Why is the zombie apocalypse so terrible for women? Gender, militarism, and ontological insecurity at the end of the world

ABSTRACT

This article explores militarism as a function of, and response to, ontological insecurity through speculative fictions of a zombie apocalypse, specifically the 2013 film World War Z (WWZ). It begins with the question: why is the zombie apocalypse so terrible for women? The zombie apocalypse genre relies on existing political and social conditions to articulate anxieties and vulnerabilities and to present avenues for resistance or, as I argue is the case for WWZ, to reassert the norms of dominant power structures as a kind of salvation. WWZ is a form of everyday theorizing that highlights the connections between militarism, gender, and ontological insecurity and that asserts the need to return to “traditional” (Western-centric, heteropatriarchal) values to save ourselves. The article presents the zombie as a knowledge system, analyzing the political work that the zombie does as a materialization of ontological insecurity and its reaffirmation of the necessity of a heteropatriarchal militarism and masculinist protection. Like many films in the genre, WWZ entrenches the necessity of a militarized response to the end days and relies on the trope of the “Just Warrior,” here supported by international institutions, to save the day.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• militarism
• ontological insecurity
• popular culture
• zombies

Introduction

Nominally based on the 2006 novel by Max Brooks, the film World War Z (WWZ) (Forster 2013) opens with a series of short, refracted shots of tides, wind, bird migrations, and morning commutes. It is an introduction to a banal world, with scenes of everyday movement and flow, but visually distorted and set to a background chatter of morning news reports that promise headlines and weather forecasts. The shots begin to transition to scenes of decomposition and consumption, disasters of the Anthropocene juxtaposed with news reports that first introduce audiences to the existence of a novel virus. The opening scene situates the impending disaster of the film, the zombie apocalypse, within the real impending disasters that the audience faces away from the screen, framing the narrative through a pervasive and existential insecurity over our vulnerability to a changing planet. As the film unfolds, and indeed as the title suggests, this anxiety is addressed through a militarized operation led by the United States (US) reliant on gendered divisions of labor.

Ten years after the cinematic release of WWZ, we find ourselves gradually emerging from another “real-world” crisis: the pandemic of a novel virus that also prompted gendered and militarized responses, from using the military to coordinate lockdowns and mass testing to providing a discursive foundation for the justification of “necessary, but extraordinarily invasive, legislative measures” (Gillis 2020, 136), which have also had significant racialized and gendered impacts (see Wright, Haastrup, and Guerrina 2021). Like the infected of WWZ, COVID-19 was positioned as “the enemy” with which we were all “at war,” either as “heroes” at the “front lines” of health care and essential services or on “the home-front” (Gillis 2020, 139). It is worth considering how insecurity, militarism, and gender are invoked in crisis discursively and normalized through popular culture. Popular culture creates the conditions of possibility for what is intelligible, thinkable, and doable politically; it is co-constitutive of the political. In illustrating these claims, this article highlights the critical positions of gender, heteronormativity, and militarism in the zombie apocalypse and the ways in which responses to the insecurity produced by the zombie make possible similar responses to “real-world” threats.

In this article, I examine WWZ and its position within the wider genre of apocalyptic horror films. I read WWZ as primarily an expression of ontological insecurity that produces gendered, militarized effects. The article considers the zombie as a knowledge system, examining the political work the cinematic zombie apocalypse does. It proceeds in three parts. First, I provide an overview of the literature on politics and popular culture, specifically speculative genres, horror, and zombies. Second, I discuss the relationship between zombies and ontological insecurity, arguing that the zombie apocalypse narrative allows for the discursive exploration of ontological insecurity. Third, I illustrate how the anxiety produced by ontological insecurity provokes a response that is both militarized and gendered, creating a catharsis whereby “normal” patriarchal order is restored through the triumph of a “Just Warrior” masculinity supported by a “Beautiful Soul” femininity (Elshtain 1982).

Like the world invaded by zombies, this analysis is layered, exploring and describing the complex constellation of power, fear, and martial politics that circulates within the zombie genre. The zombie allows us to interrogate the mutually constitutive relationships between ontological insecurity, gender, and militarism, and their effects. Therefore, to speak of the zombie as a knowledge system is to view the political figure of the zombie as a constellation of meanings and signifiers and to explore the matrixes of power that the zombie implicitly embodies and reproduces. This enables us to capture the complexity, the messiness, of our (in)secure relationships to the self, the Other, and the international, and how these relationships are explored, normalized, or challenged across the variety of ways in which the zombie appears in popular culture. Here, in the case of WWZ, the zombie-as-knowledge-system also allows us to see how gender and militarism fit into this complex landscape. In taking seriously the productive power of popular culture in creating conditions of possibility for political action, this article contributes to wider understandings of the international politics of gender.

