MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead comics, the structures and strictures of human society have collapsed to the extent that protagonist Rick Grimes and his band of zombie-apocalypse survivors butcher cannibals who had at one point eaten their own children. In the television adaptation, Rick’s group refuses to help a man they pass on the road, then later loot his corpse. While moments such as these are intended to raise questions about ethical assumptions, the characters’ behavior is always partly excused by their circumstances. The rules are different now, we are meant to think. However, such radical transfiguration appears not to extend to the conceptualization of the family. The apocalyptic refashioning of social practices makes it all the more striking how tightly the protagonists in both manifestations of The Walking Dead cling to the traditional bourgeois nuclear family as an organizing social unit. The potential for radical alternatives to this family unit can best be engaged through the framework of queerness. Lee Edelman, in No Future, positions queerness in opposition to the social obsession with what he terms reproductive futurism. For Edelman, reproductive futurism functions as an assurance of both individual and collective futures and constrains the possibilities for and within the political. The consequence of such removal of political possibility in The Walking Dead is the continued dominance of the reproductive, heteronormative nuclear family even within the destruction of the existing social order, which one might expect to open spaces for alternative structures. However, neither the world of the comics nor of the television version meet the potential of these new spaces for new kinds of families. Queer family arrangements do not merely fail to materialize; they are, in fact, often actively rejected.