“Queering and Cripping the End of the World: Disability, Sex, and Race in The Walking Dead.” In Zombies and Sexuality, edited by Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, 106–22. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.
ABSTRACT: Since its 2010 debut on AMC, the television show The Walking Dead has garnered vast popular and critical attention. Embedded within the contemporary obsession with a zombie apocalypse, the show is part of a broader cultural project seeking collective ways to navigate a post-2008 imploded capitalist system that many economically vulnerable and privilege populations are still experiencing as “the end of the world.” In this article, Hannabach argues that the show raises questions about post-apocalyptic racialization, kinship ties in the absence of social institutions to finance them, and diverse queer intimacies. She argues that disability, race, and sexuality intertwine in The Walking Dead to reflect histories of zombie representation as well as anxieties over early-twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism.