Aaahh!!! Real monsters¹: popular culture, world politics, and zombies

The field of popular culture and world politics (PCWP) has been a site of robust analysis of and engagement with the ways in which popular culture both represents and reproduces the world. Popular culture can be a powerful tool for understanding, as well as making, the political (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009). Researching, teaching, and learning world politics through popular culture can “unsettle” the disciplinary boundaries of international relations by eschewing discrete categorizations, allowing us to develop a richer understanding of the world (Clapton and Shepherd 2017, 6) and to understand how power shapes our political and social worlds (Holland 2019, 57). Popular culture offers a way of making sense of the world through different lenses, one that may be more democratic and more deeply connected to everyday life (Carver 2010, 427).

We make sense of the world, and world politics, through everyday narratives and encounters (see Rowley 2010; Shepherd 2013). The knowledge produced in the study of these narratives and encounters enables us to find new ways to understand the problems of politics and to consider how our “representational habits” shape the political (Bleiker 2001, 526) – and, in turn, to create space for imagining new possibilities. This speaks to the role of popular culture as productive of the political, not merely representative of it. The stories that we tell and are told are key to understanding who “we” are and where we are in the world (Grayson 2013); the US, for instance, uses narrative and story to build and maintain the cohesion of its national identity (see Armstrong 2019; Campbell 1992; Holland 2019; Weber 2006). Popular culture can also reproduce (and therefore disguise) as “common sense” (Bleiker 2001) configurations of power. Studying it gives us a fuller picture of the political world, particularly where it challenges narrow understandings of common sense.

This article focuses on the ways in which horror, and in particular zombie horror, contributes to the PCWP field. The specific politics of the horror genre requires more engagement in PCWP, particularly given its role in articulating, policing, and, at times, resisting social taboos and norms. Here, I focus on the contributions to PCWP of horror narratives, in particular the zombie apocalypse film WWZ and its role in the production of ontological security through the eventual defeat of the zombie. Horror films are vehicles of affect; Tim Aistrope and Stefanie Fishel (2020, 3) argue “simply, the horror genre intends to horrify.” In an examination of post-millennial torture-horror, Xavier Aldana Reyes (2012, 14) argues that the brutality and extremity of these films intentionally capture “the hyper-activated affective reality of the twenty-first century.” While individual viewers may experience the horrors on screen differently, the “desired effect” (Carroll in Reyes 2012, 16) of horror films is to, in some way, provoke fear. Within the genre of horror, apocalyptic narratives can provide important catharsis for the existential uncertainty of a world in peril, and horror can both provoke and resolve our fears, and so the affective power of these artifacts makes them important for understanding their role in the political (see Armstrong 2019; Nelson 2005). They are a means by which audiences can make sense of experiences, anxieties, and possibilities that are unsettling or frightening and speculate as to potential courses of action. They may also present solutions through the reassertion of certain political and social norms; in the case of WWZ, militarism and normative, gendered divisions of labor are presented as a kind of salvation from ontological insecurity. In this way, WWZ offers important contributions to our understanding of PCWP. While militarism has consistently been a feature of narratives that, for instance, produce particular imaginaries of the state (Weber 2006), WWZ also offers us a look at the gendered relationship between militarism and ontological (in)security.

Militarism “refers to a complex package of ideas that, all together, foster military values in both military and civilian affairs” (Enloe 2007, 11). Two ideas stand out in this “complex package”: first, “the belief that men are natural protectors and that women should be grateful for manly protection,” and second, “the belief that in human affairs it is natural to have enemies.” Militarization refers to the process by which militarism becomes embedded deeply in society (Enloe 2007, 11); a person, a community, or a state can become militarized as the ideas of militarism become increasingly normalized. In aligning militarism with the shoring up of ontological security, WWZ is a vehicle for what Victoria Basham (2018, 34) highlights as a process of legitimization that is essential for the militarization of liberal societies, which normalizes and naturalizes militarism as necessary for protection against threat. It works through the banal practices of everyday life (Basham 2018), including popular culture, which creates a sense of war as “normal and even desirable” (Chisholm and Ketola 2020, 2).

