Ain’t I a Woman? Representations of Sistadom in the Zombie Apocalypse

I’m not afraid to admit that I am a huge zombie genre fan. There, I said it. But I’m also a bit of a zombie snob; I’m not a huge fan of some of the older, cornier zombie films made by few popular genre directors, I’m not fond of badly dubbed films or those featuring zombies wrestling sharks, or other such nonsense. Regardless, I’ve watched (and read) a lot of zombie entertainment over my lifetime.

As a young girl I was first introduced to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead by my mother decades after its original theatrical release. To my 12-year-old delight, not only did this film represent everything that was vintage and horror, two of the best qualities a modern film could offer my blossoming sensibilities, but also the protagonist was a commanding, eloquent black American man. Though I was a child, Romero’s progressive manoeuvres weren’t lost on me. To daringly cast Duane Jones as Ben, the protagonist charged with the care of the near-catatonic, Barbara (Judith O’dea), in 1968 seemed tantamount to tipping everything typical about everyday American life over on its head. One would be hard pressed in Romero’s day or even my childhood, to find a handful of protagonists, or real black American heroes represented in American media; in films, black men weren’t heroes, weren’t eloquent, and didn’t go toe to toe with ignorant bullies. At the time I didn’t need cultural theorist, Adorno, or terms like hegemony to recognise the phenomenon by observing the deficit: so few Duane Joneses in a sea of leading men. But Night of the Living Dead pronounced the power of film to express cultural anxieties and offer, as far as my 12-year-old sensibilities were concerned, alternatives to reinforcing the status quo. Add to that the fact that this film had, in its time, burst upon the film scene and ushered in a type of cinéma vérité-marries-horror style which showed in sharp relief against an arguably more stylized and staged mainstream backdrop of the horror genre, and I got hooked on zombie films for life.

Ben, Night of the Living Dead

While recently working on a dissertation on the popularity of zombie apocalypse entertainment, I came across interesting internal questions, some of which challenged some of my long-held perspectives on what I deemed to be some of the progressive qualities inherent in classics like Night of the Living Dead. While writing, after covering how zombie entertainment often expresses Western cultural anxieties over issues like urban crowding , disease, and government authority, I turned to the subject of how zombie apocalypse films represent different types of identity. I asked myself rudimentary questions like Who are the surviving characters? How do they see themselves and organize themselves? Who’s in charge in the absence of the government? What is this director or writer getting at and is it intentional? Apocalypse films are special in that they generally represent the breakdown of the usual, dominant social order. Film critical theorist, Robin Wood, is famous for broaching the redemptive possibilities in imagining the apocalyptic on film. You can learn a lot about how we Westerners see different kinds of people, and how we wish to represent ourselves and others given societal breakdown scenarios like those found in zombie films.  One of the big questions is, do these films tend to reinforce dominant social order or resist it? And what is the dominant social order?

Having viewed and wracked my brain over so much of this idea of identity in contemporary zombie lore, as I call it, one of the issues I came across concerns the representation of women in these films. Aside from the strong female lead in Romero's 1985 film, Day of the Dead, most mainstream female characters; white female characters, have not developed very much over the years. They range from the freaked out, useless Barbra (Judith O’Dea) in Night of the Living Dead, to a later Barbra (Patricia Tallman) in Savini’s 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, who spends most of the film being shaken and told to snap out of it by Ben (Tony Todd), until she finally grows a backbone.

Decades later, we find Ana (Sarah Polley), in Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead who exhibits very little character transformation when compared to her fellow survivors, including a drifter who becomes a leader, a cop who learns to balance his care of others with his own needs, a young thug who wants to start over to become a father, and a petty, mall security guard who becomes a selfless hero. Ana goes from being a caring, married nurse before the apocalypse, to a caring nurse and girlfriend of the group leader during the apocalypse. Ana possesses the same gentle nature as the overtly vulnerable, pregnant Francine (Gaylen Ross) in Romero’s 1978 original version of the film, who has to beg to be taught to use a firearm and fly a chopper. Overall, it seems that the contemporary norm is to represent women as eager to learn but still lacking leadership qualities. But there are exceptions.

More than noteworthy is that the two biggest exceptions to this rule enter through characters Selena (Naomie Harris) in Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and Michonne (Danai Gurira) in The Walking Dead TV series. Both characters are badass. Both wield sword-like weapons at undead zombie assailants; both can survive in the wild (one in the urban jungle of London; the other in the backwoods of Georgia); both are people you’d pick to have your back during the zombie apocalypse. But most notably, while one is British and the other is American, both women share a key commonality: they’re both black.

