Racism and Sexuality in Zombie Apocalypse Era

Zombies exist in many popular culture mediums such as TV, video games, books and etc. Most of these Zombie movies reflect the common fear of dystopian world caused by nature and humans disasters like terrorism and war. One the most common themes in Zombi movies are the representation of the zombies as the monstrous “other”, which creates fear and terror in human society. Compare to other monsters, Zombies look as the same as humans, but they act different which reflects on post 9-11 Islamophobic representation of the “other”. The “other” is always dehumanized and they can’t be reasoned with since they don’t have any sense of logic. Although the story line moves around Zombie apocalypse, but there are always implication of race and sex as well. “Walking dead” is one of the most recent TV shows about Zombie apocalypse and survival of human race during this period. Although there is a complete chaos and there is no matter of order, the two white men ending up leading two different groups of people (Rick’s prison gang and the Governor’s Woodbury), which indicates white patriarchy. The two main leaders are both presented as masculine, authoritative and dominant characters. They also proven to have some unqualified qualities in terms of leadership, but at the end of the day it does not matter because people follow them anyways. This TV show is one of the recent productions, which tries to challenge the subject of racism by punishing the “redneck” character of the show for his discriminating behavior against the black character, and introduces a black female warrior to the audiences. However, the savior/leader is always described as a white masculine figure that fits into binary opposition again.

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