Militarism features strongly in WWZ, as there is an unspoken, natural assumption in the film that the best – and in fact only – response to the zombie outbreak is one of total war. The militarism of WWZ produces an understanding of violence as a natural response to ontological insecurity. In brief, ontological security is the state of stability of self; it is a coherent story of the self that is stably bounded against the non-self/Other. It is a “fundamental sense of safety in the world” (Giddens in Shani 2017, 276) and sustains the self’s “capacity for agency” (Mitzen 2006, 344). Ontological security relies on our belief in the socio-political world “in which we are embedded and through which our self-identity is constituted” (Rossdale 2015, 372). To be ontologically insecure is to lose the sense of boundary between self and Other and to be at risk of that boundary’s permeation. The function of ontological (in)security and its negotiation in popular culture has gained scholarly attention (Innes 2017). In this article, I contribute to this body of work by considering its relationship to gender and militarism, with specific discussions of the Just Warrior/Beautiful Soul (Elshtain 1982) and the logic of masculinist protection (Young 2003).

The political life and work of the zombie

As we know it today, the zombie has been effectively whitewashed in an attempt to obscure its origins in colonial Haiti. The Haitian zombi, now “‘cannibalized’ by Western film and horror mythology” (Lauro and Embry 2008, 96), is a slave, embodying “the appropriation of labour and life under colonial slavery” (Lauro 2017, x). The contemporary zombie continues to tell stories of suffering: “the monstrous aspects of neoliberal capitalism, the emptiness of consumerism, the disposability of people, and our reckless use of earth’s finite resources” (Fishel and Wilcox 2017, 336; see also Lanzendörfer 2014; Sugg 2015). The zombie speaks to fears tangible – “contagion, disease, death” (Fishel and Wilcox 2017, 336) – and less tangible, such as the loss of self (Lauro and Embry 2008, 397).

The zombie tells these stories, however, while remaining rooted in its past, regardless of any attempted whitewashing; as Stefanie Fishel and Lauren Wilcox (2017, 340) argue, the zombie “exists both as a racialised figure in its origins in Haitian culture, as well as a figure of extermination” that must itself be exterminated. So intrinsic is the zombie’s Otherness that its necessary destruction goes unquestioned. Gerry Canavan (2017, 418) adds that zombies are best understood as being under a “colonial gaze,” whereby they are afforded no agency and no power, but exist only to be seen, to be feared, and to be wiped out (Rieder cited in Canavan 2017, 418). Canavan (2017, 418) connects this to Michel Foucault’s understanding of state racism in the biopolitical, where the zombie is a “hyperreal metamorphization of the racial logic” that forms the boundary between the civilized/subject and the uncivilized/bare life. Zombies, in line with Fishel and Wilcox (2017), allow for the violent extermination of the Other without having to confront its reality in society (Canavan 2017, 420).

The zombie has transformed over the years from its physical being-in-the-world to what it represents. The film 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002) brought audiences the “sprinter” – as opposed to the classically slow “shambler” – zombie. Sprinters represent a different kind of zombie threat; they are fast, strong, and more or less alive as the “infected” (Dendle 2012, 5–6). Reyes (2012, 14) notes that the “speeded up” zombie, as the product of a virus, is removed from its supernatural origins. Indeed, the sprinter is a substantial shift from the reanimated corpse of the shambler and, further still, from its origins in the zombi. The shambler is devoid of feeling and mindless, stripped of “passion”; the sprinter, by contrast, is “a brute creature of pure desire,” or our “truest self underneath the veneer of socialised behaviour” (Dendle 2012, 6). While the sprinter retains critical elements of zombieness, in that it sits on the boundary between life and death, it represents a significant departure from its roots and one that speaks to its contemporary era. We are less confronted with the individual terror of the zombie than directed toward the total destruction caused by masses of zombies. If the shambler depicts a being stripped of agency and power, the sprinter represents a being stripped of social control; the sprinter is as powerless as the shambler but more acutely in need of the civilizing effects of society to stem its overwhelming rage. WWZ represents the zombie as a sprinter whose apocalyptic effect requires containment through a militarized response that relies on and simultaneously re-entrenches normative gender roles.

The zombie does a considerable amount of work in popular culture as an embodiment of deeply existential fears. It is a thing that will end us, but also a boundary figure between the living and the dead, destroying even that most basic understanding of ourselves as mortal beings that will die. The zombie is, and stands for, an existential threat, materializing those things that threaten to destabilize – or destroy – the status quo. Thus, the zombie can be understood as a knowledge system; it is never entirely separate from its logics of race, gender, and colonialism, nor from its representations of interconnected threats (such as climate collapse and neoliberal capitalism). The remainder of this article applies the zombie-as-knowledge-system to a discussion of WWZ. The film uses the zombie as a means to confront our extinction and present possibilities for salvation. These possibilities include reliance on international institutions, on violence as the only thinkable solution, and on particular heteronormative understandings of gender and especially of the family. The civilizing mission of the heteropatriarchal family and war will be what prevents our demise.

