaways.’ (p. 37)
This narrative shorthand has been adopted in FMc discourse as one way of conveying the potential threat of foetal material in the maternal body. Despite the complexity and still-emerging scientific understanding of FMc, many of these metaphorical narratives are highly familiar. Depending on how scientists have theorised the biological purpose of FMc, narratives directed at the general public may present the non-self cells of the chimaeric body as “helping” or “harming” the body.
Here, agency is personified through imaginary figures with helpful or harmful intentions depending on the perceived positive or negative impact of FMc. The desire to answer the “why” of FMc inevitably engenders the narrative construction of cells as autonomous beings with tangible scientific and social implications beyond the strictly scientific or medical.
These narrativisations of FMc have been significantly informed by evolving scientific knowledge regarding how chimaeras are produced. Research since the 1990s has found evidence that foetal cells can remain in maternal bodies until long after the pregnancy has finished (Martin
2010a, p. 24). “Foetomaternal microchimaerism” or “foetal cell trafficking” is the scientific phenomenon of cells existing post-pregnancy in the body that are “genetically and immunologically distinct from the body (mother or child) in which they reside,” having been transferred from maternal to foetal body (or vice versa) during pregnancy (Martin 2010b, p. 31). In a study presented in the early 1990s, women with male foetuses were compared against (control) non-pregnant women who had each given birth to male infants between 6 and 27 years earlier (Martin 2010a, p.
29). The study found that most of the women tested positive for male DNA. Indeed, it is
Page 195 of 277 theoretically possible that almost every pregnancy could result in cases of foetomaternal microchimaerism (Granzen 2014, p. 6).
The researcher of this study—Diana Bianchi—initially had difficulties in publishing her findings, but had eventual success in 1996. In this publication, Bianchi characterised the foetal– maternal relationship as similar to that between donated organ and recipient. According to Aryn
Martin, an expert in the social and historical studies of microchimaerism, this is the first publication in foetal cell sciences that imagines the relationship in such a way (2010a p. 30). By thinking about non-self cells in the chimaeric body as analogous to gifted organs, I argue that a discourse of monstrous heterogeneity, where the body is compromised by non-self DNA, can be reimagined as the body corrected or enhanced, where new biomaterial is introduced to supplement or improve parts of the body. Indeed, later studies found evidence that the non-self DNA of FMc may actually play a role in immunologically supporting the maternal body (Johnson et al. 2002; Nelson 2002).
In this view, the chimaera is not a mistake of nature, but a potentially superior creature that has been deliberately (if unknowingly) produced. This question of creative intent is a key premise of the artificial zombie in fictional media. Parts are not randomly collected to create the monster, but instead carefully selected. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frank-N-Furter’s goal for his monstrous creation is clear. He wants paradise, a beautiful creature—a muscle man. Thus, the artificial zombie is distinct from other zombie types in that it is not born from disease, apocalypse, magic, or failed scientific experimentation. The production of the artificial zombie is intentional and the process through which it is created can be conceptualised as a series of gifts—in the material sense of being gifted parts of bodies from donors and also through being gifted life from its creator.
In Chapter 5, I conceptualised the crossing of boundaries that facilitates the chimaera’s production as a form of consumption, where the self brings parts of the other within in order to facilitate healing. In instances such as these (e.g. vaccination) the purpose is clear: the self
Page 196 of 277 consumes the other, producing heterogeneity in order to spark healing. In this chapter, I instead explore what possibilities emerge if such a material exchange is framed as “gifting.” Gifting in this context does not necessarily denote enthusiasm; though the parts of the body may be gifted to another, the donor (in cases of both the artificial zombie and microchimaerism) generally does not consent to this gifting. The production of chimaerism also does not always yield desirable results.
According to Myra Hird (2007), intercorporeal gifting in maternity is an omnipresent, fluctuating, and largely unknowable process through which both bodies give and receive gifts. Hird writes:
Corporeal generosity stands obstinately outside liberal notions of a closed
economy, and reminds us that, whatever cultural notions of autonomy and
free will to which we might aspire, we are all corporeally interdependent.
The necessary symbiotic relationships and their constant gifting invites
fundamental questions about the individual autonomy of all people
specifically, and living and nonliving matter more generally. That is, we are
not autonomous individuals who subsequently interact: we interact, gifting
things calculable and incalculable, and this ongoing process creates our
individuality, to be recreated with every encounter. (p. 14)
There is a long lineage of thought on which this analysis rests. Hird is here drawing on Diprose’s
(2002) notion of corporeal generosity, which is in turn indebted to, but also departs from, Mauss’s theory of the gift. Where Mauss’s ([1950] 1990) work draws on anthropological research to posit gifting as a way of fostering ongoing reciprocal relationships within and between communities,
Diprose extends a Derridean ([1991] 1992) idea of gifting-as-debt to consider the multitude of continuous, volatile, and necessary giftings that take place between bodies during gestation.
According to Derrida, recognising a gift as a gift transforms it into a commodity (a debt to be repaid):
Page 197 of 277 If [the donee] recognizes [the gift] as gift, if the gift appears to him as such,
if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to
annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the
thing itself, a symbolic equivalent. […] It suffices therefore for the other to
perceive […] its nature of gift, the meaning or intention, the intentional
meaning of the gift, in order for this simple recognition of the gift as gift, as
such, to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude.
The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it. ([1991] 1992, p.
13–14, emphasis in original)
If we accept this premise then only an unrecognised gift maintains its gift-status. Furthermore, according to Hird, because the outcome of the gift cannot be assured, gifting should be considered a volatile or even violent act with unknowable outcomes (2007, p. 5). Hird applies this understanding of the gift to a range of intercorporeal biological processes, including chimaerism induced through pregnancy. According to Hird, “all bodies are engaged in constant gifting, with a variety of consequences, some anticipated and others unknown” (p. 12, emphasis in original). While these exchanges are not given intentionally or freely (though, as noted below, they may be presented that way in public writing on FMc), this does not exclude them from the category of “gifting”; indeed, extending the Derridean model, they are arguably some of the only possible forms of true gifting.
The notion of the gift offers a way of critiquing the language employed in public writing on
FMc—in particular, how such writing reframes biological processes to fit narratives of the body under (geopolitical) threat or the “undeniable” bond between mother and child. The agency of actors in these narratives (the nation state and foreign enemy or the mother and her child) is projected onto scientific hypotheses. The emotional impact of such narratives on readers translates
(theoretical) biological processes into broader universal human “truths” (and uses these truths to
Page 198 of 277 understand or retrospectively explain the science), which in turn transforms the cells of FMc into actors with agency themselves. Take, for instance, the phrase “foetal cell trafficking”; this loaded language carries affective connotations of unauthorised access to the body, smuggling of “illegal” entities, and nefarious motives for transit. This language is a direct reflection of our understanding of the relationship between the body (self) and foreign cells, and is highly political; prominent narratives about microchimaerism are generally militaristic or maternalistic in nature. Questioning this language in relation to an understanding of agency can help illuminate some of the cultural and scientific assumptions that underpin FMc research.
The understanding of gifting and agency established above is useful in exploring the role of foreign cells in foetomaternal microchimaerism. In the years following Bianchi’s publication on the ubiquity of XY chromosomes in mothers, researchers began to discover heightened levels of foetal cells in the bodies of people with autoimmune diseases (Martin 2010a, pp. 32–33). This appeared to show that the maternal body was indeed (as immunologists expected) rejecting the cells of the now- absent foetus. This discovery supports the militaristic narrative of invading foreign cells threatening the whole, homogeneous body; under this model, the foreign cells in the chimaeric body are considered dangerous.
However, Bianchi and her team later made a discovery that challenged the assumption that
FMc is an inherent threat to the maternal body. When maternal bodies with autoimmune diseases were compared to maternal bodies with other diseases (specifically hepatitis C), Bianchi’s team discovered that foetal cells appeared in similar amounts in both bodies (Johnson et al. 2002; Martin
2010a, p. 43). This led them to hypothesise that rather than causing diseases in these bodies, the cells were instead helping the body repair (more recent studies have also supported a similar hypothesis, including Kamper-Jørgensen et al. 2014; Kara et al. 2012; Santos et al. 2008). An understanding of foreign cells as potentially helpful problematises the assumptions embedded in the
Page 199 of 277 military self versus non-self rhetoric of prominent discourses of cellular chimaerism, and instead proposes an alternative imagining of the chimaeric body as a network of potentially benevolent alliances. This entails a corresponding shift in the understanding of how cells can be introduced into bodies that accounts for the competing theories of their benevolent/malevolent role. Where previously, the non-self cells “invaded” the body, the foetal cells of microchimaerism can instead be construed as “immigrant” cells (Martin 2010a, p. 25). Bianchi’s hypothesis of non-self cells trying to help the body lends itself to an entirely new lexicon when constructing metaphors for foetal cells in microchimaerism, such as “productive immigrants, naturalised […] to their new home,” or, as
Martin suggests, “less like insurgents, and more like ‘Doctors Without Borders’” (p. 43).
