MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In my paper, I explore how the queered identities of the BBC’s In The Flesh’s zombies confound popular understandings of the monster and the connections between the undead’s “monstrous” identity and their bodies. Focusing on the crucial renaming and restructuring of the monster within the series, I seek to understand how the show restructures the traditional narrative of the undead in efforts to deconstruct the monster/human narrative that permanently silences the othered monster. In In The Flesh, creators peel away the monster myth surrounding zombies and create a new space in which monsters are able to rewrite their narrative. The show morphs the well-used zombie “end of the world” narrative into a zombie “end of the world as we know it” tale, allowing for deconstruction of hierarchal and definitive structures that informed life before the Rising. Through the protagonists Kieran Walker and Amy Dyer, the undead are able to reconstruct their narratives and empower themselves in a society eager to essentialize them. The two characters present new nuanced looks into the complexities found in othered monstrous space, complexities to often ignored in favor of zombie rhetoric that favors the dominant paradigm. Marginalized while living as a gay youth, in death protagonist Kieran Walker represents a dual marginalization as a queer zombie. Interestingly, within the series as Kieran’s domestic space is increasingly queered his relationships with men are more accepted by his family and larger community. The liminality and queerness that characterizes the zombies quickly comes to characterize the spaces in which the living subjects dwell, ultimately queering the world of the Subjects as well. This deconstruction allows for a rewriting that questions dominant paradigms used to reaffirm living subjectivity. The zombie’s existence as a visibly-culturally different othered group within their homogeneous middle-classed setting makes their fight for control over their narrative all the more decisive and life saving.