Ash Mayes

Manhunt: Zombie Narrative Influence on Public- and Blame-Building in Expert Risk Communication for Contagion Risk

Since COVID-19 emerged as a global pandemic early in 2020, it has become clear that expert risk communication is not equipped to deal with massive publics that are resistant to expert risk suggestions. Due to the politicization of and the ever-evolving misinformation spread about the disease, US expert risk communication has failed to guide the public through stopping the spread of the disease, especially comparatively to other nation-states that stemmed the spread with varying levels of success. Thus, new approaches to risk communication must be developed in order to account for this “new normal,” to use a term popularized in COVID-19 pandemic times, when it comes to how a public will identify itself as a part of the perpetuation as well as the mitigation of the risk.

In the instance of COVID-19 but also in many other risk situations, expert risk communication often runs into the problem of a public that does not recognize itself as the body that needs to react to or mitigate the risk. Rather, sometimes this resistant public will identify a different group that should react or mitigate the risk instead of itself, effectively slowing down the proposed risk management solutions by expert risk communicators. Because of that long-standing issue in rhetorics of risk, expert risk communication needs to evolve and test creative solutions in order to enable the public to identify itself as impacted by the risk and to equip the public to respond appropriately based on expert risk assessment. Perhaps one such avenue of creative solutions to this particular problem could be through expert risk communicators partnering with creatives to create media designed for pop culture entertainment consumption.

In this paper, I will outline how the “public” identifies itself in risk rhetoric scholarship. Also, I will suggest how this public designates and misplaces blame and how that blame impacts the public’s reaction to expert risk communication. Additionally, I will discuss how pop culture influences the public and its blame process. More specifically, I will argue that pop culture media representations of specifically, though not exclusively, zombie narratives have influenced this process of public-building and blame-designating and thus creates public resistance to expert risk communication for instances of contagion risk in the cases of HIV and COVID-19 and other contagion situations. In this argument, I will use Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 novel Manhunt as an example of how countercultural zombie narratives can do a lot of intellectual heavy lifting for expert risk communication. Such countercultural examples subvert pre-existing tropes of a marginalized group being the source and spreader of a contagion. Consequently, countercultural examples shift public opinion and later public response to expert risk communication through shifting focus of the system of public-building and blame-assigning. Finally, I will end by giving suggestions to expert risk communicators about how to intentionally utilize pop culture as a ground to model appropriate responses to risk situations and how to navigate pre-existing pop culture narratives that unintentionally influence public responses to risk.

History of Zombie Narratives

Monsters have long been a way to fictionalize societal fears, and zombies have been a monster that has been racially-coded as well as queer-coded to serve as commentary on the fears of sexual violence and colonial control. Zombies’ first iteration is often cited as being from Haitian vodou as someone who has been cursed to be under the control of the sorcerer. Paravisini-Gebert describes how in Haitian folklore, zombies could be the dead reanimated or someone alive who has taken a potion that made them comatose and seem dead, only to be administered an antidote. The second form of zombification was seen as the consequence for those who violated the expectations of the secret society that represented the forces of peasant life that controlled the power dynamics of the village and its resources.1 In these early forms of zombification, the sorcerer responsible for the zombification in both forms seems to represent coercive power, and the act of zombification fictionalizes the dehumanization that occurs when a coercive power makes a person less than human. The power associated with the ability to create a zombie is noteworthy in the context of Haiti: perhaps as a result of the long history of slavery and colonization in Haiti, the ability of the spiritual practice of vodou to exert magical power over another person via zombification was a way of exercising resistance in its practice and the threat of the narrative. The responsible sorcerer was generally explicitly or coded as Haitian themselves while the identity of the resultant zombie varied, but at this point, regardless of the identity of the zombie, this folklore seems to indicate that the magic of Haitian vodou has returned control to the Haitians who practiced, even though the ethics of that of course came into question in its application in future work inspired by, or perhaps more appropriately appropriated from, the original folklore.

