1/29/2024 0 Comments Apocalypse cow by michael logan![]() Nonetheless, although Logan and Westerfeld adopt a critical approach in some respects, their texts also demonstrate that metaphors of zombie and vampire infections can be used as vehicles for glorification as well as pathologization even as zombie and vampire epidemics stand in for perceived social ills, they may also reproduce metanarratives that represent infectious masculine consumption as a necessary component of human life. Insofar as the masculine subjects pathologized in these novels are white, middle-class, heterosexual young men, these texts also challenge the “default” status of normative identities. As works of satire, these novels expose implicit narrative conventions associated with masculinity, flesh-eating, and disease. Michael Logan’s 2012 zombie parody Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 pseudo-vampire novel Peeps highlight the potential for zombie and vampire infections to offer commentary on adolescent masculinity. ![]() Adolescent masculinity becomes subject to scrutiny, and the frequently invisible discourses that contribute to contemporary understandings of male subjectivity become apparent. ![]() Where zombies and vampires are represented as the result of an infection, these fears and anxieties manifest themselves in processes of pathologization. Not all zombie and vampire narratives explore adolescent masculinity as a central theme, but the above homologies ensure that, where these narratives do focus on young male subjects, zombie and vampire texts are primed to respond to a plethora of fears and anxieties about the nature of contemporary adolescent masculinity. The inherent stasis of zombie and vampire figures-undead and unable to age-parallels current cultural anxieties that young men are unable to transition from adolescence to adulthood (see Kimmel 4–6). The grotesque act of consuming a human subject as food can reflect assumptions that teenage boys are themselves inherently grotesque, and narratives that associate flesh-eating with the formation of masculine sexual identity are salient in Western mainstream media (see Wannamaker 31 Adams, Sexual 33). The flesh and/or blood consumption that typifies zombie and vampire fictions resonates with a number of prevalent discourses of masculinity in Western cultures. When it comes to the consumptive aspect of these fantastic infections, however, the critical literature focuses overwhelmingly on capitalist greed (often within the context of race) as the primary metaphorical referent (Bakke 403 Boluk and Lenz 136, 142 Comaroff and Comaroff 780–83 Jen 120 Schneider 155–57).Ĭonsumption itself is potentially as multivalent as the concept of plague in which it is embedded, and, in the context of zombie and vampire infections, it is a particularly apt platform for contemporary dialogues about adolescent masculinity. Contemporary scholarship in literary and cultural studies reflects this observation: zombie plagues and non-supernatural vampire infections have been explored as metaphors for varying intersections of capitalism, race relations, global politics, gender, and media within the contexts of hero narratives, representations of otherness, and anxieties about personal and global intersubjectivities (see, for example, Bakke Boluk and Lenz Cameron Comaroff and Comaroff Jen Schneider). In their discussion of plagues in English literature, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz observe that fictional epidemics act as multivalent metaphors that encapsulate numerous cultural anxieties and contradictions (135–36).
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