Selena, 28 Days Later 

Michonne, The Walking Dead

 While I adore 28 Days Later, religiously watch The Walking Dead while hiding behind a pillow, enjoy both these characters and the lovely actresses who play them, I have been hesitant to wholly embrace these characters. Why? Because of one of the ways that black womanhood is represented and measured against the backdrop of whiteness.  

Follow me on this, and see if it makes sense: one element that film critical theorist, Richard Dyer, tackles is how whiteness in Western culture exists as a non-issue because it represents normality. What does that even mean? Well, Dyer asserts in his essay, White, that an established ‘white identity’ and ‘white culture’ elude definition and representation. Why is this relevant and what exactly does this mean? It means that cultural products like film help establish a passive normalization framework for whiteness, so that anything associated with whiteness, like white film and TV characters and their microcosms, is normalized. In film, white is normal: white neighborhoods, white neighbors and families, and white people in general represent averageness, and this is unspoken but ever-present in entertainment. Consequently, in entertainment, any character falling outside of that established normality like, say, a Latino corporate businessman, a quirky Asian buddy, or a black heroine get framed as unusual or abnormal.

This sense of abnormality of characters of color is something Dyer discusses in relation to the black protagonist, Ben (Jones), in Night of the Living Dead, who is super industrious, possesses ingenuity, but seems to come from nowhere, having no family ties, even when compared with human antagonists in the film. Elements like family ties and personal history make characters seem more average and normal and allow viewers to sympathize with them. In this way, Ben stands out uncomfortably in the film which, according to Romero, was never an intentional move (according to my interview with international film critic, Alan Jones; also see One for the Fire: The Legacy of Night of the Living Dead). Romero believed that simply casting Duane Jones was a progressive move, and for 1968 it was. But times have changed. It’s important to move beyond the conventions that writer, Paul Waldman champions; the era of diversity representation by having people of color simply show up to be counted. Taking a close look at postmodern characters like Selena and Michonne, it seems that they have been crafted in similar ways to Romero’s character, but include extra cultural baggage as well.

In the case of Selena in 28 Days Later, unlike her fellow survivors Jim (Cilian Murphy), Hannah (Betty Curse), and Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and even Mark (Noah Huntley), who occupies about five minutes of screen time before he bites the dust, Selena neither possesses, nor describes any family history. She’s also featured as aggressively against any possibility of romance with Jim until the very end of the film, only after she faces real peril against a pack of rogue military men. In an apocalypse film it’s rare to find a female ‘companion’ character with no mention of personal or family history and no establishment of romance with the male lead early in the film.

Michonne in The Walking Dead TV show is also a character lacking family history and romantic capacity, but to a more extreme degree. Michonne is introduced into the series carrying a sword and leading two zombies on neck collars and chains, but unlike the graphic novel version, the TV show so far has omitted the original back-story that her zombie ‘pets’ are actually what remains of her boyfriend and his best friend. The TV show also features Michonne juxtaposed against the conventional, blond beauty Andrea (Laurie Holden), a woman with whom we’re supposed to sympathize because she had to shoot her younger sister who was bitten and infected by a zombie early on in the series. In fact, we get plenty of back-story and family history for Andrea though, in general, Andrea as a character is problematic in a different way.  She’s represented on the show as being thirsty to exert muscle, secure perimeters, and shoot zombies to secure the camp, while actually proving to be a terrible markswoman and a stubborn-but-gullible character.

Michonne and Andrea become friends because Michonne helps Andrea survive in the woods (though we never see this enacted). The friendship, however, goes sour when Andrea uses her feminine wiles to become romantically involved with the rival leader and villain of the show, Governor Blake (David Morrissey), whom Michonne doesn’t trust. The fact that Andrea’s stats point towards her uselessness as a team member within the original group of survivors and her penchant for using her physical appearance to elevate her status in a new survivors’ camp, combined with the fact that a mainstream segment of the show’s viewing audience seems to empathize with and like Andrea reads as bad news; a stink bomb for the pro-womanist camp. The Los Angeles Times actually called Andrea "tough as nails". Does this point towards mainstream America’s value and normalization of the combined qualities of weakness and conventional attractiveness where white women are concerned?