Later, as zombie narratives were adapted outside of Haitian folklore and into mass media like films, the sorcerer was coded to be representative of racialized and often lower class masculinity and lust and the zombie was coded to be representative of upper class white femininity and purity. As Paravisini-Gebert details, many of the zombie movies of the twentieth century are based around the story of Marie M. told by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston: a fair (read: white or white-coded) upper-class young woman is murdered, buried, and later exhumed and reanimated by a sorcerer whose advances Marie M. had previously rejected.2 In reference to the 1943 movie I Walked with a Zombie, Weston liquidates the zombie-as-racialized-other idea when they describe this instance of the pre-established trend like with the narratives inspired by Marie M.: “a white woman’s zombie (racialized) state is linked to sexual transgression and comes to embody the ‘tragedy’ of miscegenation.”3 In this framing, the sorcerer enacts racialized sexual violence and the zombified young woman is the victim of the retaliation of colonized and enslaved peoples. Where previously the sorcerer was empowered to regain some control in an otherwise out of control colonial and slavery situation through Haitian spiritual practices, in the new context that control is demonized when it is portrayed as a tool to lead white women into relationships with Black men. This shift seems to represent an appropriation of zombie folklore for a white audience, or at least one that is sympathetic to Haitian colonizers for whatever reason. Of course, a critical consideration in understanding this shift in zombie narratives and their implications is the creators of the narratives and the audiences. Haitian folklore was obviously created by and for Haitians themselves, while comparatively, early zombie movies were likely created by white audiences for white audiences, perhaps as a way to justify continued violence against the Haitians. By reframing zombie narratives to represent the violence of Haitian masculinity that manifests as sexual violence against white women, the creators of these early zombie movies suggested that continued violence against Haitians and segregation were justified to protect white femininity from the resulting violence of miscegenation. In reality, this fictionalization obscures the fact that the colonizers were the root of the violence that Haitians were likely reacting to through whatever means necessary. However, because the audience of these movies were likely these colonizers and colonization sympathizers themselves, continued colonization efforts to stem the Haitian’s reactionary violence was thus justified. Consequently, these early zombie movies serve as examples of the horrible power through fictionalization of an audience’s societal fears or goals.

As these colonization-justification zombie movies became recognizable to wider audiences, the process of zombification was expanded to include the much more insidious metaphor of zombification-as-infection, though for many of the same ends as those earlier zombie movies. As medical knowledge about microbes and viruses became better understood, transfer of various diseases between communities worldwide and Europe and the US became a known side effect of colonization and trade. Then in the conclusion of many history lessons, many folks, particularly in colonized communities, died due to the lack of antibiotic resistance to European diseases. In order for colonization to be successful, colonizers had to make sure that the same did not happen in reverse, and thus epidemiological racism was born. Laura Diehl connects the logics of epidemiology with colonizing racism: “the language of bacteriology–bad blood, infection, invasion–converged with the language of national defense–border patrols, resistance, immunity–to militarize the fight against foreign agents that penetrated the body, took up permanent residence, and transformed the host into a killer by subverting the body’s/nation’s security defenses.”4 The epidemiological racism of Diehl’s description describes the anxieties of white colonizers represented in early zombie movies: miscegenation represents a threat to whiteness in that it serves as a way for the lines between colonizers and colonized to blur and thus makes the justification of violence less clear to the colonizers. Further, a microbe or virus endemic to a colonized region thus acting to kill colonizers through illness serves as another way that colonized peoples could metaphorically fight back with material consequences against their colonizers. Donna Haraway sums up: “In the face of the disease genocides accompanying European ‘penetration’ of the globe, the ‘coloured’ body of the colonized was constructed as the dark source of infection, pollution, disorder, and so on, that threatened to overwhelm white manhood (cities, civilization, the family, the white personal body) with its decadent emanations.”5 Both Haraway and Diehl’s summations of this process of how epidemiological racism functions easily maps onto zombie narratives. An unknown or misunderstood disease turns its susceptible victims into less than human vessels that aim to infect, harm, or kill non-infected humans who must fight to stop the spread of the disease, thus justifying the means necessary to wipe out all of the infected less-than-humans. Many contemporary zombie narratives may not be created with the sole purpose of justifying colonization as was previously the case with early zombie narratives, but many do not challenge the tropes of a racialized other attempting to invade the often white “good guys” and infect them with the fictionalized zombification virus. In failing to subvert these tropes, the logics behind epidemiological racism are left unchallenged, influencing how audiences of contemporary zombie narratives view epidemiology and how it functions broadly without challenging the notion that the infected are only the perpetrators of the risk of infection rather than victims of the risk of infection alongside the non-infected.

