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—————————————————————————— Using Zombies in the Critical Medical Humanities: A Transdisciplinary Methodology for the Development of Ethical Thinking and Feeling —————————————————————————— 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.