Queering the Apocalypse: Survival Politics, Zombies, and Popular Culture

This project examines how apocalyptic settings and themes in transnational zombie films, graphic novels, television shows, and video games conceive of futurity and survival in queer terms. I analyze how visions of zombie apocalypse manifest in these pop culture narratives, while exploring their attendant survival politics, which often require rejecting normative behaviors, codes, and ideologies in order to survive. I also focus specifically on how apocalyptic zombie narratives explore transnational fears about sexual and reproductive agency, racialized and gendered Others, disease pandemic, and scientific and technological advancements against the backdrop of decomposing social, national, and global landscapes. On a broader theoretical level, this project interrogates how "queerness" and temporality play a critical role in imagining the apocalypse as well as conceptualizing survival in zombie narratives when neither a utopian future nor a nostalgic return to the past is viable.