Encountering the zombie: methods of analyzing WWZ

In brief, WWZ tells the story of Gerry Lane, a former United Nations (UN) investigator who left his job to remain home with his family. We are introduced to Gerry, his wife Karin, and their two daughters, on the day that a zombie plague breaks out in Philadelphia. We follow the family as they flee the city through chaos and confusion to nearby New Jersey, where they are evacuated by the UN after rescuing a young boy named Tomás. To keep his family safe aboard the USS Argus, an aircraft carrier serving as a temporary UN command center, Gerry joins an international effort led by the US military and the UN under Captain Mullenaro and Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni, respectively. Gerry then travels to Camp Humphreys, a US Army base in South Korea, with Harvard virologist Dr Andrew Fassbach to discover the origin of the zombie virus. Following Dr Fassbach’s accidental death, Gerry continues the search by heading first to Jerusalem and then to a World Health Organization (WHO) facility in Cardiff, Wales, in the company of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier, Segen. It is at the WHO facility that a “cure” for the zombie plague is discovered.

At first glance, WWZ does not appear to offer significant novelty within the zombie genre. Key themes and dynamics that are familiar to audiences re-emerge, particularly the reassertion of normative gendered roles, which is unsurprising given the film’s Hollywood blockbuster status. However, there are some less common, more interesting elements in WWZ, including its positive depiction of international institutions. Not all zombie films ignore the potential involvement of such institutions, but rarely are they successful in the zombie war, and the emphasis tends to remain on individual characters and individual survival, entrenching narratives of violence in response to threat. While WWZ does reinforce and reproduce the understandings of militarism familiar to the genre, it also articulates an optimism around the relationship between militarism and international institutions, suggesting that together these will save us, in contrast to the self-help approach to survival typical of other zombie films. Likewise, that humanity relies on masculine protectors from the zombie threat is not novel to WWZ, but the form that that masculinist protection takes is an interesting one. Crucially, it is not only these subtle novelties that make WWZ an important artifact for examination; rather, it is an important artifact because it illustrates how specific configurations of power are reproduced as normal, natural, and desirable through the blockbuster film.

This research began with a narrative read of the film WWZ, taken as a cohesive story and paying careful attention to the emotions, thoughts, and affects produced by the film as it was viewed as a consumer in the first instance. This is in line with Norman Denzin’s (2004, 241) “phase one” of critical visual research, “looking and feeling.” It is also inspired by two key insights: Roland Bleiker’s (2001, 520) argument for attention to be paid to the experiences produced through aesthetics, and Linda Åhäll’s (2018) affect as methodology. Like Jack Holland (2019, 82), I consider affect as largely non-conscious, or pre-conscious, and embodied; Holland specifically references “the crawling of the skin” by way of illustration. Considering affect as both the vehicle for discursive production and as a starting point for investigation meant tracing the unsettled feelings that zombie films elicited, asking questions about why I found myself squirming in my cinema seat. Following Åhäll’s (2018) affective dissonance and Cynthia Enloe’s (2004) feminist curiosity, the research began with the observation that in popular culture, the end days often mean a return to “traditional” and binary gender norms for women and men. It began from an unsettled place of asking the question: why is the zombie apocalypse so terrible for women? It interrogates what is taken for granted (Åhäll 2018, 297) about violence, militarism, and gender in the logic of the apocalypse and the extent to which what is both told and untold in these stories supports gendered and racialized power dynamics.

To explore these questions and feelings, I returned to a deep reading of the film to follow what stories were being told or not being told and where these emphases or erasures created a feeling of unease. This approach makes use of Holland’s (2019, 86) method of analyzing fictional television, as well as Denzin’s (2004, 242), but with a specific concentration on dominant narratives within WWZ and their affective impacts. From there, I engaged with key affective “sticking points” (the function of normative gender hierarchies, the function of militarism with respect to liberal international institutionalism, and ontological insecurity) through feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (FPDA). Judith Baxter (2008) defines FPDA as drawing on poststructuralist concerns with the complexities and entanglements of power and its discursive production, with particular attention to the ways in which gender serves as a dominant discourse. FPDA allows us to explore how these affective sticking points knit together to produce complex relations of power and subjects that are dynamic and multiply located (Baxter 2002). Its application here required careful attention to the ways in which gender and militarism functions within the matrix of insecurities in WWZ and to what is produced as natural and desirable, as well as what is silenced or excluded.