Additionally, the logics of epidemiological racism that guide common zombie narrative tropes are often accompanied with the suggestions of sexual transgression or non-normativity that link back to the miscegenation anxieties presented in the first zombie narratives outside of Haitian folklore. While of course interracial relationships are not completely unstigmatized in current US society, they have become much more normalized through a lot of work done in civil rights activism and other spaces. However, the policing of sexual boundaries absolutely still exists in current US society, and that often takes the form of shifting societal attitudes towards queerness and its various implications about sexuality and gender, most relevantly after the devastation of HIV. At the intersection of sexual violence and the violence of disease, commonly held anxieties about sexual transgression are then projected onto queerness, perhaps as a result of reductive HIV discourse but perhaps before that, and then, of course, those are fictionalized through zombie narratives and monster narratives more broadly. “The intimate touch of the zombie is potentially transformative for the ‘normal’ human; zombieness, like queerness is read as a contagion to be quarantined from the healthy, straight body.”6 This analysis from Ryan Cheek’s piece about the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Campaign that very uncritically reproduced some of the same bigoted tropes that are touted by zombie narratives explains how zombie narratives continue to be used to suggest to audiences what a normative body is. In defining a normative body, how a person should behave to maintain their normativity, and thus their safety and personhood, is also defined as counter to non-normative behaviors like queerness or the miscegenation of before. 

Cohesively, zombies serve as fictionalized representations of society’s anxieties and fears about non-normative behaviors, as defined by a generally white, cisgender, and straight public, and thus these representations play a role in the risk associated with these anxieties and fears. As Donna Haraway puts it: “Monsters share more than the word’s root with the verb ‘to demonstrate’; monsters signify.”7 As already discussed, zombies originally represented anxieties around the lack of control associated with shifting power dynamics of colonized Haiti and a past scarred by slavery in which a Haitian sorcerer could exert some form of control again.8 Then when these narratives were appropriated from folklore to mass media like films by Haiti’s colonizers, zombies shifted to represent the victims of the sexual violence borne of the anger of the victims of colonization. Thus, white femininity and victimization from racialized sexual violence was weaponized to perhaps recast the colonized peoples of Haiti as the antagonists of the violence in the country rather than the white colonizers themselves or rather to justify continued colonization efforts as a result of colonized people’s violence in resistance. Later, when it became clear that epidemiological violence could occur both ways between the colonizer and the colonized, the act of fighting zombies in these narratives served to perpetuate the message that the act of being a carrier of the disease in and of itself made one less than human and a target to protect the boundaries of body and country from. When applied to a contemporary context, zombies still represent the policing of sexual boundaries through the lens of queerness. When interviewed about the creation of the CDC’s “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic,” the creator Max Brooks describes his exigence for writing zombie narratives as the public response, or rather the lack of,  to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Brooks argues, “What drove me crazy was that unlike the Black Death or the Spanish Influenza, AIDS could have simply been stopped by a pamphlet: A couple dos and don’ts, a little education and clear-headed leadership and it might have ended up as a footnote in a virologists’ medical text. If that’s not zombies, I don’t know what is.”9 Though I would argue that HIV/AIDS would not have been stopped by a pamphlet, at least not by an uncritical one, and leadership alone as the same tropes I discuss in this paper were the impetus for the failure to contain the disease, it is worth noting that contemporary zombie narrative creators are making those connections among zombies, queerness, and creative forms of risk communication. Additionally, when associated with the coding of HIV as a disease exclusively carried by queer folks, zombies continue to function as an infected other with malicious intent of spreading non-normative sexual behaviors to a normative person with disastrous consequences. In delineating this evolution of the zombie narrative and its contemporary functions rooted in long-standing bigoted tropes meant to defend colonial violence and sexual normativity, I hope to make plain how zombie narratives perpetuate bigotry in risk responses when not radically altered to challenge the reductive and confounding nature of the genre’s tropes.

The Public and Its Blame

In order to connect how zombie narratives can operate as a complement rather than just an impediment to expert risk, it is important to operationalize how the public already identifies itself in order to enable risk communicators to effectively navigate that confounding factor in their communication. Up to this point, I have included light reference to the audience of zombie narratives. I do not want to imply that the public that I will define is strictly made up of the audience of zombie narratives as the public that is influenced by contagions like COVID-19 makes up a much larger group than just horror movie consumers broadly and zombie fans more specifically. However, due to the prevalence of zombie narratives historically and contemporarily in pop culture, many of the genre’s tropes are recognizable to even non-consumers and thus are still  influential to the entire public. Additionally, in the formation of the public and its ability to respond to a risk, the reality of the public’s act of assigning blame to racialized and queer communities as nudged by zombie narratives needs to be assessed and mitigated by expert risk communicators. In drawing conclusions from pre-existing scholarship on the matter, I will develop a framework in which understanding how both a public and a party to blame are constructed could be applied to new iterations of risk communication in the future to combat the potential pitfalls of a public resistant to expert suggestions to mitigate contagion risk due to these confounding factors.