Here, Martin claims, the understanding of cellular “action and intent” is significant in how researchers consciously or unconsciously approach their research objects (2010a, pp. 25). If we understand the assimilation of foreign cells as a process of naturalisation, rather than invasion, pregnancy can be understood better as a maternal–foetal relationship that reimagines the borders of the (nation state) body as permeable and changeable. Thus we may consider the vocabulary of
“gifting” to be a useful alternative to “invading.” This shift accounts for the healing potential of cellular transition between bodies.
Though I argue that biological gifting in the above cases offers ways to move beyond the idea of the gift invoking contractual reciprocity, this does not mean that an understanding of reciprocity is unhelpful. Instead, to move beyond the anthropological model of social contracts of reciprocity we can instead think of Hird’s understanding of corporeal interdependence as a biological contract of reciprocity. Though the effects are still uncertain, it can no longer be doubted that the sustained reciprocal exchange of biomaterial between bodies, particularly between maternal and foetal bodies, is a natural and expected phenomenon. However, perhaps because of these unknown impacts, this reciprocity is still frequently understood within the framework of a non-
Page 200 of 277 consensual exchange. When this framework of non-consensual exchange is combined in public writing with narratives of actors with agency (e.g. a child “manipulating” its mother), the emotional impact on audiences can be much more significant and misleading.
What is interesting in the case of foetomaternal microchimaerism (as opposed to other forms of chimaerism) is that this process of non-consensual reciprocal gifting comes as a by-product of an often-intended form of gift-giving: the gift of life. In this example, a (frequently) planned form of gifting prompts the ongoing reciprocal gifting of biomaterial between maternal body and foetus.
This is not entirely unique to foetomaternal microchimaerism—see, for instance, the example of hematopoietic progenitor transplantation described in Chapter 5—but the relationship between the two bodies in FMc arguably makes this unintended consequence more impactful. The volatile act of gifting in FMc and the still-uncertain role of the non-self cells is often expressed in emotionally engaging ways in news media (irrespective of the positive/negative interpretation). Consider the following headlines:
• “Baby’s Cells Can Manipulate Mom’s Body for Decades” (Callier 2015, emphasis added)
• “Your Baby’s Leftover DNA Is Making You Stronger” (Hua 2014, emphasis added)
• “It’s Science: Your Baby Will Always Be a Part of You” (Marcoux 2017, emphasis added)
Here, the idea of reciprocity is informed by an understanding of familial relationships: mother gives baby life and baby gifts back “something” in return (wanted or not). This idea of the unexpected gift is important here. Indeed, some articles explicitly invoke sci-fi/horror tropes in their reporting of
FMc, such as in a science news story from Arizona State University describing “dramatic research” with the headline: “The Alien Within: Fetal Cells Influence Maternal Health During Pregnancy (and
Long After)” (2015). This particular story opened: “Parents go to great lengths to ensure the health and well-being of their developing offspring. The favor, however, may not always be
Page 201 of 277 returned” (Ibid., emphasis added). Thus, the narrative is established: in an attempt to produce human life, benevolent parents are unknowingly harmed by their creations.
The classic sci-fi horror trope to recall here is that of Frankenstein’s monster. The story of
Frankenstein is centred on the ethical relationship between the creator of life and the object of that life—the monster (Stephens 2018, p. 120). The monster ultimately subverts the creator’s expectations and intentions in all renditions of the story, and it is that question of “intent” that plays a central role in FMc narratives. As noted earlier, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a particularly relevant example of this trope when it comes to thinking through these narratives. The concepts of gifting and intent are bound by a practice of reciprocity in the example of Rocky—the creature is manufactured, given the ultimate gift of life, but that gift must be repaid. The multifaceted and contradictory roles of Rocky in the narrative are especially well-suited to drawing out the complexities of understanding of FMc.
Even though the birthing scene in Rocky Horror takes sci-fi horror visual elements from more traditional Frankenstein screen media—with flashing lights, valves releasing steam, and
Rocky’s tank mirroring that from Hammer Horror’s Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)—the set design also incorporates more strictly medical imagery than many Frankenstein renditions. Frank-
N-Furter’s guests look on from a raised platform reminiscent of a surgical amphitheatre, and Frank himself dons a surgical gown instead of a lab coat. This reinforces the feeling that this is indeed a medical event (a birth), rather than a purely scientific creation.
When Rocky is born, his initial interactions with the world are childlike. He observes his birthing room with wonder and terror, running with abandon among the observing guests. When
Frank finally catches his creature, he scolds Rocky (“Well really, that’s no way to behave on your first day out!”), causing Rocky to hunch over in distress. After Frank forgives Rocky, Rocky slaps his hands against his tank in glee and bounces happily. Rocky speaks very little throughout the film,
Page 202 of 277 dances with excitement when presented with new toys (exercise equipment), and hides crying after being chased by dogs.
Of course, Rocky is not intended to function only as a child to Frank-N-Furter, nor is he exclusively a display of hubris from a creator with a God-complex. Rocky is intended for sexual gratification, as exemplified in the “I Can Make You a Man” reprise:
A deltoid and a bicep
A hot groin and a tricep
Makes me shake
Makes me wanna take Charles Atlas by the hand.
Frank has sex with Rocky, acts out marrying him, and is jealous of his attention to others. More than any other character, Rocky is presented as a sexual object, with the camera constantly lingering on his muscles (sometimes as Frank runs his hands over them). Even Rocky’s casting emphasises this objectifying role, as we never actually hear actor Peter Hinwood’s voice—Hinwood was cast primarily for his muscular body type and consequently had his lines dubbed by a more talented singer (Michaels and Evans 2002, p. 259).
In sum, the artificial chimaera is a purposeful creation, but the consequences of such creation are volatile. This volatility is expressed through continuous, reciprocated, and often unknowable giftings between two bodies. In the specific example of foetomaternal microchimaerism, these two bodies play the role of mother and (usually masculine) child. The story of Bianchi’s work on FMc outlined above (and the ongoing work of researchers and science writers in the area) has interesting implications when considering the healing potential of the heterogeneous body; not only did Bianchi’s work face initial resistance from the scientific community, but theories of cellular intent in FMc continue to be revised. Are these foreign cells helpful or harmful? Should we consider the cells invaders or benevolent migrants? These shifting hypotheses are informed by
Page 203 of 277 the longstanding assumptions of homogeneity and purity explored in the previous chapter and, as noted by scholars such as Martin (2010a), these assumptions impact upon research. In the following sections I propose ways to think through these questions and present Rocky Horror as a text capable of critiquing dominant narratives that are present in both scientific and popular FMc writing.
6.2 Diffracting the Boundaries of Self and Non-Self
I turn now from the affective investments in agency and gifting explored in the previous section to interrogate the assumption of distinct geopolitical boundaries (e.g. nation state borders) between self and non-self that underpin militaristic narratives of foetomaternal microchimaerism.
Drawing on the work of Karan Barad (2014) and Victor Turner ([1969] 2017), I propose that Rocky
Horror and the ritual of the midnight movie present opportunities for “diffracting” such boundaries through the production of liminal space (both inter- and extra-textual). I furthermore explore the paradox of this liminality and how this paradox can be understood within the context of FMc.
This chapter uses the metaphor of “diffraction,” as proposed by Barad (2014), to address the limitations of a same/different binary when thinking about the body (where the body is composed by parts that are either the “same” as the body or “different”). In “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting
Together-Apart,” Barad brings together the notion of diffraction (in light) as observed in experiments by seventeenth-century physicist Francesco Grimaldi, and the depiction of boundaries in Chicana queer theorist, poet, and activist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work Borderlands (1987) (Barad
2014, pp. 170–174). Despite their significantly different disciplinary fields and times of writing, both Grimaldi and Anzaldúa offer complementary ways of thinking about “difference” that present a challenge to the normative constructions of self versus other that inform militaristic understandings of the body. In “Diffracting Diffraction,” Barad notes that a binary of self versus other “has been instrumental to the workings of power”; the “colonising logic” of binary difference
Page 204 of 277 can be disrupted by positioning difference as not “in opposition to sameness” (2014, p. 170). As
Barad (continuing the work of Trinh Minh-ha [1988]) writes:
The self in positioning itself against the other, constituting the other as
negativity, lack, foreignness, sets up an impenetrable barrier between self
and other in an attempt to establish and maintain its hegemony. The self (‘I’)
only ever sees itself, and not the other. The other, the ‘non-I’, is consigned
to the shadow region, the space behind the mirror. According to this
geometrical optics, the other is constituted as the Other. Difference as
apartheid. (Barad 2014, p. 170.)
