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Curator's Note
In zombie stories and Orientalist fiction, there are fates worse than death. In zombie stories, its becoming one of the undead. In Orientalist fiction, its living in a world in which the Oriental dominates the West economically, culturally, physically and sexually. Gina Marchettis work has highlighted sexual themes in Orientalist stories, including gang rape, sexual slavery, and racial pollution. In this video collage, Ive cut together video and images to compare themes in zombie and Orientalist stories. I invite your comments and feedback. Zombies hunger for flesh symbolizes more than just gluttony. We can also interpret flesh as sexuality (e.g., fleshpots refers to sex workers), particularly White womens sexuality. Orientalism has represented the Oriental as a sexual threat to White women and White racial purity. Asian, Arab, and Muslim men have long been cast as perversely lustful sexual predators, looming over terrorized White women. In 2008, Lan Dong said, One of the most potent aspects of the Yellow Peril discourse in American popular culture is the predatory sexual desire from the yellow race that endangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white American society. In 1877, Dennis Kearney, infamous American leader of the anti-Chinese Workingmans Party said, To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with a Chinaman. The Orientalized enemy doesnt just want to enslave individual White women it wants to make all of Western civilization its sexual slave.
In 1992, Gary Hoppenstand said, A favorite convention of the yellow peril featured the lone white woman surrounded by a horde of Chinese bent on debauchment. She holds them at bay with a revolver, and that revolver has only a single bullet left. Seeing that her situation is hopeless, she points the barrel of the gun to her temple" Sometimes as in Taken the White male hero saves the White woman in the nick of time; other times, not. Resident Evil 2 evokes this Orientalist nightmare, with zombies standing in for the lecherous Oriental reiterating to White women that suicide is preferable to racial pollution and to White men that homicide or genocide is justifiable in protection of White racial purity.
by Kim Paffenroth Iona College September 28, 2009 09:58 Interesting observations. And I have to agree with the analysis of TAKEN: though ambivalent about it, so many friends extolled it as the best action flick of recent years, that I sprung to see it on video and it found it to be the most atrocious, racist updating of the even more reprehensible movie COMMANDO. But as for our zombies: part of the analysis of Romeros zombies at least is how multi-ethnic the shambling hordes are, so its hard for me to see them as representing a white fear of the "other" (at least in so far as the "other" is racially typecast). Do you think Resident Evil just takes it in another direction, or do you think the zombies "otherness" represents race, even when they are (visibly) multiracial (and mostly white, for that matter)? Kim Paffenroth, Author of Dying to Live and other zombie fiction and nonfiction
U.S. forcibly took from Mexico), the fear of pollution seems to be a, ehrm "vital" part of the terror and
*Also, notably, Huntingtons idea of a Mexican "reconquista" of the U.S., which is hugely popular among Right Wing groups like the Minutemen and other anti-immigrant groups, actually inverts the original use of the term. My understanding is that, originally, the "reconquista" referred to Catholic Spain, several hundred years ago, "reconquering" European land that had been conquered by Muslims.
As for Resident Evil, I sometimes try to imagine how a producer might pitch a movie by alluding to three other movies or less. For me, Id pitch Resident Evil as Aliens meets "Night of the Living Dead. Replace Resident Evils zombies with Aliens xenomorphs and youre basically back to Aliens a survival horror movie in which a small band of low level military folks realize that the military-industrial-congressional complex is much more powerful and nefarious than they realized, and that it may, through its greed, be the death of humanity. But, in both cases, the MICC has trifled with the literal, biological equivalent of a rapacious corporation, respectively, zombies and xenomorphs. Which, perhaps also relates to what Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has referred to as the paranoid "squeeze play" story that many White Supremacist ideologies have historically sold or told to working class White people that theyre squeezed between powerful elites (generally scapegoats like Jews or East Asians, standing in for overwhelmingly White and Protestant-run and -flavored corporations) and underclass hordes (generally scapegoats like Black folks or Latin@ immigrants). So, in both cases, the heros are facing off against corporations from above and zombies or aliens from below.
So, yes, I think that zombies generally stand in for those aspects of Whiteness about which people are uncomfortable and want to project onto an other regardless of the race of the actors cast to play them. In your post, you note this too as Romero put into the mouth of one of his characters, "Theyre us."
I will, also, give Romero credit over most other tellers of derivative zombie stories Romero comes closer to recognizing that "they" are "us," than most of them. In the more derivative stories, "they" are much less like us and much less sympathetic as monsters. Romero, after all, was the one who posited in Land of the Dead that perhaps working class humans (symbolizing working class Whites) might be better served by casting their lots with zombies (symbolizing the racial Other underclass) than with the rapacious and callous upper-class Whites. This is, after all, a basic anti-racist message that poor Whites should favor class solidarity with other poor people, regardless of race, over racial solidarity with upper-class Whites. In contrast, derivative B-movies like Flight of the Living Dead are a very transparent Orientalist interpretation of 9/11 fears and stories its a story
about a group of people who sneak onto a plane and threaten to crash the plane into a crowded city, magnifying their power. Of course, Flight of the Living Dead is talking about zombies, not racialized terrorists. Not subtle.