The Public

To go about the task of defining the term “public,” and thus to go about the task of creating risk communication that allows the individuals that make up that public to recognize themselves as part of that larger group, perhaps it is wise to start with discussion of the rhetorically foundational idea of discursive publics. Michael Warner writes about what makes up a public, and most relevantly in regards to risk communication, these elements include that a public is self-organized10, a public is social space created by the circulation of discourse11, and a public is poetic world-making.12 A public is self-organized in that it is simply not enough to think of the individuals making up that public as a predetermined group. Rather, the individuals’ ability to respond to a “text,” in whatever form that “text” may take, creates a discursive public by merit of the response.13 In situations of risk, a public would then be self-organized around instances of risk communication, in whatever form that may take, because the associated group of people in the risk situation would have the opportunity to respond with action or discussion. Then a public is a social space created by the circulation of discourse because that circulation includes not only the stakeholders, those who are impacted by the impetus for discourse, but also onlookers who may not be directly impacted.14 The distinction that a public is meant to include both stakeholders and onlookers could serve as an interesting problem for risk communicators. The rhetoric of risk would thus have to navigate the potentially vastly different set of stances and values held by these two parties that make up the group of stakeholders in its totality. Additionally, a public is world-making, which is critical for risk communication as “[the people in a public] recognize themselves only as already being the persons they are addressed as being, and as already belonging to the world that is condensed in their discourse.”15 Along this line of thought, risk communication is meant to propose actions that could mitigate risk because the public should recognize that it is a part of the world in which they could be impacted by the risk. Thus, having a public identify itself as belonging to the world that would necessitate and facilitate their response is of utmost importance. If a discursive public can be established by keeping these characteristics of a public in mind when doing risk communication and writing, and those within that public can identify themselves within the intended public, headway can be made to enable a relevant public’s move towards applying expert risk management suggestions.

Expanding upon the idea of the discursive public to include the visceral that is often associated with risk and is critically important to zombie narratives is Jenell Johnson’s “‘A man’s mouth is his castle’: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public.” In the piece, Johnson sets out to explain how a group of people successfully advocated to stop the fluoridation of their town water by organizing based on the visceral fear of fluoride transgressing the borders of the body. In her analysis, she defines the term “visceral publics”: a visceral public is born from discourse about boundaries in a variety of forms and cohered by strong emotion. In Johnson’s discussion of expanding the idea of the public to include the quality of the visceral, she conceptualizes visceral publics as not oppositional to discursive publics but rather as supplemental to the older theory of the binding qualities of the public.16 The resistance to expert risk suggestions by the citizens of Williamstown is best summarized as “fear that created this public, fear that drew people together, and fear that motivated the residents of Williamstown to vote in record numbers.”17 Throughout human history, fear has been a driving force in creating publics to respond to risk, both real and perceived. This is exemplified by occurrences of mobs and other groups formed to protect a status quo such as the instance of the anti-fluoridators in Williamstown. Further, the fear of the loss of control or sanctity of the body is the cornerstone of all of the iterations of zombie narratives all the way back to the original Haitian folklore of zombies. Therefore, Johnson’s theory could enable risk communicators to further understand the reasoning behind public responses that are not necessarily rational or driven by expert opinion by adding that visceral fear as a driving force to create a public and to generate collective responses as an effect of that active public both and general and within the specific lens of zombie narratives. 

The Public’s Blame

The next critical piece of my earlier proposed framework is understanding how a public situates itself as separate from and oppositional to a scapegoat that is designated to shift blame or responsibility from that public. A reasonable place to start in this analysis is Mary Douglas’ “Risk and Blame” from her larger collection of essays of the same name. In this piece, Douglas juxtaposes early anthropological work that analyzes how blaming worked as cause and effect for small pre-globalized communities and how blaming has now been translated into terms of risk in an industrialized and globalized world.18 She posits that risk rhetoric has evolved out of this widely used cause and effect blaming system due to a need to protect individuals from the hazards of living with massively destructive international industrialization and, I would add, capitalism.19 The public’s understanding that extractive, destructive, and toxic globalization forces are responsible for a lot of the risks that exist in our contemporary world is crucial, though limited. The limitations occur as a public’s blaming is not always affixed on a party that is actually responsible for the hazard that created the risk. However, in emphasizing the role of such parties as nation-states and corporations in creating hazards and thus being responsible for the creation of the consequent risks, a justice-oriented rhetoric of risk could attempt to stymie a public’s opportunity to place blame where blame is not due.