Trihn and Barad identify a popular binary of self and other that may be otherwise understood as “I” and “non-I” or “same” and “in opposition to sameness.” Trinh, according to Barad, calls for a disruption of this binary. In addressing this calling, Barad poses the question: “How might difference be figured differently?” (Ibid.).
This question is fundamental to understanding the chimaeric body (be it the fictional zombie figure of Frankenstein stories or the maternal and foetal bodies of FMc). The various parts of the chimaeric body are simultaneously different from and part of the whole. Because of this, I contend that it is unhelpful (and arguably impossible) to seek to establish a clean boundary within the body that identifies the originary self body and invading/immigrating other body. The chimaeric body is produced and it reproduces; it is one and it is multiple. It is these contradictions that make the chimaera an interesting and productive object of critical inquiry.
Here we can see an opportunity for different discourses that imagine boundary crossing as a new and productive form of heterogeneity. First, let’s consider the concept of diffraction. In
Grimaldi’s experiments, a thin stream of light was projected into a darkened room and its path was obscured by a rod, causing the light to cast a shadow bordered by colour (Barad 2014, p. 170).
Page 205 of 277 Furthermore, this colour could be made to appear inside the boundaries of the shadow by replacing the rod with a rectangular blade (Ibid.). This experiment complicated scientific understandings of light and darkness in classical physics and was described by Grimaldi as “diffraction” (p. 171).
Diffraction reveals that a darkness/light binary, where darkness is understood as the absence of light, is insufficient. As Barad explains:
[D]arkness is not a lack. Darkness can be produced by ‘adding new light’ to
existing light – ‘to that which it has already received’. Darkness is not mere
absence, but rather an abundance. Indeed, darkness is not light’s expelled
other, for it haunts its own interior. Diffraction queers binaries and calls out
for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference. (Barad 2014, p.
171)
Linking this diffracted binary to Anzaldúa’s work, Barad argues that a colonial understanding of a darkness/light binary is similarly inadequate to that in classical physics. Anzaldúa problematises an understanding of darkness as absence of light through a cultural and feminist lens, bringing notions of darkness back to “the mystery of the Origin” where darkness predates life (Anzaldúa [1987]
1999, p. 71). She writes:
I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another
culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it […] I am
an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a
creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions
the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (p. 103)
Anzaldúa, according to Barad, “pokes a hole in the colonizer’s story of how darkness is the other of light” (Barad 2014, p. 171). The segregating and colonising logic of the West maintains the “self” through acts of dominance and/or eradication of the other, through establishing solid and
Page 206 of 277 impermeable borders (p. 169). Barad (through the works of Anzaldúa and Grimaldi) compromises these borders and complicates the coloniser language of segregation and domination.
Anzaldúa’s (and Barad’s) writing addresses the significance of existing within the borderlands, a metaphor in which physical space and identity come together. These various states are entangled in the borderlands so that “the material multiplicity of self […] is diffracted across spaces, times, realities, imaginaries” (Barad 2014, p. 175). Crucially, however, Barad notes
(continuing Anzaldúa and Trinh’s work): “Entanglements are not unities. They do not erase differences; on the contrary, entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings” (p. 176). Thus, diffraction is a concept capable of holding the contradiction of multiple bodies within one body while maintaining the co-existing difference and sameness of that body.
In applying this concept of diffraction to the chimaeric body, I argue that the body should not be considered as a once-whole originary self (nation state) that has been compromised or even strengthened by the incorporation of the foreign other; rather, it is better to see the chimaeric body as a body diffracted. Just as difference is not “in opposition to sameness,” multiplicity is not in opposition to singularity. The temporality of chimaeric production in the body must be rethought: the chimaeric body is not only different from the singular body it once was; the chimaeric body is both different and the same.
I find the metaphor of diffraction particularly attractive when paired with a text like Rocky
Horror. The film resists a binary of self/non-self on multiple levels. Rocky, as our Frankensteinian creature, is a composite of bodies in the material sense; like the chimaera of FMc, his body is comprised of multiple sets of DNA. Rocky’s relationship with his partial brain donor, Eddie, is sustained and messy. Despite sharing a single brain, the two are able to socially interact as individual people and their interactions are perceived by Frank as a romantic or sexual threat. Later,
Rocky is tricked into eating Eddie, further entangling the two bodies in ways that can be described
Page 207 of 277 as diffracting the boundary between self and non-self. Eddie is not Rocky, but he is also not not-
Rocky. The metaphor of diffraction provides a way of articulating the tangled relationships of the chimaeric body in a literal sense; however, Rocky Horror also rests upon a culturally rich history of science fiction media that promotes an affective understanding of the chimaeric body.
The body of Rocky is made legible through an extensive cultural understanding of science fiction tropes, camp sexualities, and gender performativities. The film itself is something of a
Frankensteinian creation: sitting in the genres of science fiction, horror, comedy, gothic romance, cabaret, and Elvis Presley movies (all of which it cites through the aesthetic choices of costuming, set design, and music), it lovingly parodies the horror and sci-fi B movies of the mid century while embracing the queer potential of schlock, glam, and punk rock aesthetics. Rocky Horror is indebted to this history of cinema and television and, as noted previously, makes extensive references to specific stories, directors, production companies, and characters. This citational practice highlights the value of Rocky Horror as a conceptual tool on two levels: within the specificity of the film itself and as a film that belongs to a broader tradition of screen culture. Where the narratives of FMc told in scientific and public literature assume a particular level of scientific and cultural competence in audiences, so too do genre films and fiction, especially Rocky Horror. However, while the narratives of FMc ultimately uphold the Western cultural assumptions they cite, Rocky Horror frequently subverts audience expectations to create a fantastical and camp assemblage of classic sci- fi/horror/gothic romance and queer sexual desire. In this way, Rocky Horror can capitalise on the affective experience of watching a text rich with cultural reference points in order to present a complex, messy chimaeric body that is unconstrained by hegemonic narratives of the body.
The embodied practice of viewing is another important element when considering the affective potential of Rocky Horror as a film. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is famous for its public and community-focused screening practices. Rocky Horror cemented the midnight movie
Page 208 of 277 (the practice of viewing low-budget films, particularly in the U.S., in late-night screenings with ironic hosts and audience participation) as a camp tradition of cult film consumption (Austin 1981;
Kinkade and Katovich 1992). Indeed, Rocky Horror is arguably a film designed for this kind of consumption; its adaptation from the stage, kitsch narration, and overarching themes of performativity invite the kind of active engagement that cannot be achieved as richly by simply sitting and watching in a traditional cinema or home viewing environment. The ongoing ritual of actors performing the show with lip-sync, with the film as a backdrop, while acknowledging the audience’s presence, appropriately reflects the metanarrative of the film: “Don’t dream it, be it.”
Rocky Horror is a film that constantly reproduces itself and it is beloved for its reproductive potential. To quote Liz Locke, “Rocky Horror performances are characterized by individual and collective transformation and embodiment and are marked by a high degree of reflexivity on all levels, from the content of the film to the weekly creation of the participatory theater event” (2008, pp. 142–143). It is impossible to disentangle the cultural legacy of the film itself from this tradition of comradeship and public spectacle.
There is a highly ritualistic element to the embodied experience of viewing Rocky Horror as a midnight movie; the ritual is prescriptive (with audience and cast having specific roles and lines) and passionate, an experience that Locke likens to the concept of “communitas” as theorised by anthropologist Victor Turner (Locke 2008). This notion of communitas provides a useful way of understanding Rocky Horror as a midnight movie but also, as I explain below, provides a coherent way of understanding the temporal and spatial dimensions of the chimaeric body of FMc as a body diffracted.
Here I must make a distinction between Turner’s concept of communitas and the idea of communitas in the previous chapter as conceptualised by Roberto Esposito ([2004] 2008). Where
Esposito used communitas to articulate systems of reciprocity and obligation, Turner is interested in
Page 209 of 277 the ritualism and sacredness of community that is born from “the collective spatial and temporal dimension occupied by liminal personae” (Locke 2008, p. 143). According to Turner, this sacredness “is acquired by the incumbents of positions during the rites de passage, through which they changed positions” (Turner [1969] 2017, p. 97). Turner identifies communitas as existing in a
“communitas/structure” binary opposition (p. 106); put another way, “communitas emerges where social structure is not” (p. 126). Communitas articulates a kind of togetherness that can emerge in moments of liminality, where social structure is (temporarily) unapparent. It is born from a great equalising ritual, where social hierarchy is flattened while the liminal space is occupied.