This analysis prompted the understanding of the zombie as a knowledge system, a dense matrix of power relations that are discursively produced as natural or common sense and that rely on violent exclusions and abandonments. The zombie itself is a site of confrontation with the Other, and through its extermination, the self is rendered ontologically secure. That the zombie has evolved over time from shambler to sprinter is important to this system as it suggests anxiety over the precarity of civilization itself and reveals that which must be contained and/or destroyed in order for civilization to prevail. The zombie carries these histories into specific cultural moments unspoken – as a presupposition (Åhäll and Borg 2013, 199); it stands for background knowledge that allows for the naturalization of discourse. In WWZ, the zombie is not interrogated or apprehended as a political subject; it is a horror that must be destroyed and, as such, a vehicle for the triumphs of specific configurations of power. Therefore, while there are some novel elements to the story, what makes WWZ interesting for examination is not what makes it stand out from the crowd; rather, it is its banality. It reveals the political work of the zombie as we understand it today.

Zombie insecurities

Though fantastical, zombies occupy a real space in our imagination(s) as they embody fears and anxieties through their racialized origins, their gendered effects in the apocalyptic landscapes that they produce, and their ability to collapse civilizations. The zombie-as-knowledge-system reveals how the figure of the zombie materializes multiple layers of ontological insecurity and allows us to think through these concepts together. Chris Rossdale (2015, 370) highlights that the pursuit of ontological security typically produces exclusions between self and Other. These exclusions are dispersed through media and popular culture and become “sedimented” (Agius, Bergman Rosamond, and Kinnvall 2020, 438–439). The zombie is the excluded Other outside the bounds of the self that seeks ontological security. WWZ, as a kind of “ontological security-providing narrative” (Rossdale 2015, 370), normalizes the violent exclusion of the Other by depicting a successful response to the total threat of the zombie in the form of aggressive military action (which also leaves much of the population to fend for itself in the meantime). The film portrays the triumph of certain states and/as part of the liberal international community over the existential threat of the zombie, and certain kinds of masculinities that protect certain kinds of families. In this way, WWZ communicates normative understandings and worldviews of how the international should be governed and who is best positioned to protect others (and who is therefore responsible for such protection), and legitimizes war as a response to threat.

This leads to the question of what threat the zombie war secures us against. Katherine Sugg (2015, 793) argues that “contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central ‘crises’: late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity.” The ontological insecurity that the zombie embodies, and for which it is a vector, challenges liberal assumptions of a self-possessed (self-contained), stable, bounded, rational, and masculine subject and the liberal societies that this creates. When zombies strike, the collapse of these liberal (Western)² societies and civilizations is swift and near total. In WWZ, within the first night, we witness the rapid descent into panic and the necessity of self-help in the chaos and violence of a Newark, New Jersey grocery store. We watch as a police officer, charged with the maintenance of law and order, jogs past the visibly armed Gerry moments after Karin is attacked to load a shopping bag with baby supplies. This is a common theme in apocalypse narratives: the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the disaster(s) leading to a Hobbesian state of nature. What we imagine to be a robust, stable civilization can be taken down, and fast, by a single destabilizing element. Apocalyptic visions of the future can help to articulate present anxieties and offer hypothetical responses; they create a space for an imaginary future in which characters map out a means of survival. Such visions allow audiences to imagine themselves in the narrative and, therefore, produce certain kinds of normative, legitimate responses.

However, in WWZ, the aggressive, militarized response to the zombie threat, led by a particularly masculinized hero figure, departs in some ways from other examples of the genre. Gerry, though reluctant to leave his family in pursuit of a zombie cure, does not ultimately seek individual survival; his is not merely a mission of self-help. While his family’s safety is his motivation, he is a representative of the UN working with other organizations responsible for maintaining order: the US military and later the WHO. WWZ is less about individual survivalists and more about the impact of the individual hero on a coordinated international response. It suggests the limits of self-help narratives for both individuals and states; in other words, it challenges neoliberal understandings of the individual as responsible for their own survival and realist understandings of the international that center the state as an isolated actor. WWZ is a story of the securing and preservation of the liberal world order rather than a story solely of individual struggles for survival in the absence of state protection or even a story of securing the state in isolation. However, this securing and preservation is only possible through military action; the fight to regain ontological security remains a violent one.