While Douglas focused on the connection between risk and blame primarily at a larger scale, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz uses the example of Nadya Suleman, more widely known as “Octomom,” in “(In)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Octomom’” as a case study for how the public creates an individual or a specific group scapegoat to blame as representative or indicative of larger public concerns. Because of Suleman’s identity as non-white, poor, and unmarried, her unusual motherhood situation became symbolic of public anxieties about threats to hegemonic ideas of what motherhood, and thus reproductive power, should look like instead of symbolic of the success of modern medicine. Because of Suleman’s perceived transgressions against societal norms, “the rhetoric of risk emerged to mark Suleman, not as at risk, but as a perpetrator of risk, a threat to be contained” (emphasis Fixmer-Oraiz’s).20 The distinction between perpetrator and victim is critical when examining the impacts of creating a party to blame that is also impacted by the hazard that created the risk. Suleman, as a working class non-white unmarried mother, was susceptible to the risks of living in a society influenced by the hazards of capitalistism, misogyny, and racism. In addition to these hazards and consequent risks, Suleman became at risk of public ire and all the consequences that entailed. However, the public’s portrayal of her as the perpetrator of risk acts “in lieu of examining a range of critical factors that might constrain parenting, such as a lack of livable wages, educational opportunity, or health care.”21 In blaming Suleman, the powerful parties and systems that are actually responsible for the precariousness of motherhood and thus the resulting risks escape criticism. Then because these systemic issues escape identification by the public, no change is enacted to make Suleman or this public’s lives less risky and in effect perpetuates the ability of these parties and systems to continue generating risk due to this public’s misplaced finger-pointing. Ultimately, in order to enable a public to identify the cause of the risk and thus an appropriate and actionable response to the risk, expert risk communicators need to help the public avoid scapegoating of an individual or group of everyday individuals. An emphasis on the more appropriate blaming of the systems that are responsible for the creation of risk is critical in a framework for risk rhetoric that is both more effective and justice-oriented.

The Public’s Blaming in Zombie Narratives

In using the newly established framework on the particular lens of zombie narratives, both how the public defines itself in relation to the zombie versus not zombie distinction and how the public takes the blame designated for the zombie and projects that blame onto the real-life group that the zombie is meant to symbolize is important to consider. To begin, the audience of a zombie narrative is not all-inclusive of a public that is influenced by and responding based on suggestions of that zombie narrative. As earlier mentioned, the tropes of contemporary zombie narratives would likely be recognizable to non-zombie narrative consumers due to their ubiquitousness in pop culture more broadly. Stephen Dougherty writes: “This is the world that television heralds… where media images achieve such immanence that they are no longer distinguishable from reality.” Because pop culture images are so pervasive and representational, it is likely that zombie narratives and how they portray the exigent problem and what the problem’s appropriate response is cannot be extricated from contagion risk communication or responses at this point.22 Cheek describes this phenomenon to function because “it is easier to see the diseased than the disease, the public comes to rely on mediated information from official sources rife with sensationalized rhetoric to understand the risk and consequences of an outbreak.”23 If sensationalized rhetoric about disease such as zombie narratives perpetuate the stereotypes about anyone who does not fit into whiteness or heterosexuality that these narratives have in the past, the public will continue to associate non-normative bodies as the risk rather than the disease itself. Thus a discursive and visceral public in a contagion risk situation, as informed by zombie narrative tropes, would be created in part through the self-definition as those who are not responsible for the contagion but who could possibly fall ill because of it and thus are acting on the visceral fear of self-preservation. Further, this public could perceive itself as responsible for defending against those who are responsible for the contagion but perhaps not against the contagion itself as the public in many zombie narratives are often confronted with the moral dilemma of an ally becoming infected due to this distinction.