Reproductive nightmares
by Eric Hamako University of Massachusetts Amherst October 02, 2009 12:29 I definitely appreciate and respect your points about citizenship and reproduction. With a bit of symbolic unpacking, I think that White women might also be good allies against the oppressive symbolism of many zombie stories because, as you point out, racism and sexism are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Im reminded of past ways that White Supremacist Patriarchy has used the imagined threat of Brown Hordes (generally of men) to control Women of Color, Men of Color and White women. Im thinking, for example, of then-President Teddy Roosevelts admonition to White women, in the early 1900s, that they were committing "race suicide" by having abortions and by not producing enough White children because in those ways, the Brown people of the world would out-reproduce and overwhelm White society. So, when White women today hear stories about Brown people "overwhelming" White society, I think alarm bells should go off. Because such stories, when deployed, often imply that White women should be valued primarily for their (unpaid) labor reproducing the White race over all else.
One of the most horrific films Ive seen in the last couple of years was Alexandre Ajas 2006 remake of Wes Cravens "The hills have eyes" (1977). Blood-thirsty mutant humans, victims of the Nevada atomic bomb tests, brutally attack a family traveling through the desert. The film in itself certainly welcomes all kinds of psychoanalytic/post-colonial/return of the repressed readings. But the sub-human-as-zombie-packs sexual attack of a young girl is what brings it here for me. Its all there in the trailer and in the main slogan for the promo, a highly sadistic version of your "Id rather die than". In this particular case its "The lucky ones die first.", and in the trailer it comes after a rape scene involving the creatures and the daughter of the family. One more to the repertoire of the crooked rabble and the damsel in (extreme) distress.
Another metamorphosis of the genre is the zombie-drone/android, and a good example is in "Star Trek: First Contact" (1996). Instead of mutated humans, we have a bonding of organic and synthetic, creating a technoautomaton-undead army called "The Borg". The appropriation of new humans into the swarm gains sexual connotation in an interesting twist. Instead of a blond woman running from a group of oriental looking men (or deformed sub-humans), we have the captain of the ship, Jean-Luc Picard, using his macho-wits to avoid the highly contagious mob, while flirting with a black woman from earth (Alfre Woodard) who has become stranded on the ship. In the end of his effortless struggles to rid the ship of the Borg invasion, he goes to meet them, and encounters what appears to be the manifestation of their unified brain, a kind of contradictory personification of the Borg collective: a seductive viscous cyborg woman. Ive recently re-watched the film and happened to copy down the moment when the captain confronts the "Borg Queen" (as shes credited); its bellow. Interestingly, this complex extrapolation of the zombie encounter receives strokes of the voluntary servitude idea, and is all framed through seduction. In the scene, as a kind of last heroic deed before he gives himself to the Borg and lets
the ship be destroyed, Picard is trying to save his cybernetic friend Data, who in turn is being helped by the Borg to become more human (one of the films themes) and, unbeknownst to Picard, does have a plan, which ultimately saves the day:
(Picard and the Borg Queen) - What have you done to him? - Given him what he always wanted, flesh and blood. - Let him go, hes not the one you want - Are you offering yourself to us? - Offering myself? Thats it, I remember now! It wasnt enough that you assimilate me, I had to give myself freely to the Borg. To you! - You flatter yourself! Ive overseen the assimilation of countless millions, you were no different. - You lie! You wanted more than just another Borg drone, you wanted a human being with a mind of its own, who could bridge the gulf between humanity and the Borg, you wanted a counterpart. But I resisted, I fought you. - You cant begin to imagine the life you denied yourself
As an aside, I also read the Reavers of Firefly/ Serenity as space-zombies. But, in an intriguing twist, Joss Wheadon suggested that the Reavers were actually betrayed (ostensibly White) colonists, who were seeking revenge against their brutal colonial regime. So, while I originally read Serenity as an anti-imperial answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" (answer: because a "Pax" Romana would make some people rebel violently
and relentlessly), I now think of Serenity as a story about how White Supremacist imperialism itself is the "pax" that poisoned underclass White folks and while most White people would be cowed into a deathlike submission, some would go completely apeshit, becoming indiscriminately violent (rather than striking against the source of their pains: upper-class White imperialism). Unfortunately, Wheadons explanation of the Reavers also implies that there were no indigenous people on the lands where the Alliance sent colonists. But then, Wheadons read, like Romero, acknowledges that the stories "we" tell are about "us," even when we say that the monsters are some Other group.
And speaking of the ways that racism and classism or imperialism are bound up in each other, I appreciate your point about the White underclass "mutant" monsters from The Hills Have Eyes. I think theres been a resurgence of interest in stories about middle-class Whites whore terrorized and violated by underclass Whites. (Im thinking here of franchises like The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Rob Zombies films.) I think that the relatedness of racism and classism in these movies may be generally under-examined. Because while the "monsters" in these films are racialized as White people, theyre explicitly poor White people. And I believe that classism and racism are mutually constituting. Over the U.S.s history, many European groups have been re-racialized to be included in Whiteness a Whiteness that is distinctly Anglo. Im thinking here, for example, of the Irish, Scots, Germans, and Italians. But, I think that the prior racializations of these now-White groups still persists and that those ideas become most obvious when were talking about poor White people. I think that, in the U.S., despite myths of a "classless society," social class is seen in racial terms. Britney Spears, despite her wealth, is still castigated as "trailer trash," because of her perceived unwillingness or inability to behave like a "proper" upper-class White woman (in which "proper" implies old money tastes and manners which are defined in large part by Anglo norms not Irish norms, not German norms, or so forth.) In some ways, money does Whiten or rather, perhaps lack of money makes Whitening seem less convincing and then the monstrous racializations of the past become more obvious. Plus, because of class segregation, poor Whites have been more likely to live in close proximity to (disproportionately poor) People of Color than wealthy Whites. So, in this oppressive logic, to be poor and White is to be one step closer to being poor and Brown and thus monstrous.
Kim Paffenroth, Author of Dying to Live and other zombie fiction and nonfiction