2. That Is My Wife: Reproductive Futurism and Patriarchal Competition

Carol’s observation in the comics that Lori’s pregnancy may be more advanced than she thought implies that Rick may not be the father (c1:ch3:n14).

Lori’s asking if Rick wants the wedding band back appears related to the possible relationship issues implied in the series’ first episode rather than to any sort of rethinking of the monogamous family.

Rick does categorize the fact that he restrained himself from violence as a strength rather than a weakness, which arguably complicates the notion of masculinity represented, but, at the same time, the implied threat contained within his very disavowal of violence and the fact that it is presented in terms of a contest of strength and weakness both conform to traditional constructions of the masculine.

“18 Miles Out.”

One could also read this choice in Freudian terms: it seems as though Carl will kill the father, an expectation that signals the audience’s latent acceptance of the Oedipal conflict, but he instead kills the (other) competition for the mother.

Shane in fact dies twice, first as a human and then as a zombie. If we read his metamorphosis into a zombie as a movement into queerness, then his death as a human represents his repositioning outside of the social order, becoming the “nothing” that he feels Rick has made him and experiencing the “loss of self, of coherence, of life, and of heirs” that Edelman ascribes to queer figures who stand in opposition to reproductive futurism (loc. 1432).

Edelman argues during an examination of Hitchcock’s film The Birds that “the Child means ‘meaning’ for adults, who can only attain it by virtue of participating in the labor of giving (it) birth” (loc. 1904). (Craig Fischer [2011], significantly, sees The Birds as a “proto-zombie film,” and raises the possibility that Shane’s desire for Lori may function as “the male sex drive displaced into the wholesale Thantos of zombie cannibalism” in the way that Lydia’s desires are connected to the “reality-shifting apocalypse” in Hitchcock’s film [68, 76, 78].) Edelman’s analysis helps to explain both the fact that Glenn and Maggie, in both the comics and TV series, conceive a child, and the fact that the completely positive reception of Rosita’s announcement in the comics (c3:ch24:n141) that she and Eugene are having a baby marks the increased ability of the survivors to live as they did prior to the apocalypse. The limits of that ability intrude in the fact that Eugene has agreed to raise the baby while knowing it is not his (c3:ch23:n133) and in that Rosita is decapitated by the Whisperers while still pregnant (c3:ch24:n144).

See Chap. 3 of this volume for a discussion of Carol’s proposal of a polyamorous marriage and its rejection.

Dale repeats this idea, telling Lori that Rick must never know if the baby is Shane’s because “[i]t’ll kill him. It’ll be the one last thing it takes to make him crack” (c1:ch2:n10). If we associate the negation imposed by death with queerness, then the rhetoric that disruption to accepted roles in the family unit could kill Rick accrues additional resonances.

In the same season, Beth follows a similar arc: after critiquing Lori’s pregnancy (“How could you do that?”) and denying its illusion of meaning (“It [life’]s just so pointless.”), she chooses life and a future by choosing not to commit suicide (“18 Miles Out”).

Trevor Grizzell (2014) adds that Lori’s death and the aftermath of Judith’s birth denaturalize the tenets of reproductive futurism: “Rather than a symbol of society’s continuation and naturally unending reproduction of itself, then, the Child (figured here as Judith) in this world becomes a marker of society’s inability to reproduce itself without intense cultural, physical, and emotional work” (loc. 2349).

Quickmeme.​com, to take only one of many, many examples, features a category dedicated solely to “The Walking Dead—Lori is a Slut.”

See Chap. 4 for a discussion of the ways in which the undead Sophia acts as a disruptive sinthomosexual.

See Chap. 5 for a more detailed discussion of this moment and its relationship to queer family arrangements.

In another parallel, the Governor’s reasoning in this scene that it acceptable for self-preservation to kill “killers” and those associated with them is repeated by Rick in his decision for his group to kill numerous members of the Saviors in their sleep in season 6.

In a sympathetic echo of these events, in the episode “Bury Me Here” in season 7, Richard’s loss of his daughter in the apocalypse appears to motivate him to try to sacrifice himself to force the Kingdom to fight the Saviors. In the same episode, Morgan, after he kills Richards, mistakenly refers to the young man Benjamin, who has accidentally been shot and has died instead of Richard, by Morgan’s own dead son’s name.

Simpson also points out a deleted scene in which the Vatos, a group of Hispanic men in Atlanta who cared for the sick and elderly, are shown to have all been killed: “Assuming one accepts this deleted sequence as part of the narrative, the communal, utopian possibility represented by the Vatos is thoroughly discredited as hopelessly naive, just as Dale’s progressive philosophy is toward the end of the season” (loc. 699). Alternatively, one can view the fact that the scene was cut as less definitively foreclosing progressive possibilities.