While it’s arguable that Andrea is accepted in The Governor’s terrible camp because she’s weak and Michonne is rejected in that same camp because she’s strong, that doesn’t explain the viewing audience’s sympathy for a character like Andrea, or the fact that Michonne as a character, audience sympathy or not, seems estranged beyond the walls of The Governor’s camp.

In one or two awkward episodes, the parting of Michonne and Andrea is almost reminiscent of a heterosexual romantic breakup, with Andrea having to decide on whether to stay with The Governor or go with Michonne, who becomes primarily framed as a masculine figure competing for Andrea’s affections. The tone of this is punctuated by the fact that Michonne isn’t presented as a feminine figure at least, since she has no romantic interests or connections, and at most by the fact that the TV show skips a terrible episode from the graphic novel where The Governor rapes Michonne. While I hardly condone scenes of rape, to omit this sort of inherent female peril adds to the effect of magically erasing the reality of Michonne’s vulnerability; a vulnerability that a normal female character would automatically carry in the midst of an apocalyptic scenario.

So what makes mainstream entertainment like The Walking Dead so hesitant to paint black female characters as possessing normative female vulnerability? Cultural theorist Bell Hooks contends that America’s feminist movement which sought to ally itself with the black equality movement created an unfortunate by-product in the process. According to Hooks, a framework was established in the white female-black person alliance, wherein one is either a woman or black, so that those who are both black and female end up occupying an isolated cultural space in between womanhood and blackness, and get supported by neither movement.

Considering both Dyer and Hooks, it’s easy to understand why black female film and TV characters like Selena and Michonne are crafted in odd ways, and are permitted to function in ways usually reserved for male characters; their vulnerability is sacrificed, and they go beyond just resisting normal representations of womanhood in entertainment like a white ‘feminist’ character might. These black female characters aren’t considered to be members of traditional or normal womanhood or feminist womanhood, as they exist outside of each of these. It is implicit that writers and directors most often simply reflect whatever exists within the dominant social structure of a given culture. So, these sort of representations make me uncomfortable when I consider the real, historical implications of estranging black women from normative womanhood; what this has rationalized and left black Western women vulnerable to: being worked as physically hard as men while bearing the burden of all that misogyny and patriarchy entail under enslavement, being racially profiled like men and physically abused by those in authority in ways, and beyond ways in which men can be abused, and suffering every crime against women that can be committed, while being viewed as less valuable, or less worthy of saving than their white female counterparts. In this light, and against an historical backdrop where it was once considered impossible to rape a black woman because of slave status or 'scientifically' acceptable to experiment on black female patients without anesthesia, the omission of problematics implicit in normative womanhood for a black female character in a popular series like The Walking Dead just doesn’t sit right with me.

As a black woman, it isn’t that I don’t want to be represented as strong; I am strong, but being represented as having no family history, no grace, no femininity, no sexuality, no chivalry applied, and no need for rescuing; the kind of which so many white Western women have had the luxury of butting against, isn’t acceptable to me. I want to be represented with versatile, connected, vulnerably human black female characters. That’s all.

References (in order of mention)

Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero (1968; Beverly Hills: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004). DVD.

[Image] Ben, Night of the Living Dead, source: http://whatculture.com/film/8-questionable-offenses-committed-by-beloved-movie-heroes.php/2.

Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror’, p. 195-220 in Bill Nichols (ed), Movies and Methods, Revised for Volume II (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California, 1985).

Day of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero (1985; Beverly Hills: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004). DVD.

Night of the Living Dead, directed by Tom Savini (1990; Los Angeles: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2000). DVD.

Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zack Snyder (2004; Universal City: Universal Home Entertainment 2007). DVD.

Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero (1978; Beverly Hills: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004). DVD.

28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle (2002; Century City: 20^th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008). DVD.

The Walking Dead, Various directors, 2010-Present, adapted from Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel, The Walking Dead, Vol. 1-17, Seventh Printing 2008 (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2003).

[Image] Selena, 28 Days Later, source: www.tumblr.comtagged28-days-later.

[Image] Michonne, The Walking Dead, source: blogs.indiewire.com.

Richard Dyer, ‘White’, p. 44-65 in Screen, Vol. 29, Issue 4, 1988.

One for the Fire: The Legacy of Night of the Living Dead, Robert Lucas and Chris Roe (2008; Burbank: Dimension Home Entertainment, 2008).

Paul Waldman, 'The Left and the Living Dead', prospect.org, June 16, 2009.

Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/AndreaFansWalkingDeadPetition.

Gina McIntyre, ''The Walking Dead': 10 characters we'll miss, 5 in danger (spoilers)', Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2013.

Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (London, Winchester, MA: Pluto, 1982).

Barron H. Lerner, 'Scholars Argue Over Legacy of Surgeon Who Was Lionized, Then Vilified', New York Times, October 8, 2003.

Page WHAT?? International Women's Day and Me

Let's face it, I'm mildly amused and fairly unaffected by International Women's Day. I assure you, I had no intention of writing any blog today (I've got too much other stuff to do) much less a blog pertaining to IWD. What is it for really? There's something about packaging "international" womanhood into an acknowledged day that just smacks of corniness. What are people going to do, bake cakes for us? I haven't gotten a cake or any telephone calls on the matter. But it's all very Hallmark cardy, wrapped up in some ambiguous package of "international" as if by its title it sweeps away all the complexities of class, race, culture and distributions of privilege imbedded in the problematic of what does or should constitute "feminism" and re-brands womanhood into a happy little Google cartoon of cute smooshy pink and brown faces. Solidarity at last. Thanks Google! Have I lost you? If not, read on. I promise I'm coming to a point.

But in all seriousness, perhaps its my own realization of the oceans-deep and continent-wide polarities between what I deem to be my 'woman issues' and the issues of women in the far reaches of other places which makes me want to rebuke what seems like a trivial and superficial celebration of womanhood. I can't get down with articles harping about being treated like a "second class citizen" because you're a single white woman in the West. Really? I just can't, when I know a plethora of things, like the reality that single (young) white womanhood is heralded and exploited by mainstream media as the apex of beauty and freedom, both sexually and socially. I want to crumple that stupid photo of Bridget Jones, with her well-fed hamster cheeks and her pristine white sheet set, then shake the author of that article and yell, Oh YOU'RE treated like a second class citizen?? Try being a 60 year old black woman in America like my mother, you gormless mouthbreather! Or better yet, try being a single woman in Iran, you idiot! And in a way, even as I write this I seem to be writing my way out of addressing one issue that struck me this morning, in favor of dismissing it as negligible as I weigh it against the legitimate and systematic suffering of so many women and girls throughout the world. But I'm determined to convince myself that simply working on your own microcosm represents some sort of effort towards progress, so here I go.

When I first moved to Britain from the US in 2004, I had an opportunity to make a lot of new and interesting friends, many of whom, at least on paper, represented demographics that I might not have been likely to connect with in my home country. Moving abroad is good that way; because you're a stranger to the culture, you're often able to travel through networks of people, unfettered by that culture's views or rules of social categorization which function along lines like class or ethnicity. This can free you up to meet all sorts of interesting people. One such friendship I made early was with a working class rock and roller who works for the London Underground. To be fair, I actually befriended his partner first. She was a monolithic, towering Metal Head Goth of a woman who worked as a civil servant (now as a very popular Metal DJ), and we became fast friends at an annual local film festival.

I can't remember whether it was the time I got my labret piercing and my friend's boyfriend pampered me with milkshakes because that's all I could eat with the swelling, or one of those times when I'd stayed over their house and we were left to scrounge up coffee and breakfast on our own because the Iron Maiden of the house had to head to work early. But on one of those mornings, over either chocolate milkshakes or coffee and cold pizza, I discovered Page 3. All the Brits will now start laughing and most of the Americans will now shrug in confusion over my mention of the infamous Page 3.

My friend - the male half of the partnership, that is - often brought home various newspapers from his long hours at work. If you spend five minutes in Britain you'll notice their impressive collection of a variety of newspaper publications. Many of these newspapers are reputable and many of these are not. Regardless, it is a commonly practiced pastime to read newspapers on the London Underground. Everyone, from the passengers to the Underground employees, obsessively reads newspapers, sometimes indiscriminately because, after all, in the view of many here it's better to read anything than to read nothing at all. So I grabbed one of his newspaper selections from the day before, The Sun, which was sitting on my buddy's coffee table. It was easy to see from the cover, with its bold red header and salacious headlines, that this newspaper was going to be trashy. But what I was not prepared for what met me on the third page. There, covering most of that page, was a pleasantly smiling young woman with nicely styled hair (probably extensions), totally bare-breasted and wearing nothing other than underpants, with giant boobs like headlights designed to mesmerize. Boiiiing! And mesmerize, they did, for a moment before I went into shock and squawked, "What the hell is this? What the fuuuck?"

