1. Introduction

In the season 8 episode “Big Scary U,” Negan makes a very similar confession regarding his own wife, even using the same phrasing (“I couldn’t put her down”), though it is not developed after it is mentioned.

Barbara Gurr (2015) extends this connection to postapocalyptic narratives more broadly, writing that, after the 9/11 attacks, they represent notionally American value as “under constant threat from both outside and possibly inside forces” (5).

David A. Reilly argues for substituting globalization for terrorism (Castillo et al. 2016, 68–69).

Where a zombie narrative such as Day of the Dead critiques masculinity (Wood 2003, 289), The Walking Dead, especially the television version, valorizes it, most commonly presenting (masculinist) violence, often espoused by Rick, as the only tenable solution, even when it questions the effect of such violence on its characters. In the television show, for example, Carol and Morgan have both rejected and reembraced killing over the course of the series.

Ashburn-Nardo (2017) cites three decades of studies with consistent results.

Muñoz (2009) sets himself partly against Edelman (2004) as a representative of what Muñoz calls the antirelational school of queer criticism and its “romance of singularity and negativity” (10). He counters Edelman’s claim that “the future is the province of the child and therefore not for the queers” with the contention that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (11). I stake my own position between the two, if closer to Edelman: the negation espoused by Edelman may be necessary to unseat the child and reproductive futurity from their dominance in order to open a path to the more affirmative queerness that Muñoz advocates. I less reservedly agree with Halberstam’s (2011) critique of Edelman, which focuses not so much on negation as on his avoidance of material politics (loc. 1998–2076). Bernini (2017) makes a similar criticism (see particularly pages 77–82), and Part I of his book offers a useful and detailed overview of the evolution of the major strands of antisocial queer theory.

This function aligns with Wood’s (2003) description of an Other as allowing something in the self or culture to be projected outward in order to be “hated and disowned” (65) and echoes Halberstam’s (1995) views of the traditional Gothic monster as representing who must be removed from the community (3) and of the modern monster as characterized by “proximity to humans,” which would be especially true of the zombie (23).

McGlotten (2011) further claims that zombies may constitute “compelling sites for identification” and represent “a freedom from the responsibilities and obligations that are the ordinary stuff of life and, perhaps, forms of attachment that are a viscous drag of living life in more novel ways” (loc. 4004). However, like Muñoz (2009), she rejects Edelman’s vision of “the ethical demand of queer life and sociality” “as merely the negation of politics and the social itself” (loc. 3868).

By Land of the Dead, of course, Romero’s zombies became explicitly progressive, even revolutionary figures. The Walking Dead makes no such actively positive identification but rather features zombies as agents of subversive energies.

Zombies disrupt even the gender binary, rendering, as Jessica Murray (2013) notes, gender progressively illegible as they decay (5).

Ohi (2004) specifies that saying that all children are queer is not the same as saying that all children feel same-sex desire.