After defining this discursive and visceral public, it is clear that an element of “us” versus “them” through the process of blaming is heavily implied in zombie narratives and thus real-life contagion risk. Blaming as Mary Douglas formulates it is a critical component for critically assessing how zombie narratives perpetuate non-white and queer folks as responsible for risks such as contagions. For instance, epidemiological racism hides the actual source for the risk of the movement of disease. In reality, global communities are not attributed with having actively infected other communities with diseases endemic to their regions as a form of biological warfare like colonizers have done through such forms as the smallpox blankets used in North America, but rather colonization and other globalization forces like extractive capitalism maintain the presence of groups of people from outside the region for business purposes.24 The zombie in contemporary infection-as-zombification narratives acts as the scapegoat: though the zombies too were victims of the disease, because they now serve as the vector, they are demonized and cast as less than human in order to more effectively eliminate as the hazard that generates the risk of spreading the disease. If Dougherty’s stance that media images become inseparable from reality is accurate, and I believe it is, then if these tropes in zombie narratives are left unchallenged and unchanged, then the public will continue to mirror the scapegoating that occurs in zombie stories in real-life contagion risk situations.

Felker-Martin’s Manhunt as Countercultural Possibility for Change

There are real-life consequences for leaving the tropes of zombie narratives as is for the future of contagion risk communication, but in the pursuit of analyzing the possibilities within a zombie narrative with a different ethos, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt can serve as a starting point. As a result of the constraints of this paper and the specific lens of Manhunt, I will focus on the process of the marginalization of queer folks that zombie narratives participate in and thus influence how the public responds when assigning blame in instances of contagion risk and I will not address the long racist history associated with zombie stories. Through the process of “the queer zombies who remain non-subjects, i.e. not shown as conscious or thinking beings, sometimes serve as a reminder that sexual minorities are forced into social oblivion,” this social oblivion can force queer folks into the role of the scapegoat as previously discussed, thus being designated outside of the bounds of the public in the public’s own self-definition.25 Manhunt serves as an interesting example of how a zombie narrative can use the same tropes associated with the genre but radically alter the common roles of who stands for “good” versus “evil” as is common with many monster narratives. For instance, there are two main groups of explicit villains in the novel: the zombies and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs. Further, the heroes of the novel are a group of trans folks, including the three protagonists, and allies who fight off those who would murder them for their gender identity or their non-zombieness. Outside of just being unusual due to the sheer lack of trans representation in pop culture in general, much less trans representation in protagonist and hero-esque roles, this villainization of non-ally cisgender folks is well outside the common theme of the policing of the boundaries of the norms for the US public’s sexuality and gender norms.

Zombification within Manhunt heavily leans into the common contemporary trope of infection but with an original twist. To begin, the “T. rex” virus that causes the zombification turns all humans with an undefined lack of estrogen into the zombies, and that designation includes cisgender men, transgender women who are unable to keep up their estrogen levels, and menopausal women with the same problem as trans women. Additionally, once the transformation is complete, the zombies become “shrieking, ravenous things” and the virus compels them to “[look] for something to rape, maim, and leave half-dead.” In addition to the sexual violence inherent with the zombie’s behavior, the virus is designed to continue to replicate through an abbreviated pregnancy that ends with the almost exclusively male zombified babies eating their way out of the body of their mother.26 This version of zombies is different from the original iterations of zombies such as the Marie M.-inspired stories in that femininity in the form of estrogen is the only way to prevent zombification rather than femininity being the main impetus for zombification. Further, in many previous zombie stories, anyone could be infected with the zombie contagion. In linking zombification and the lack of estrogen or an overabundance of testosterone, Felker-Martin directly associates zombieness with masculinity through a testosterone-masculinity link. Jordan-Young and Karkazis describe this connection between testosterone and masculinity that seems to potentially be the reasoning behind Felker-Martin’s design for zombification as “[testosterone] (T) is a willful character. When T whispers instructions in the ears of hapless men, it’s clear that T has a plan, and that plan is to maintain the natural order of things.”27 In linking testosterone with masculinity and masculinity with zombification, Felker-Martin portrays masculinity in its most toxic and norm-supporting form as being the driving force behind the creation of monsters. This link is radically different from previous iterations of zombies as white masculinity is often portrayed as being the stopping force of zombification through commonly white male protagonists or through the idealization of heterosexual white relationships over all others. Felker-Martin’s virus and resulting zombies are representative of the violence against women that is a result of patriarchy: the obvious message is that sexual violence is a product of patriarchial violence that makes cisgendered men monsters. In this, Felker-Martin’s zombies are still recognizable to an audience who would perhaps recognize the common element of zombie as representative of sexual violence, but she actually points to the normative sexual violence of the patriarchy as the problem rather than the old trope of non-normative sexual relationships being representative of the problem and thus the subject of the public’s assessment would be shifted.