In applying this concept to the Rocky Horror midnight movie experience, Locke writes:
Rocky Horror’s sacred dimension is diffuse insofar as it has the potential to
arise wherever and whenever the film is viewed, yet it is also highly
structured and contained insofar as viewing of the film and the audience
participation that accompanies it is bounded by time and space. The
existential communitas that arises in the carnival atmosphere of the theater
will be maintained on the street at a lower pitch by certain audience
members who will gather outside to talk or go out for breakfast after the
show, but these groups are small, however central they have become in the
ongoing performativity of liminality-as-identity within the Rocky Horror
context. (Locke 2008, p. 144)
Here, Locke identifies the contradictions contained within the concepts of communitas and liminality; the sacred dimension of Rocky Horror produces a subculture that is coherent in the context of the midnight movie viewing experience, yet is incoherent to outsiders. This containment is necessary for the production of subculture, even as liminality demands a dissolving (diffracting)
Page 210 of 277 of social structure. Here the paradox becomes apparent: “liminality-as-identity” cannot maintain itself if allowed to spread indiscriminately. We must conserve boundaries in order to sit at them.
Though Turner’s work has been criticised in an anthropological context (Bynum 1990; Eade and Sallnow 1991), it provides a useful way of conceptualising boundaries and how these boundaries are paradoxically dissolved and reinforced in the chimaeric body. Barad’s notion of diffraction articulates the liminal space/time in the chimaeric body where multiplicity and singularity co-exist. Communitas and liminality acknowledge this paradox in the context of social structure; as Turner writes, “Liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low” ([1969] 2017, p. 97). Taking this metaphor to the spatial/temporal place of diffraction in the chimaeric body, we see that the chimaera cannot exist without an understanding of the singular, whole body as the norm; even as
FMc challenges hegemonic discourse (the nation state body must protect itself against the foreign), an understanding of this discourse is necessary in order to present alternative models. Thus, just as communitas and liminality require and reproduce the legibility of social structure in order to exist, so too does the chimaeric body uphold the norm of the homogenous body; the chimaeric body of
FMc, and the queer and constructed bodies of Frank and Rocky, are made legible against the backdrop of a bodily norm. As this bodily norm changes over time, so too does our relationship to the chimaeric bodies of FMc and Rocky Horror. As time slowly progresses, the chimaera will gain familiarity and thus legibility. This makes the chimaera a more expected member of the social world, though not always a more accepted or normalised one—particularly if the bodily norm against which the chimaera is understood continues to maintain its powerful place in the social hierarchy.
Page 211 of 277 Perhaps then, in this context, diffraction presents an alternative way of conceptualising
Falk’s consuming body (1994). Returning to the discussion of affective boundary crossing in the previous chapter, consumption is, according to Falk:
matter dissolving into energy and maintaining or producing more complex
and ordered forms of matter, or an endless chain of transformations – of
destruction and construction – which is based on the same universal
principle even if the historical and cultural forms change. (p. 93)
The process of transformation noted by Falk is a state of liminality where communitas emerges. If liminality is the spatial/temporal state of transformation, diffraction describes the act of transforming (dissolving, destructing, constructing). Where consumption is an “endless chain” of bidirectional transformations, diffraction may be better capable of accounting for the temporal and spatial contradictions explored in this chapter. Instead of a chain, where the body constantly changes through the processes of destructive and constructive consumption:
WHOLE ⟶ PARTS ⟶ WHOLE (destructive) (constructive)
Figure 6.2.1: The scale of consumption. we have a loop:
WHOLE ⇆ PARTS (body) (cells) (structure) (structure) (liminality/diffraction) (chimaera) (communitas)
Figure 6.2.2: The scale of diffraction.
Page 212 of 277 where the chimaeric body is simultaneously whole and parts but emerges most clearly in the liminal space/time between. In this way, the chimaeric body (re)produces itself through the practice of citation, and with each loop becomes more legible as a chimaera. In the context of FMc, the more ubiquitous the chimaera appears to be, the more comprehensible the distinction between “normal” body and chimaera becomes. Similarly, the subculture produced through Rocky Horror remains coherent through its paradoxical dissolution and maintenance of social structure. Though social change may take place over time, the act of citing a social norm as a backdrop against which subculture is produced ironically resists that broader change. Thus, the practice of citation (where the liminal cites the norm) preserves the liminal identity of the chimaera. This understanding of liminality-as-identity—that it reinforces the very boundaries it seeks to reject—also underpins the fragile stabilities of sex and gender in the chimaera. I investigate how seemingly disruptive discoveries in FMc are leveraged to instead uphold normative constructions of sex and gender in the following section.
6.3 The Gendered and Sexed Identities of the Chimaera
This final section explores the gendered and sexed dimensions of the chimaera produced through foetomaternal microchimaerism. As explored in previous sections, the ways scientific research into FMc is reported to public audiences relies on emotional responses: for example, do readers feel comforted by their ongoing cellular relationship with their baby or horrified by the
“alien within”? The first part of this section explores how the narrativisation of FMc by journalists, bloggers, and scientists upholds Western cultural assumptions of maternal kinship. Furthermore, it looks at how science writing on FMc somewhat counterintuitively reinforces a binary model of sex and how Judith Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter (1993) offers a framework for us to critique this conservation of the binary. The second part takes this framing and applies it to The Rocky
Page 213 of 277 Horror Picture Show to explore how citationality is employed in order to present a subverted, queered version of the Frankenstein story. Through this subversion, a more complex and imaginative picture of gender and sex performativity in the chimaeric body emerges.
As discussed in Section 6.1, narrativisations of the maternal–foetal relationship of FMc in news media frequently evoke emotional and highly gendered explorations of that relationship. This can be seen in the language (produced by both scientists and journalists) used to hypothesise the phenomenon of FMc. For example:
• “perhaps the cells could hijack and increase levels of maternal hormones for important
post-birth processes including lactation […] It’s clear that there’s a special bond between
mother and child, and it’s powerful — but how powerful?” (Saplakoglu 2018)
• “If a child can somehow coax its mother to provide more resources […] he or she may be
more likely to survive to adulthood and reproduce. Fetal cells may let children manipulate
their mothers to this end.” (Zimmer 2015)
• “Evidence is building that those fetal cells aren’t just lounging around in Mom; in fact,
they might be active participants in a mother’s health.” (Shute 2010)
Terms such as “hijack,” “special,” “coax,” “manipulate,” “lounging around,” and “active” provoke clear emotional resonances in readers that build on pre-existing Western cultural assumptions of familial kinship between mothers and their children; in the above examples, the figure of the lazy or entitled child is either confirmed or destabilised, and the notion of an unquestionable and unending bond between mother and child is ultimately upheld.
FMc has even found a place on some Catholic news sites, where it has been proposed as evidence for the Assumption of Mary (the belief that the body of Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, was assumed into heaven along with her soul) (Scalia 2016; 2018; Schiffer 2019). This theory posits that
Page 214 of 277 if the divine DNA of Jesus remained in his mother, then it logically follows that her body could not remain on Earth:
we understand that [Jesus] wanted to honor his mother, and that the sinless
one was preserved from sin, and also from decay. Microchimerism gives us
yet another way to understand Mary’s Assumption: As Jesus ascended into
heaven, it seems fitting that his unique DNA should not remain on the earth
to undergo decay. (Schiffer 2016)
Though the primary message here diverges from that of maternal kinship, the underlying narrative remains the same. Indeed, the author writes: “Even years after the child has been born and has grown to adulthood, a mother retains some of her child’s cells in her heart, in her brain, in her blood. […] So can a mother forget her child?” (Ibid.). Thus, the narrative of a natural and persistent mother–child relationship existing across humanity is once again reproduced.