WWZ tells the story of what those in other zombie fictions assume is happening in the early stages of the outbreak – that control over the crisis will be established, and that help is on the way. WWZ reassures audiences that control over the apocalypse will be achieved through a combination of a militaristic response, international cooperation (led by the US), and a heroic figure supported by the family that he is attempting to protect. There is a sense of desire and longing in these depictions of US-led protection against and extermination of zombies in WWZ; here, the zombie-as-knowledge-system can expose the gendered and racialized preoccupations within this desire through who and what is enabled to survive. There is a primacy placed on a specific, heteropatriarchal vision of the nuclear family that needs saving and is the reason for the fight for survival. This protection fantasy expands beyond the family as state security forces become the providers of protection and safety for the “family” of the nation. There is also a fantasy that speaks to what Iris Marion Young (2003, 2) calls a logic of masculinist protection, whereby citizens submit to the protection of the state “like that of women in the patriarchal household.” We are reminded of this willful submission when Gerry prepares to leave the USS Argus, and Karin reassures him that they will make the best of the situation.

“We can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back”³

As a process, militarization is intimately tied to gender; gendered power and gendered hierarchies are causal variables in making war and militarization possible (Cockburn 2010). Gender and the hierarchies, roles, and divisions of labor that it produces are inherently unstable (see Butler 1990, 1993). However, the stability of the liberal world order is policed and maintained by an assumed “natural” gendered order, and the destabilization of this gendered order in contemporary society produces the ontological insecurity that films like WWZ attempt to navigate and resolve (see Sugg 2015). They do this through their reassertion of these “traditional,” “natural” orders to ensure survival in an apocalyptic landscape. Most zombie narratives remain unable to imagine possible futures in which the apocalypse does not inevitably mean a nearly immediate return to “traditional” gendered divisions of labor (see Sugg 2015).

In WWZ, we are introduced to what feels like a modern, emancipated gendered vision of family life in the opening scene; Gerry is the primary caregiver in the family and the household, having left his dangerous job with the UN. Importance is immediately placed on the Lane family and Gerry’s role within it, as we are introduced to the family in a scene representing a kind of heteronormative domestic bliss: Gerry making pancakes for his children and wife at the start of their day. We also learn of Gerry’s former job as he explains the concept of martial law to his youngest daughter and denies that he misses his old job, despite her teasing remark that “all you do [now] is make pancakes.” Later, aboard the USS Argus, Karin reminds Gerry that he left his job to protect his family from its traumatic impacts. Once the zombies strike, however, this is undone, and Karin remains with the children as Gerry travels the world in search of the key to eliminating the zombie threat. This suggests that WWZ, like so much of the zombie genre, functions to stabilize gender roles in a time when “traditional” gender roles have been increasingly destabilized. This return is, interestingly, informed by the more “progressive” gendered order depicted at the outset of the film; Gerry is neither aggressive nor violent, but first and foremost a family man who will give up his career to protect his family and fight for their survival when necessary. Through Gerry, ontological security is restored through particular gendered and militarized responses as he assumes his role as protector of the family and directs the international military action that secures civilization itself. The zombie allows for the restoration of gendered order in a time of threatening destabilization, but an order that still nods to its more contemporary evolutions.

The gendered order presented in WWZ relies on a binary division of labor between the Just Warrior and the Beautiful Soul (Elshtain 1982), two archetypes that emerge in “the victorious story States tell about wars” (Sjoberg 2010, 55). The Beautiful Soul, gendered feminine, is opposed to violence; she is the “pure, rarified, self-sacrificing, otherworldly and pacific Other” (Elshtain 1982, 342). In contrast is the Just Warrior, gendered masculine, “engaged in the regrettable but sometimes necessary task of collective violence in order to prevent some greater wrong” (Elshtain 1982, 343). The Just Warrior’s participation in violence is reluctant but definitive, and he makes his sacrifice to protect “(his) (innocent) women” (Sjoberg 2010, 55). The Beautiful Soul, herself not a participant in the violence, supports the Just Warrior in his righteous cause (Elshtain 1982), but also becomes the reason for the fighting itself, and women who embody the Beautiful Soul continue to be used as justification for war across a wide range of historical and cultural spaces (Sjoberg 2010). As the protected, the Beautiful Soul is in a position of dependence and obedience (Young 2003, 2). This also provides a justification for the division between the feminized private sphere and the public sphere of martial politics (Sjoberg 2010, 57).