In the novel, queerness is portrayed as the limited but only remaining solution to the violence of the patriarchy that has turned men and many cisgender women into the problem of zombie. Queer folks, including the three trans protagonists, and their allies are those who are portrayed throughout the novel as maintaining their hope, kindness, and ultimately good humanity. Comparatively, the cisgender women who organize around the symbolic “‘XX’… A little shibboleth to ward off the specter of the wolf in women’s clothing” are portrayed as being ruthless and hateful to their own and outsiders.28 Consequently, the TERFs replicate many forms of patriarchal violence in their rudimentary social structure in their post-apocalyptic world and in their goals and behavior. Ultimately, Fran, one of the protagonists, comes to the conclusion as she dies that “[The TERFs] don’t even love each other… They’re just men.”29 Through Fran’s dying thoughts, Felker-Martin depicts the solidarity that the protagonists’ group of friends created as the idealized final stand against the zombies and the TERFs who attack the group simultaneously as well as against the ideologies that fuel the two villain groups.

Representation is absolutely not the end-all, be-all of creating new zombie narratives that challenge the pervasive bigoted tropes of previous zombie narratives. However, in the pursuit of using pop culture for good, or at least using pop culture for more effective risk communication, switching the roles, identities, and values of the protagonist could suggest new possibilities for action to the real-life public. By creating fictionalizations or visualizations more broadly that indicate that larger societal issues such as patriarchy or global capitalism actually are worsening risk through these new representations of who is represented by the heroes and who is represented by the villains, the public could be equipped to more appropriately place blame where blame is due rather than on a minoritized scapegoat. Additionally, in portrayals of groups that are usually depicted as the scapegoat as actively fighting against the risk or the symbol associated with risk like zombies, the public could be more receptive to recognizing these traditionally scapegoated communities as being a part of itself rather than in opposition to it.

It is worth mentioning Felker-Martin’s novel was intentionally controversial; she even included a snippet about how J.K. Rowling would have died alongside a group of her menopausal TERF friends who would have succumbed to the virus in this world, which resulted in a flurry of criticism on social media and larger media sources.30 Felker-Martin then gleefully responded to the criticism with tweets that summarily could be described as “that’s the whole point.”31 As this novel was written and published in a time when COVID-19 was running rampant and conservative politicians were actively trying to criminalize transness in various ways, Manhunt was absolutely born out of a critical lens of how institutional power failed to prevent, or perhaps even encouraged to spread, the violence of pandemics and transphobia.32 However, as I hope to have made evident in this piece, those violences are not all that separate, and the act of challenging a public’s blaming practices is of course going to have repercussions and critics. Nonetheless, allowing a public’s blaming of marginalized folks as inspired by genre conventions of zombie narratives and pop culture more broadly will simply continue to impede effective risk communication in the future. By using Manhunt as inspiration and as a starting point, expert risk communicators can continue the process of shifting the way zombie narratives have portrayed queer folks as monstrous in the past and thus circumnavigate the public’s usual response to blame them in situations of contagion risk.

Conclusion

It is clear that pop culture absolutely can influence how a public identifies itself and how it identifies responsibility for the hazard that created the risk that needs responding to. Further, as exemplified by Manhunt in comparison to previous iterations of zombie narratives, it is possible that part of the impetus for public inaction in situations of the risk of infection such as COVID-19 and HIV is that the public has identified a group that it associates as outside of itself as the perpetrator of this risk, even though this scapegoat is prone to the risk of the infection as well. This call to action for expert risk communicators is guided by a call to action by Ryan Cheek: “[risk] communicators do not have to be passive agents of corporate employers that reproduce the most problematic aspects of dominant culture. Instead, they can employ their skill set to open up the most mundane texts for critical inquiry and reflection.”33 Perhaps by constructing pop culture narratives similarly to Manhunt, work can be done to counter long-standing ideas of a racialized or queer-coded other that is wrongly perceived as responsible for the risk situation and thus should be the ones to mitigate or respond to the risk rather than the public as a whole. This work may be preventative rather than the traditionally reactionary norm for risk communication, but because the risk of contagion will always exist, doing this sort of holistic risk communication would be useful in the long-term. 