Whether these articles suggest that FMc is evidence of love for a child, manipulation by a child, or a combination of the two, these narratives ultimately cite a (Western) cultural assumption of a particular type of relationship existing between mother and child, and project this relationship onto maternal body and foetus. On the subject of journalistic reporting on FMc, Aryn Martin
(2010b) writes:
Depending on whether the article is reporting about evidence in support of
the good cell theory or the bad cell theory, the character of the bond may
shift from care to meddling, but commentators seem to agree there is a
bond, and this cell exchange is relevant to it. Good cells are judged to be
doing caring labour; they are both inside and looking after the other person
in the mother/child pair. […] On the flip side, when cells are thought to be
Page 215 of 277 causing diseases, mothers’ cells are characterized as meddlesome, and the
children’s as needy. (p. 36)
According to Martin, the science of FMc frequently provides a biological justification for apparently universal human emotions. In one article investigated by Martin, FMc provided an answer to “why a mother would need to grieve an abortion”—according to the author, the remaining foetal cells in the maternal body provide a persistent link between mother and
“child” (foetus) that explains why women (apparently) never forget their “lost children” after miscarriage or abortion (p. 39). Here we can see how “matter comes to matter” in an ideological sense (Ibid.). Whether it is used to uphold or critique dominant narratives, the science of FMc can be mobilised in powerful ways.26
Yet even as these narratives engage with scientific research to bolster hegemonic notions of a gendered familial relationship, other aspects of FMc complicate this relationship. If, for example, foetal cells do in fact have the potential to help the maternal body restore itself, then a linear, unidirectional understanding of mother–child relationships is subverted. In dominant Western discourses, mother–child relationships are represented as a mother providing life and nourishment to a child, who eventually gains independence and distinctly separates from the mother.27 Yet discoveries in FMc show that it is entirely possible that the foetal body reciprocates the biological
26 A particularly egregious example of this can be seen in one South Indian newspaper, who warned of “the true consequences of sexual intercourse” (Deccan Chronicle 2017). The article (incorrectly) claimed that a study had found that women retain the DNA of every man with whom they have had a sexual relationship. This claim was cited in various other online sites and became a controversial topic of discussion on forums criticising perceived female promiscuity. The study actually found: The most likely source of male Mc in female brain is acquisition of fetal Mc from pregnancy with a male fetus. In women without sons, male DNA can also be acquired from an abortion or a miscarriage. The pregnancy history was unknown for all but a few subjects in the current studies, thus male Mc in [the] female brain could not be evaluated according to specific prior pregnancy history. In addition to prior pregnancies, male Mc could be acquired by a female from a recognized or vanished male twin, an older male sibling, or through non-irradiated blood transfusion. (Chan et al. 2012, p. 4)
27 Though non-Western customs of aged care—where children are culturally (and sometimes legally, as with China’s Law on Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly; see Lee 2015) expected to provide care for older generations—are often held up as a superior model of intergenerational guardianship, this model is not normalised in Western cultures. Even under such a model, sustained reciprocal care from birth (as seen in FMc) would be considered unusual. Page 216 of 277 nourishment and protection provided by the maternal cells, and does not make a clean and distinct separation from the maternal body.
Rather than romanticising the hetero- and gender-normative discourses of mother–child relationships, here we can see the gestation of the foetus/child as a messy, affective entanglement of bodies through which reciprocal nourishment and care are performed, albeit asymmetrically. The familial relationship between mother and child is diffracted on both a spatial and temporal level.
Spatially, mother and child cannot exist as two entirely separate entities, nor can either mother or child neatly and uniformly incorporate the other into itself: “entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings” (Barad 2014, p. 176). Temporally, the “natural” order of care between mother and child is folded in on itself in that the linear narrative of the mother–child relationship explicated above (i.e. the mother provides unrequited nourishment/care to a child until a time in which it is no longer required) is similarly inaccurate.
There is a risk here of substituting one form of romanticisation (the normative conceptualisation of maternal kinship in the popular imaginary) for another form (the privileging of
“messiness” that has historically preoccupied various corners of cultural studies). This is not my intention; there is, however, a value to exploring what different narratives enable or legitimate, and how different bodies of knowledge might inform our understanding of that value. In their article,
“Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Viney, Callard, and Woods argue that medical humanities is inherently messy, and that messiness holds its own potentialities:
As a heterogeneous and interdisciplinary set of practices […] the medical
humanities stands to gain more from working through and indeed embracing
the messy flexibility and inclusiveness gained from having no necessary or
predetermined [disciplinary] trajectory—particularly if it is to foster
innovative research questions, be ready to revisit its norms and procedures
Page 217 of 277 of operation, as well as act as a counterweight to prevailing orthodoxies—
than by assigning to itself a mantle by which to act. (2015, p. 4)
Shildrick et al. agree with this perspective, arguing that “[m]essy research can generate endless new questions” (2017, p. 4). In the spirit of this view, my proclivity for viewing the body as a messy, affective, and heterogeneous entanglement is not to suggest this perspective is a truer or more intellectually rich perspective, but rather that its capacity for opening different (but not necessarily superior) critical perspectives is both exciting and productive.
While thus far I have focused on how the chimaeric body is gendered in maternalistic FMc narratives, I have seen less attention paid to how the chimaeric body is sexed through understandings of FMc. Narratives of FMc presuppose a body that is naturally and persistently sexed; the destabilisation of the boundaries of the sexed body that are illuminated through the discovery of FMc reinforce these boundaries as the norm. To return to the paradox of liminality in the previous section, we must conserve boundaries in order to sit at them.
Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter (1993) provides a useful framework for understanding the discursive nature of the material markers and boundaries that persistently define sex. Butler builds on Foucault’s understanding of power and the role of power in the materialisation of the body. Drawing from Discipline and Punish (Foucault [1975] 1977), Butler writes:
the prison is materialized to the extent that it is invested with power; or, to
be grammatically accurate, there is no prison prior to its materialization. Its
materialization is coextensive with its investiture with power relations, and
materiality is the effect and gauge of this investment. […] ‘Materiality’
designates a certain effect of power or, rather, is power in its formative or
constituting effects. Insofar as power operates successfully by constituting
an object domain, a field of intelligibility, as a taken-for-granted ontology,
Page 218 of 277 its material effects are taken as material data or primary givens. (1993, p.
34, emphasis in original)
Butler continues that though these material effects may appear to transcend the operating power structures, this very appearance is what makes power so powerful; framing material data as an empirical certainty hides the power structures at work in that framing (p. 35).
This understanding of institutional power allows for a fruitful understanding of the framing of FMc and how this framing can so easily translate to gendered narratives of familial relationships.
Constructions of FMc presuppose a natural, whole, sexed body that may be altered (compromised; enhanced) by biological boundary crossing. This interpretation of the sexed body as altered by FMc is born from a historical understanding of bodies as existing on a binary of testable sex characteristics:
• Sex chromosomes (XY vs. XX)
• Gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
• Sex hormones (testosterone vs. oestrogen and progesterone)
• External genitalia (penis, scrotum, etc. vs. vulva, labia, clitoris, etc.)
• Internal genitalia (urethra, prostate, etc. vs. vagina, uterus, etc.)
• Secondary sex characteristics (facial hair, less body fat, etc. vs. breasts, menstrual cycle,
more body fat, etc.) where the former characteristics are associated with male sex and the latter with female sex. In instances where this binary is not reproduced, the body (rather than the discursive production of a sex binary) is viewed as defective and is thus pathologised (Newbould 2014). Depending on the nature of the body and the cultural context within which it exists, this defect may or may not
“require” intervention (e.g. the surgical “correction” of intersex bodies to aesthetically and/or
Page 219 of 277 functionally serve as a “male” or “female” body), and this intervention may be performed with or without the consent of the patient (Sullivan 2009, p. 313).
The ubiquity and uncertain role of FMc, however, means that bodies produced through FMc do not warrant medical “correction” (if this were even possible). Instead, the chimaeric body is narrativised in a way that upholds the binary sexed body as the norm. To explain, I must momentarily digress to describe the process of testing for FMc, which itself carries its own interesting implications when it comes to sex and gender. The difficulty of distinguishing foetal genetic material from maternal genetic material introduces a reversal of dominant gendered paradigms (Martin 2010a, pp. 27–28). In the maternal body, foetal cells can appear almost identical to maternal cells, and thus early researchers needed to find a unique characteristic of the cells in order to identify them. The simplest solution was to search for Y chromosomes, as these would (in most cases) be absent in maternal cells. This of course meant that only half of pregnancies would allow for such research. In this system, it is the male that is “‘marked’ by difference,” where the female cells become the bodily norm (which lies in stark contrast to the more culturally prominent
“male as default”) (Ibid.). This unfortunately perpetuates the much more common practice of scientific discoveries regarding male bodies being presumed to apply equally to female bodies, as no female cells could be readily identified as a point of comparison. Martin writes:
In the field of microchimerism research, the almost universal reliance on the
Y chromosome cannot but support the implicit coding of the fetus as
masculine (reinvoking an old tradition in medical texts and pregnancy
advice manuals of using the universal pronoun ‘he’ with respect to the
fetus). (Martin 2010a, p. 36)
It is important to note here that although identifying the association of the Y chromosome with
“male” and the lack of Y chromosome with “female” further upholds the sexed binary described
Page 220 of 277 earlier, these associations are already enmeshed in scientific and popular discourse; it is therefore necessary to acknowledge such associations in order to interrogate how the sexed body is discursively reproduced in testing for FMc. Though the presumption of scientific discoveries in
“male” bodies applying to “female” bodies as noted by Martin may on the surface seem to contradict a medical delineation of male and female bodies, the testing for a phenomenon through the active focus on a single sex (male) demonstrates an acknowledgement of the differences between the bodies; this presumption does not dissolve the material boundaries between sexed bodies, it simply assumes that knowledge produced from research into one can apply to the other
(not unlike the universalising approach to medical knowledge produced in rationalist Western medical discourse). Furthermore, by constructing the chimaeric body as a body “marked by [male] difference,” the foetal cells maintain their foreignness. The maternal body is not allowed to challenge the discursive production of “maleness” and “femaleness” based on chromosomal makeup; instead, the maternal body is preserved as “female” with “foreign male cells.”
