The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions

From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central “crises”: late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the “crisis” of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future for – or a nostalgic return to – masculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it produces – roots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of “all against all” that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-“official man”, the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to “finally start living” – reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television show – especially in the visual and aural technolo