My friend looked up from his own newspaper, saw which paper I had in my hands, flashed me a knowing smirk, and replied casually, "Page 3". Once he logged my total confusion he repeated, "Page 3," and then, man of few words that he is, added his version of breaking things down with something like, "It's in every issue of The Sun". I was shocked, then fascinated and mortified at the same time. I just kept staring at it, thinking of how many times I'd seen working guys on the train reading The Sun, how many times I'd spotted this newspaper in the supermarket, and everywhere else. How could this be? my tiny, puritanical American brain pondered over and over. These fucking pervert British fuckers, I thought to myself, more fascinated than angry over the fact that this was a very stark example of how sexiness, actual, real live nudity in fact, was being placed right smack dab in the middle of ordinary, pedestrian life. This newspaper was on people's breakfast tables and on the morning commuter trains, totally out in the open and totally okay with regular folks. I tried to reconcile my dawning horror that children would be regularly exposed to this sort of casual-but-bold objectification of women, with a rationalization of de-shaming nudity.

But as I continued to process the prominence of Page 3, what got me then and continued to plague me was this idea of setting bold, daily female objectification as a public, normative activity. Now I don't think I even come close to looking like a breast implanted, weave wearing, orange tanned Page 3 'beauty', but as a woman living in this society I can't help associating the mainstreaming of young, female nudity with comments like, "looking beautiful, love" from my refrigerator delivery men, and getting whistled at and complimented for my "great tits" by dudes in white work vans. Obviously other people have made the connection and worry about the harm of everyday presentations like Page 3, since articles have been written and lines have been drawn, like Lucy Holmes's petition on the matter, which has had a lot of support and publicity.

So today I read yet another article on the subject from the perspective of a woman who grew up in Britain in the shadow of Page 3. Her points about her subsequent body neurosis were well taken, but more importantly, her simple re-imagining of society with a Page 4, a page featuring the bodies of young, attractive men with their bare tackle on display for casual conversation at the breakfast table really spoke to me, and cuts to the heart of the matter. If there's nothing wrong with nudity (and I agree), and there's nothing wrong with the admiration of beautiful bodies, then why aren't nude men on display? There are plenty of people who would be more than happy to be able to sip their morning beverage of choice while casually scanning a fresh, new young Adonis every day. Why? Why don't we get to ogle the beautiful, naked bodies of men in the public arena? Why are images of male genitalia protected from the casual view to the degree that you still won't see prolonged male nudity in mainstream films and magazines? Because this is one of the ways the culture sends messages about what parts of ourselves are important according to gender, that's why.

Consider this: at this point, the importance of women's bodies; how our breasts are shaped (or need to be shaped), how our butts and stomachs are (or should be), whether we should or shouldn't have pubic hair- which used to be the personal choices of women themselves, and even how our vaginas look (or should look) is mostly decided and mediated by media conglomerates mostly run by men, not some invisible Gay Mafia, as so many straight men have pointed out when discussing the fashion industry. Meanwhile, some of us women speak as if we're so liberated now because (some) of us throughout the world now enjoy a choice of occupations, and are allowed involvement and choice in who we wish to marry, whether we'd like to get married at all, and if and when we'd like to have children.

But I am also often drawn to consider that many of us once lived during a time where a woman could present herself to a man intimately and he'd roll with the punches, and often be happy for what he was getting. Women didn't have to worry about men complaining that they had too much pubic hair, that their breasts were the 'wrong' size, or that their very vaginas were shaped the 'wrong' way. It didn't matter if you didn't have an apple bottom or large inner labia.

Now, media-reinforced expectations and dictations by a handful of men have polluted the idea and acceptance of natural variety. Now when it comes to women's bodies, nothing is sacred anymore, while what we're shown publicly tends to represents one kind of norm. Granted, there may never be an occasion for Page 3 to present the picture of a perfect inner labia, but to drive the point home, can you imagine a very dark-skinned, B cup Page 3 model with short hair? It won't happen. There are plenty of dark-skinned, small breasted, short haired foxy ladies out there - I've seen many - but it won't happen. Therefore women and girls in this society get to wake up every day faced with what a supposedly average Joe's picture of beauty should be, breasts and all - and consequently face a level of anxiety and self loathing that men and boys do not face today. When I suggest that men's bodies should also be on display, I am aware that we'd be running the risk of objectifying them in the way women continue to be objectified. Yes, and the silver lining could be that there might be a backlash once men get a true taste of what it feels like to be valued most for their bodies and compared with a very narrow standard of beauty from the time they sprout peach fuzz and first grow a pair.