In the context of FMc, therefore, a mother with XY chromosomes is allowed to retain the sexed status of “female” by being denied discursive ownership of the cells. This denial of ownership also produces other troubling implications. The ontological complexity of defining cells as “foetal” cells encourages a “slippage from a cell to ‘a life,”’ particularly in stem cell politics in the U.S. (Martin 2010a, p. 37). The adjective “foetal” refers to the origin of the cells, as we now know that these cells can be found around the maternal body, far from the amniotic sac. Yet describing the cells as “foetal” implies foetal ownership and supports the autonomy of the cell from the maternal body. This would appear to affirm the discourses of pro-life politics, where personhood is afforded to the foetus, regardless of how early in the pregnancy it might be.28 With this in mind,
Martin (prompted by the work of philosopher Moira Howes, 2008) suggests an alternative
28 Even if the foetus is afforded personhood and thus could theoretically claim a “right to life,” many feminist ethics scholars have noted that this would not necessarily outweigh the right to bodily autonomy of the person gestating the foetus (see Mackenzie 1995 for a detailed analysis of perspectives on the topic). Page 221 of 277 imagining of the foetal–maternal relationship where the foetus is understood as a maternal body part
(Martin 2010a, p. 27). This imagining is similarly imperfect, but (as with the discussion of messiness earlier) offers a plurality of critical perspectives that interrupts normative approaches to constructing foetal autonomy.
None of this is to deny the material reality of statistically significant groupings of sex characteristics or the sharing of genetical material between a maternal body (who may become a mother) and a foetus (who may become a child); the narrativisation of the materiality of the body, however, needs interrogation. Butler’s work offers a way forward for us here. Butler proposes a returning “to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (p. 9, emphasis in original). In the context of sex, this materialisation can be understood in many forms: in the more abstract sense, the materiality of sex has been historically understood within a binary based on observable characteristics, with this binary then informing medical and social definitions and methods for testing sex (thus reproducing the binary over time); in a more physical sense, the body becomes literally moulded in terms of bodily comportment (see Young 1980), dieting, exercise, beauty/grooming, and surgical intervention (which may serve to “correct,” “perfect,” or
“affirm” the body in relation to a binary construction of sex and gender; see Stryker and Sullivan
2009; Sullivan 2008 for more on the selective social approval of surgical interventions). Thus,
Butler asks that we move beyond questions of gender in relation to a presumed fixed and natural notion of sex, and instead consider “[t]hrough what regulatory norms [sex itself is] materialized” (p.
10).
The body, according to Butler, “is posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior” (1993, p. 30, emphasis in original). However, the body is also the result of this signification; thus, language cannot be thought of as merely representational, but also “productive,
Page 222 of 277 constitutive,” or, in Butler’s words, “performative” (Ibid., emphasis in original). This concept of performativity allows for an important discursive understanding of how bodies are produced and read. Concepts of gender and sex both produce and are a product of signification. The citational practice of reproducing gendered and sexed bodies through a pre-existing discursive framework
(ostensibly informed by the material “reality” of the body) makes gender and sex culturally legible.
Butler’s notion of performativity has provided a useful framework for critics to make sense of the gender expression and sexuality of Frank-N-Furter (and to a lesser extent, the broader cast of characters) in Rocky Horror (e.g. Hadjis 2016; Tickle 2014). Frank plays with gender expression in various ways, from the more mundane adoption of feminine-coded clothing and makeup to the highly realistic impersonation of Brad and Janet in order to coerce Janet and Brad (respectively) into sex. Frank not only plays with his own fluid gender expression, he also dresses up those around him in hyper-feminine signifiers such as lingerie, hosiery, and high heels. In these ways, Frank enables (forces) those around him, particularly the sexually repressed Brad and Janet, to explore the fluidity of their own gender expression and sexuality.
Frank’s claim to be a “transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” makes the subject of his gender identity somewhat less coherent, though Zachary Lamm attempts to make sense of it in his essay, “The Queer Pedagogy of Dr. Frank-N-Furter” (2008). As Lamm writes, “[a]lthough it is true that Transsexual refers to a place on the alien home world of Transylvania, transsexuality also becomes part of the queer world that [the song “Sweet Transvestite”] posits” (p. 198). Lamm is troubled by the apparent muddying of gender expression (“transvestite”) and gender identity
(connoted by “Transsexual”), yet acknowledges that Frank’s complex entanglement of gender, sex, sexuality, and expression allows his body to become “a canvas for play with genders while simultaneously refusing to be naturalized by them” (Ibid.). I argue that dominant Western culture does not have the discursive or taxonomic vocabulary to render Frank comprehensible in terms of
Page 223 of 277 sex, gender identity, sexuality, or gender expression (and perhaps it shouldn’t, given his literal alien status); thus Frank’s performativity can only be understood within the camp29 context of the film.
Frank is made legible through Rocky Horror’s vocabulary of exaggerated queer parody, an idea which is further enhanced through the liminal experience of viewing the film as a midnight movie.
Frank could not exist in the real world and real-world constructions of sex and gender cannot apply to him. In this way, Rocky Horror as a fictional film opens up a fantastical space where the strict taxonomic vocabularies that maintain so much social power in the real world become (in the liminal space/time of the midnight movie) markedly less powerful. Thus, fiction (especially science fiction) offers opportunities to subversively play with language and its discursive effects.
While using performativity as a framework allows for interesting ruminations on Frank’s embodied existence, we cannot neglect the much more tangible and literal example of constructed sex in Rocky Horror—Rocky is quite literally a manufactured man. As explored above, the perpetuation of a “natural” sex and “performed” gender divide fails to account for the messy heterogeneous nature of biological bodies and Rocky as the creature provides an apt metaphor for how sex can be considered performative. Rocky is not only the manifestation of Frank’s desires for a sexual “man,” but is also the result of a citational understanding of manhood and masculinity; most notably, Rocky “carries the Charles Atlas seal of approval,” a reference to the iconic early twentieth-century strongman and bodybuilder who is alluded to throughout the song “I Can Make
You A Man.”
The language associated with Frank’s production of Rocky is particularly significant when understood within the context of Rocky Horror as a) an adaptation of Frankenstein and b) a hyper- citational film built upon the legacy of films before it. Frank and Rocky Horror go to great lengths to insist that Rocky is “a man”; indeed, the film dedicates a musical number and its reprise to the
29 I mean “camp” in all senses of the word (excessive, artificial, flamboyant, theatrical, effeminate, parodic, queer, etc.) as meticulously appraised in Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” ([1966] 2009). Page 224 of 277 idea that Frank can “make [Rocky] a man.” Furthermore, careful attention is paid to assuring the audience that Rocky is normatively anatomically masculine, from the oiling of his upper body muscles, to his tight, genitalia-contouring gold shorts. Rocky’s muscles remain an ongoing fascination for both Frank and Janet, with the latter transforming from not “lik[ing] men with too many muscles” to becoming “a muscle fan.” Rocky plays an important role in Janet’s (apparently hetero-)sexual awakening, though Lamm makes the observation that as both of them “have been trained by Frank in the performance of sexual desires,” we should not necessarily assume a heteronormative sexual encounter between the two (e.g. with Rocky penetrating Janet) (2008, p.
201).
This is a significant departure from the creature of Frankenstein who is notably nameless and denied humanity; as the creature tells Frankenstein: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (Shelley [1818] 2012, p. 98). In contrast, Rocky is named, destined to be Frank’s
“paradise,” and decidedly a man. Furthermore, the construction of Rocky as a man is an ongoing process; even after Rocky’s birth, Frank repeatedly tells Rocky “I can make you a man.” Though
Frank’s methods are somewhat reductive (with a great deal of the man-making seeming to involve the development of muscles), this nevertheless supports the idea of an ongoing process of materialisation. Here we might reflect on the prescriptive practice of “girling” as described by
Butler (1993); girling, for Butler, involves the transitive naming of a girl as a “girl” through which the word’s symbolic power “governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity” (p. 232).
This femininity can “never fully approximate the norm,” and is thus “compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject” (Ibid.). In this view we might think of Rocky as being continuously and performatively “manned” throughout Rocky Horror, with Charles Atlas comprising the masculine norm whom Rocky is continuously compelled to cite.