The archetypes of the Just Warrior and the Beautiful Soul feature strongly in WWZ as the driving force behind the film’s narrative (zombies aside). That Gerry sacrifices his personal safety to join the fight against the zombies is justified by his desire to ensure the safety of his family; that he participates at all is justified by the assurances of the UN and the US military that his family will be housed safely aboard the USS Argus while he investigates the source of the zombie outbreak. The validity of Gerry’s choice is understood because of his position as a patriarch, while his wife stays behind to be protected and, in turn, to protect the couple’s children. While Karin initially protests against Gerry’s involvement, she relents as soon as she understands his motive to be the protection of the family, vowing to “make the best of it.” Her relentlessly optimistic approach to the zombie apocalypse is core to her character, and she jokingly observes that the barrack-style room with shared bunk beds to which her family is moved is bigger than a previous apartment that the couple shared. Karin’s forbearance in facing the adversity of the family’s situation enables Gerry to embark on his civilization-saving adventure; she maintains the family while awaiting Gerry’s safe return and gives him a reason to secure the vaccine. In other words, she embodies the Beautiful Soul to Gerry’s Just Warrior.

Karin herself reflects the tenuous position of the Beautiful Soul, as her inherent need to be protected ultimately renders her vulnerable. There is continued focus on her role before she is sent to a refugee camp, at which point we lose touch with her until the conclusion of the film. Karin is both the reason for Gerry’s participation in the zombie battle and a hindrance; it is her phone call to Gerry that leads to a zombie attack on Camp Humphreys and the subsequent death of several soldiers. Karin also reveals the precarious position of the Beautiful Soul in justifying the zombie war and maintaining the home front. When Gerry is “missing” for 48 hours, she and the children are sent to the refugee camp. No longer useful as motivation for Gerry, she becomes immediately expendable; there is no thought given to the fact that her husband’s presumed death was in service of a particularly dangerous mission, nor to any purpose that she might serve in the fight against the zombie, irrespective of her husband. Her sacrifice and Gerry’s are rendered meaningless almost at once.

“There is nowhere to evacuate you to”

Not all who encounter the zombie will be secured against it, and not everyone who resists the zombie will triumph. Some characters disrupt or otherwise disturb the order sought in the extermination of the zombie by occupying gendered spaces beyond the Just Warrior/Beautiful Soul binary and are ultimately punished for these transgressions. One is Dr Fassbach, a virologist thought at first to be crucial to humanity’s survival. He is proven to be replaceable following his accidental shooting death as he flees zombies. After his death, Gerry’s memories of Dr Fassbach’s words prove crucial in solving the puzzle of the “cure” for the zombie outbreak. However, Dr Fassbach’s inability to defend himself and his inexperience with weapons and inaptitude for violence result in his death, and, for some tense moments, humanity’s survival hangs in the balance. The moral of Dr Fassbach’s story is that while these (masculine) intellectuals are useful, they are unlikely to be the key to our survival and, in fact, may be unable to ensure their own survival; they too rely on the Just Warrior.

The film makes a point of focusing on one woman, Segen, the IDF soldier. While Segen proves herself to be both strategically important and courageous, her treatment within the film is uneven and awkward. Initially, she is charged with getting Gerry safely out of Jerusalem when the city’s walls are overrun. She inadvertently shows that a quick enough reaction and the removal of a bitten limb can save a person from becoming a zombie when she has her own arm cut off below the elbow after a bite. At this point, the tables turn for Segen, who moves from being Gerry’s protector to relying on him for a safe escape from Jerusalem. She maintains that this injury makes her a liability to Gerry, but it and her self-doubt trigger a memory of Gerry’s earlier conversation with Dr Fassbach. Segen thus becomes a significant piece in solving the puzzle of how to defeat the zombies, but this is only tangentially related to her role as a soldier and instead comes about because of her need to be protected. She is quickly reduced to a role of dependency that further drives Gerry toward establishing a cure for the zombie plague. Both Segen and Dr Fassbach highlight that the triumphant man in WWZ is the “Goldilocks” combination of the militarized man who is also a loving husband and father. The triumphant woman is the Beautiful Soul who supports her Just Warrior from afar and maintains the home front, in the form of the family, as he fights to protect her.

There are some for whom the “normal” way of life, the status quo upheld in the extermination of the zombie, was never conducive to survival, but their stories are not often told in zombie narratives. WWZ does reveal that certain kinds of families may survive the zombie threat while others will not. To occupy normative gender roles is not enough to guarantee survival, and here we see how the knowledge system of the zombie reveals itself to be not only gendered but racialized. We are introduced to one family that serves as a foil to the Lanes when they shelter them in their Newark apartment. The family’s young son, Tomás, is the only named member, and we see him translate Gerry’s pleas to evacuate for his father. Gerry explains to Tomás’ father that he has expertise in and experience of desperate situations and that they need to keep moving; this directive is the only phrase that Gerry says in the family’s native Spanish. Despite his wife’s arguments, Tomás’ father refuses to leave with the Lanes. The Lanes then rescue Tomás when his parents become zombies, and he is integrated into the family; Tomás is charged with “taking care of the ladies” for Gerry when he leaves the aircraft carrier. Understanding the zombie as a knowledge system reveals the ways in which this interaction is informed by gendered and racialized hierarchies; Tomás’ family is positioned outside the hegemonic whiteness of the Lanes, and Tomás’ father does not display Gerry’s protectionist qualities and refuses his advice, for which he and his wife are punished. Tomás’ parents are sacrificed to the zombies so that Tomás, who is brought into the Lane family, may survive.