One of the major spaces for continued study past this paper is how new zombie narratives must be used to subvert the common call of epidemiological racism still prevalent in contagion discourse today. It is undeniable that racism factored into how the US public reacted to COVID-19 as discourse surrounding the virus was virtually always accompanied by discussion of how it originated in China and thus resulted in a lot of anti-Asian racism in the US. While COVID-19 made plain the fact that expert risk communication must evolve for contemporary pandemic risks, more analysis than this paper provides on how zombie narratives perpetuate epidemiological racism is necessary to build upon the argument established here. Manhunt served as a clear example of how commentary on sexual violence and queerness can be interwoven into a zombie narrative to suggest new conclusions in the process of public- and blame-building and the consequent responses to risk. However, the novel does not approach race in this way, and can only serve as an example of the possibility of subverting long-standing tropes about racialization in contemporary zombie narratives that perpetuate the motives of colonization.

  1. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticisim and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” in Sacred Possessions: Voudou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, ed. Marguerite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 38. ↩︎
  2.  Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticisim and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” in Sacred Possessions: Voudou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, ed. Marguerite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 39-41. ↩︎
  3. Kelli Weston, “Grave Legacies: The Racialized Origins of the Zombie Myth,” Museum of the Moving Image, accessed October 10, 2022, https://movingimage.us/feature/white-zombies-nightmares-of-empire/. ↩︎
  4.  Laura Diehl, “American Germ Culture: Richard Matheson, Octavia Butler, and the (Political) Science of Individuality,” Cultural Critique 85, (Fall 2013): 85. ↩︎
  5. Donna J. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 223. ↩︎
  6. Ryan Cheek, “Zombie Ent(r)ailments in Risk Communication: A Rhetorical Analysis of the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Campaign,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 50, no. 4 (2020): 417. ↩︎
  7. Donna J. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 226. ↩︎
  8. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticisim and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” in Sacred Possessions: Voudou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, ed. Marguerite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 39. ↩︎
  9. Ali Khan, “Q & A with Max Brooks,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Public Health Matters Blog, October 5, 2011, https://blogs-origin.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/10/q-a-with-max-brooks/. ↩︎
  10. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 50. ↩︎
  11. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 62. ↩︎
  12. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 82. ↩︎
  13. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 50-52. ↩︎
  14. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 63. ↩︎
  15. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 82. ↩︎
  16. Jenell Johnson, “‘A man’s mouth is his castle’: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 2. ↩︎
  17. Jenell Johnson,“‘A man’s mouth is his castle’: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 14. ↩︎
  18. Mary Douglas, “Risk and Blame,” in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 3, 16. ↩︎
  19. Mary Douglas, “Risk and Blame,” in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 15. ↩︎
  20. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “(In)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Octomom,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 241. ↩︎
  21. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “(In)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Octomom,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 241. ↩︎
  22. Stephen Dougherty, “The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001): 11. ↩︎
  23. Ryan Cheek, “Zombie Ent(r)ailments in Risk Communication: A Rhetorical Analysis of the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Campaign,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 50, no. 4 (2020): 404. ↩︎
  24. Matthew Wills, “How Commonly Was Smallpox Used as a Biological Weapon?,” JSTOR Daily, April 4, 2021, https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/. ↩︎
  25. Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Beyond the Metaphor: Gay Zombies and the Challenge to Heteronormativity,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 13, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 6. ↩︎
  26. Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt (New York: Nightfire, 2022), 6. ↩︎
  27. Rebecca M Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, “Introduction: T Talk,” In Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019), 11. ↩︎
  28. Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt (New York: Nightfire, 2022), 37. ↩︎
  29. Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt (New York: Nightfire, 2022), 284. ↩︎
  30.  Lee Brown, “Writer Gretchen Felker-Martin under fire for burning J.K. Rowling alive in ‘vile’ horror novel,” New York Post, last modified April 22, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/writer-gretchen-felker-martin-under-fire-for-killing-j-k-rowling-in-novel/. ↩︎
  31. Gretchen Felker-Martin (@scumbelievable), “If you’re sick of gender plague novels written by transphobic dipshits, try my novel MANHUNT, written by a trans woman for a trans audience. Trans dykes fall in love and fuck and murder TERFS, feral men maraude in the wilderness, J.K. Rowling dies, etc.,” Twitter, March 23, 2022, https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/1506763219427340292?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw. ↩︎
  32. “Legislation Affecting LGBTQ Rights Across the Country.” ACLU, last modified December 2, 2022, https://www.aclu.org/legislation-affecting-lgbtq-rights-across-country. ↩︎
  33. Ryan Cheek, “Zombie Ent(r)ailments in Risk Communication: A Rhetorical Analysis of the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Campaign,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 50, no. 4 (2020): 409-410. ↩︎

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