Page 225 of 277 I believe this particular use of citationality has a great deal to offer critical medical humanities. Though citationality in a literary sense (as seen in the allusions to science fiction cinema in Rocky Horror) offers a cogent critique of how ideas in public science writing are entangled with existing cultural and social meanings, the uptake of citationality in critical theory
(such as with Butler) allows for a better recognition of the materiality of the body. The discursive production of the sexed and gendered body in Rocky Horror and FMc science writing is not only steeped in social and cultural assumptions and values, it furthermore reproduces these assumptions and values in so-called rationalist medical discourse. This has significant ethical implications; no longer is the question, “how should we treat different bodies?” but instead, “what are bodies?”—“what are female bodies?”; “what are male bodies?”; “what are healthy bodies?”; “what are sick bodies?”; “what is a human body?”; “what is not a human body?” Importantly, what do we do with the bodies that do not fit these discursive categories or move between the boundaries of these categories?
Underpinning this chapter is the contention that the metaphors, language, and genres of narratives matter. Scientific writing, journalism, and popular culture alike use citational practices as a way of making meaning, and this meaning can spill out into unintended and hidden registers and contexts. Recognising this citationality is a crucial first step in critically thinking about the public communication of scientific knowledge. We continue to see the necessity of this critical thinking play out today, particularly in the climate of the current pandemic. Think, for example, of the official naming of COVID-19. The Director-General of the World Health Organisation briefed the media on the new name (updated from “coronavirus,” which refers to a family of viruses with varying degrees of severity) on February 11, 2020:
Page 226 of 277 Under agreed guidelines between WHO, the World Organisation for Animal
Health and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, we
had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal,
an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and
related to the disease. Having a name matters to prevent the use of other
names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. It also gives us a standard
format to use for any future coronavirus outbreaks. (World Health
Organisation 2020)
This update from the more generic “coronavirus” not only allowed for greater precision in language, but discouraged a conflation of the virus with milder forms and the stigmatisation of particular social groups and nonhuman animals through a rhetorical association with the disease.
On March 20, 2020, a photographer for The Washington Post tweeted a photo of the notes
U.S. President Donald Trump was reading from for a press conference; the word “Corona” from the phrase “the Corona Virus” had been crossed out and replaced in a black marker with
“Chinese” (Botsford 2020). Between March 16 and March 30, Trump was reported as using the phrase “Chinese Virus” more than 20 times, an act that this photo demonstrated was not only deliberate but premeditated (Viala-Gaudefroy and Lindaman 2020). In March, the U.S. Secretary of
State, Mike Pompeo, called for the virus to be described as the “Wuhan Virus” in an official G-7 group statement, leading to the statement being pulled altogether (Associated Press, 2020). This discourse contributed to an increase in xenophobic attacks on people of Asian descent across the world—a trend that could be predicted from previous xenophobic (and, as in the case of HIV/AIDS, also homophobic) responses to global contagion fears throughout history (Greenberg 2015; Markel and Stern 2002; White 2020).
Page 227 of 277 With this use of language, disease is inscribed on the body in ways distinct from more traditional indicators of illness; where Chapter 5 of this thesis noted how contagion-related disgust is provoked in bodily taboos (e.g. the passing of fluids from the inside to the outside of the body), in the above examples the body is rendered abject through its association with foreignness (or queerness). The body of (in the case of COVID-19) Chinese-appearing people in a non-Chinese country becomes marked by disease—the root cause of the existing pandemic and the possible cause of future, localised contagion. In this example, the naming (and misnaming) of COVID-19 is not simply retrospectively citational in that it does not simply articulate existing cultural and social preconceptions. Naming produces the future rhetorical associations of disease, which spills out to engender particular cultural and social behaviours. The Chinese-appearing body is discursively produced as the potentially diseased body in non-Chinese contexts, and this discursive production is born from contemporary rhetoric that in turn cites broader cultural (xenophobic) assumptions.
Ultimately, what is at stake in the communication of scientific ideas is the continued discursive production of stable but potentially harmful categories with fixed boundaries. The critical interrogation of the use of language in scientific discourse does not immediately destabilise these boundaries, but it does make them legible as discursive products. By bringing popular culture
(Rocky Horror) into proximity with public science writing, we can more clearly identify how affect is enmeshed in citational practices. Citation does more than simply make potentially complex ideas more comprehensible; it uses affect to reproduce the boundaries of socially and culturally produced categories. In utilising a methodology of proximity, by rocking back and forth between analyses of public science writing and popular culture, a dichotomy between rational science writing and emotional popular culture is disrupted. Through this approach, the affective investments of science writing are made more readable.
Page 228 of 277 CONCLUSION
This thesis began, like so many do, as a rather different project. I originally set out to investigate the historical representation of the zombie in popular culture and how the zombie figure reflects cultural anxieties and values. I’m sure this would have resulted in a perfectly adequate thesis; it certainly would have been a more straightforward project to undertake. Yet I ultimately found myself unsatisfied with this approach. Yes, popular culture reflects the cultures in which it is produced but this relationship is not unidirectional. Moreover, I soon realised that popular culture not only passively influences the real world, it can be proactively used as a methodological tool and a source of theory. This became the focus of my inquiry.
I had always intended my research to take a somewhat interdisciplinary approach, but I had never seriously considered what it meant to be a transdisciplinary scholar and the demands transdisciplinarity (when done well) can make. Transdisciplinarity sometimes attracts a reputation as an enterprise in which dilettantish academics undertake intellectual tourism, sampling what is attractive and interesting from different disciplines but never committing to the difficult work of specialised research. But true transdisciplinary research requires much more of the researcher. It requires the researcher to read widely within not one discipline but many. They must then synthesise what they have read, deciding how much should be added and what may be cut, what needs contextualising and what can be left without context while allowing non-expert readers to still follow along. Transdisciplinarity requires the researcher to know what they don’t know and where they cannot claim expertise, while still being able to demonstrate enough knowledge and critical skill to authentically engage with these areas. The researcher must then explicate this synthesised research in ways that many audiences will understand and be convinced by. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all of these disciplinary and extra-disciplinary knowledges must add value to each other.
Page 229 of 277 In short, transdisciplinary research is difficult. Yet it is important work and the need for transdisciplinary approaches to complex issues is becoming increasingly recognised. COVID-19 is a perfect example of this. Consider the issue of limiting community transmission. Scientific study into the transmission of respiratory viruses is a logical first step, yet this is of little use without epidemiological data into how diseases spread within human populations. To maintain accurate data on a new disease like COVID-19, we need to consider how the data is collected, which requires analysis into methods for testing as well as community barriers to testing (which could include financial barriers, logistical barriers, linguistic barriers, or even community denial regarding the need for testing). If restricting or tracing public movement is considered to be a method for limiting community transmission, then other issues arise. When community movement is necessary, what transport infrastructure is available and how is it kept safe? How will new rules and measures be communicated to the public and who might be missed in this communication? And how will these rules and measures be enforced? Digital surveillance? Police or military intervention? Trusting the community to follow guidelines? All of these carry risks and the nature of these risks would be understood differently from within different disciplines (for example, a criminologist, a sociologist, and a community psychologist might all highlight different areas of concern). Restricting public movement will then have complex economic and ecological impacts. It will also impact on a social level in ways that can only be understood through an intersectional analysis of disability, mental health, gender, race and ethnicity, class, caste, wealth, occupation, age, geographical location, residency status, sexuality, religion, and more. And none of this yet factors in the crucial perspectives that can only be attained from frontline medical workers like doctors, nurses, and paramedics.
Each of the above perspectives would provide a valuable contribution to addressing the problem at hand, but without sincere, generous, and reciprocal dialogue between these perspectives,
Page 230 of 277 their value is limited. This thesis provides its own contributions to such dialogue, most clearly in its feeling- and affect-oriented methodological offering. Yet there is also a risk to this work that I want to reflect upon once again in this conclusion. As I noted in the Preface to this thesis, we cannot ignore the danger of speaking too early and too authoritatively on a still-developing health crisis, particularly from disciplines without specific medical training. There also remains a (legitimate) fear by many of what might happen when we break down disciplinary barriers that are bound up in the establishment and defence of expertise (Hodge 1995). Defenders of such disciplinary fortresses might put forward the conspiracy theorists and mask-refusers and pandemic-deniers as evidence of what happens when we destabilise particular domains of absolute authority. Yes, the expertise of scientists and medical professionals must be upheld. But what the conspiracy theorists and mask- refusers and pandemic-deniers demonstrate is that while we often require distinctions (even hierarchies) around expertise, there is simultaneously a necessity to understand and work with affect when it comes to approaching complex ethical and health issues. Humans are driven by much more than rationality, and thus, rationalist approaches are ill-equipped to solve the broader, human problem of the pandemic.