Conclusion: the call is coming from inside the house

WWZ emerges from a sense of anxiety. When we read artifacts such as WWZ with attention to what they reproduce and normalize, through the zombie-as-knowledge-system, we can understand negotiations of ontological insecurity as they are enmeshed with gender and race and remain attuned to what responses they render intelligible and possible. Here we can see the ways in which anxieties over how (Western) civilization survives the overwhelming threat of the zombie are materialized and resolved. The zombie reveals what and who is considered necessary for civilization to survive, as well as who will be abandoned. The sense of “contemporary feminism as a threat to the male self” (Agius, Bergman Rosamond, and Kinnvall 2020, 438) comes through in the negotiation of a kind of masculinity that is responsive to changes in gender norms and expectations but still positions masculinity as a savior. Gerry’s initial role as the primary caregiver informs his ability and motivation to rise to the challenge of saving the world. The violence of the film is treated as inevitable and justified as it is filtered through a scrim of gentleness, affection, and familial love.

PCWP pushes us to explore the relationship between popular culture and the “real world”; recognizing this relationship is important for seeing how popular culture co-constitutes the political and the social. WWZ presents a kind of salvation in the face of the ontological insecurity of the liberal international order through the internationally backed, US-led military response to the zombie crisis. We see this in the exclusive focus on prominent military allies of the US (South Korea, Israel, and the UK), to the exclusion of other parts of the world, and on international institutions in which the US maintains (or perhaps maintained) significant influence (the UN and the WHO). This represents the US as part of an important network of international institutions, but as its most powerful member and the one that ultimately drives the successful effort against the zombies. The zombie allows us to see how gender and militarism are deployed in the face of ontological insecurity in the fantasy space and to question how this normalization may function off-screen. WWZ captures the gendered preoccupations of national and international security more broadly and the expectation of the inevitable return to gendered social orders in the face of global collapse. It reveals and reproduces a normalization of a “natural,” “traditional” gender order and speaks to a kind of “civilizing mission” against the rage of the sprinter zombie to ensure the survival and continuity of a militarized international liberalism.

In addition to what these narratives reproduce and normalize, we can also begin to consider what is made possible and thinkable through such narratives – for instance, the need to secure the ontologically insecure, and the acceptance of violence in the service and protection of some at the expense of others. As Sugg (2015) argues, the zombie apocalypse centers masculinized narratives that position the basic conditions of survival alongside the return to particular gendered and racialized hierarchies of social power. Hard-fought emancipations evaporate in the face of the end times, as natural orders are reasserted. Civilization survives because of a masculine hero supported by his feminine bride. This opens up space for the conceptualization of these kinds of violence as necessary and desirable in the face of existential threat – zombie or otherwise. An answer, therefore, to the question of what makes the zombie apocalypse so terrible for women is that it reveals the fragility of emancipatory progress, particularly where ontological security is threatened.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wonderful colleagues Hannah Baumeister, Julian Schmid, Benjamin Gibson, Victoria Basham, and James Crossland, as well as the participants in the IFJP Annual Conference 2021, European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) 2021, and Popular Culture and World Politics v13, 2022, and the incredible women in security writing group. I also thank the editors and reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Megan A. Armstrong

Megan Armstrong joined Newcastle University, UK, as a Lecturer in International Politics in September 2022. Previously, she held positions at Liverpool John Moores University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Birmingham, all in the UK. Her research asks two broad questions: (1) what makes violence possible? and (2) what makes peace sustainable? Her ongoing research is located at the intersection of critical international relations theory and feminist security studies, and her research interests include violent identity politics, popular culture, queer international relations, and critical military studies.

Notes

1 This is the title of a children’s television series that aired on Nickelodeon (Games Animation 1994–1997).

2 The impact on other countries is not well illustrated in the film. There is a discussion of the response of North Korea, which involves what one character refers to as “the greatest feat of social engineering in history,” whereby all North Korean citizens have their teeth removed to prevent the spread of the virus through a bite. This feeds, and relies on, a narrative of the brutality of those states that do not fit the model of Western liberal democracy.

3 This comment is made by Dr Ellie Satler in Jurassic Park (Spielberg 1993).