With this in mind, I want to recapitulate what I believe this thesis most strongly has to offer
—to discourses in health and medical ethics, but also to the humanities and beyond. If I were to synthesise the contributions of this thesis into three key points, they would be as follows. First, this thesis demonstrates the utility of popular culture as a whole, and the zombie specifically, as a tool of critical thought and a legitimate source of theory. Disciplines such as cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies still broadly regard popular culture as an object of study. This is not to say that these disciplines do not recognise the social and cultural impact of popular culture—there is a great deal of excellent work being done in this area. There remains, however, a significant opportunity for popular culture to be taken more seriously as a malleable yet precise theoretical tool, or, as Ari
Page 231 of 277 Schick phrases it, “an important cultural resource” (2016, p. 226). This thesis illustrates not only how popular culture such as zombie stories can move beyond being regarded as mere reflections of culture, but also the specific utility of zombie narratives and the zombie figure itself. It also demonstrates how the category of the zombie may be widened to encompass a great range of monstrous (and not so monstrous) figures, rejecting the gatekeeping tendencies of some more fervent fan communities. This widening not only questions why characters such as Rocky should not be considered zombies, it also demonstrates what possibilities are created when the hard edges of such definitions are made softer and stretchier. Just as analysing White Zombie together with its
Haitian predecessor illuminates important historical and cultural tensions, particularly relating to race, gender, and spirituality, so too analysing The Rocky Horror Picture Show in relation to the artificial zombie trope and the figure of the chimaera (in mythology and scientific jargon) elucidates resonances and tensions that may be obscured in other types of close reading. This, perhaps, qualifies as a second aspect of my first key contribution; I hope to see more work in cultural studies and beyond that not only looks to popular culture as a source of theory, but also explores the potentialities embedded in the work of stretching genres and taxonomies, and using proximity as a catalyst for thought.
Second, this thesis responds to a call in medical and health ethics for more emotion-inflected and empathy-driven approaches to ethical discourse (e.g. Hooker 2014; Whitehead and Woods
2016a; 2016b). It does this first by demonstrating some key ways that feeling and empathy are sorely needed tools in addressing ethical dilemmas in medicine. It is impossible to separate the human from the problems this thesis addresses—those relating to organ donation, Alzheimer’s disease, immunisation, the communication of science to public audiences, etc. Any solution that aims to approach these areas from within a purely rationalist framework is going to be limited at best. Furthermore, this thesis follows feminist philosophers of science in arguing that there is no
Page 232 of 277 innate medical truth waiting to be uncovered, nor is there a neutral way to describe and communicate medical ideas. Instead, these truths are discursively produced and are disseminated in ways that are persistently informed by cultural and social values. Part of the goal of medical ethics, therefore, is not to remove biases but instead to identify, challenge, and make clearly legible the ways that medical discourse is always a social and cultural product with complex historical entanglements; to advocate for pluralistic approaches that draw from multiple bodies of knowledge and reject rigid disciplinary boundaries; to resist the temptation to create neat solutions to medical problems and instead acknowledge that there must always be a messiness to transdisciplinarity— that the cross-contamination of knowledge and ideas can result in a richer and more human-centred ethical approach. In this way, this thesis advocates for “feeling” as a necessary companion to
“thought” in ethical problem-solving.
This feeds into the third and final key offering of this thesis—the methodology. This thesis advocates for qualitative and experimental approaches to research that radically cross disciplinary boundaries, drawing from (and in turn, contributing to) multiple bodies of knowledge. It traverses back and forth between the sciences and the humanities; fiction and scientific or medical “fact”; evidence and exploratory thought experiments; thinking and feeling. It employs methods of transdisciplinary sampling and comparison to challenge hegemonic models of knowledge production, and in doing so produces more monstrous forms of knowledge. Finally, it rejects the premise that recognised academic disciplines can be the only source of legitimate research and critical thinking, instead demonstrating not only that extra-disciplinary knowledges have value, but that cultural forms such as zombie films are already utilising methods such as thought experiments in their own ways. This more radical work is important, and it should be continued. I have used the zombie as a working case for this methodology, but I hope to see these approaches continued far beyond.
Page 233 of 277 To conclude, I want to return once again to the zombie specifically and why it has remained my focus. I opened this thesis with the following quotation from Jennifer Rutherford:
Zombie is the word on everyone’s lips because zombie as metaphor
condenses elements of the present that we most need, and are least able, to
think about. […] Zombie is a metaphor that enables ‘us’—a mass us; an
undifferentiated, transcultural, global ‘us’—to think the impossibility of
now. (2013, p. 23)
These words feel no less true today than they did in 2013. At the beginning of 2020, before we in
Australia had begun to seriously consider how the “novel coronavirus” might change our lives, several of my colleagues approached me to ask my thoughts on the crisis in relation to my own research. In some ways, this was a fairly straightforward question—the global public response certainly has resonances to prior epidemics and pandemics such as SARS, H1N1, and HIV/AIDS, all of which have constituted significant influences for the evolution of the zombie. But for the most part, I was not being asked how I thought the (at the time) epidemic would eventually influence future zombie films (even though it surely will). These questions instead were grounded in a much more affective and nuanced understanding of how the zombie related to this new disease. News stories detailing specific cases of transmission read like the opening scenes of a zombie screenplay, and as the world began to imagine what COVID-19 would mean for humanity, many journalists and commentators looked to zombie apocalypse films for a new, high-impact vocabulary. Our relationship with the zombie has never been purely intellectual—it is always implicated in emotion.
Zombie stories are stories about what it means to be human; to die; to survive; to be reborn; to care for one’s neighbours; to depend on one’s community; to be an individual; to be part of the global; to forget; to lose identity; to lose autonomy; to lose freedom; to consume; to decay; to contaminate; to revolt; and so much more. The zombie is a figure that is boundless and infinitely interpretable. It
Page 234 of 277 has persisted through mass cultural and global changes, and it is not going away any time soon.
Personally—I welcome the invasion.
Page 235 of 277 MEDIA MENTIONED
28 Days Later 2002 [film]. Directed by Danny Boyle.
Bride of Frankenstein 1935 [film]. Directed by James Whale.
Dawn of the Dead 1978 [film]. Directed by George A. Romero.
Dawn of the Dead 2004 [film]. Directed by Zack Snyder.
Day of the Dead 1985 [film]. Directed by George A. Romero.
Day of the Triffids, the 1962 [film]. Directed by Steve Sekely.
Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 [film]. Directed by Robert Wise.
Doctor X 1931 [film]. Directed by Michael Curtiz.
Doom 1993 [video game]. Developed by id Software.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1931 [film]. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian.
Dracula 1931 [film]. Directed by Tod Browning.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004 [film]. Directed by Michel Gondry.
Fly, the 1986 [film]. Directed by David Cronenberg.
Forbidden Planet 1956 [film]. Directed by Fred M. Wilcox.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 1818 [book]. Written by Mary Shelley.
Frankenstein 1931 [film]. Directed by James Whale.
Half Life 1998 [video game]. Developed by Valve Corporation.
Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, the 2012 [novel]. Written by Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman.
I Am Legend 1954 [book]. Written by Richard Matheson.
I Am Legend 2007 [film]. Directed by Francis Lawrence.
I Walked with a Zombie 1943 [film]. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Iliad, the 8th century BC (estimated) [poem]. Written by Homer.
Invisible Man, the 1933 [film]. Directed by James Whale.
Page 236 of 277 It Came from Outer Space 1953 [film]. Directed by Jack Arnold.
Land of the Dead 2005 [film]. Directed by George A. Romero.
Magic Island, the 1929 [book]. Written by William B. Seabrook.
Night of the Living Dead 1968 [film]. Directed by George A. Romero.
Planet Terror 2007 [film]. Directed by Robert Rodriguez.
Project Z: The Final Global Event 2020 [film]. Directed by Phillip Gara.
Quarantine 2008 [film]. Directed by John Erick Dowdle.
REC 2007 [film]. Directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.
Resident Evil 1996 [video game]. Developed by Capcom.
Resident Evil 2 1998 [video game]. Developed by Capcom.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis 1999 [video game]. Developed by Capcom.
Return of the Living Dead, the 1985 [film]. Directed by Dan O’Bannon.
Revenge of Frankenstein, the 1958 [film]. Directed by Terence Fisher.
Revenge of the Zombies 1943 [film]. Directed by Steve Sekely.
Revolt of the Zombies 1936 [film]. Directed by Victor Hugo Halperin.
Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 [film]. Directed by Jim Sharman.
Salem’s Lot 1975 [novel]. Written by Stephen King.
Shaun of the Dead 2004 [film]. Directed by Edgar Wright.
“Sonata for Solo Organ,” Law & Order [television episode]. Directed by Fred Gerber.
Theogony 7th–8th century BC (estimated) [poem]. Written by Hesiod.
Walking Dead, the 2010–present [television series]. Developed by Frank Darabont for AMC.
Warm Bodies 2013 [film]. Directed by Jonathan Levine.
White Zombie 1932 [film]. Directed by Victor Halperin.
World War Z 2006 [book]. Written by Max Brooks.
Page 237 of 277 World War Z 2013 [film]. Directed by Marc Forster.
Zombie Survival Guide, the 2003 [book]. Written by Max Brooks.
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