It's very likely anyone reading this already knows we're plural, but I'll go ahead and mention it now anyways since it has not come up on this blog explicitly yet. We struggled heavily with dissociation since high school, but the roots of our propensity to detach from our surroundings and play at being someone else go back even further. To a high extent I'm not sure if we've ever inhabited a coherent frame of mind. Even as a kid we felt... confused by the things we did and believed. We've always had values and beliefs, sometimes good, often bad, but there was often this basic disconnect where we couldn't tell if we.... actually cared? There's this eternal detachment between us and the things we clearly value, such that even after years of practicing earnestness and sincerity, we struggle to actually feel earnest and sincere.
This has come up for us heavily lately because we recently had an experience that upended our previous sense that just following our supra-conscious desires was probably the best way to go, since our depths are often impenetrable even to us and tend to be full of hard to dispel anxiety and trepidation. Recently we've tried to learn how to date. How to meet people from scratch and become comfortable with them and build connections with them irl, rather than primarily mediated through the internet. This has not gone all that well. The other week we had a date and although we were anxious the whole time we thought she was hot and we invited her over to hook up. I was anxious through the whole thing, though we didnt get far as it was late anyways. In the past, pushing through some amount of anxiety has always been necessary during sex for us. We did not anticipate that with a new person, this might not be the best decision, and we've ended up feeling pretty gross and put off by sex in the weeks since.
The issue is that we struggle to directly discern what we actually want. Not just consciously, but that which we fully want. Everyone has momentary desires, things which they know would be bad for them and so they do not actually want them, and are able to ignore them from that basis. But we can't tell the difference. This is distinct from people who are just impulsive, and are more likely to act just on the basis of those superficial, supra-conscious desires. We're able to ponder and reflect, its just that the material we're pondering and reflecting upon is like a reflection through two mirrors of an object we're not directly able to see. Having that disconnect has always been bad and inconvenient, but it's the first time it's really blown up in our face like this, and we're left trying to reevaluate our heuristics for how to discern our own desires and rebuild comfort with the basic parts of functioning.
The resultant disgust we've been feeling is an extreme example, but this kind of phenomena often comes up for us. The other day we saw some nasty AIDS joke on twitter, and we thought to ourselves how much we hate people who make light of AIDS, how could they be so disconnected from the history of our community? The violence our forebearers suffered and died through? But this strong judgement was not accompanied by any deep sense of its veracity, which is a difficult experience to explain. I suppose I realized that obviously we had not felt this way in high school, pre transition. To an outside observer that's the obvious explanation, we simply became more invested in a community and its values and they have become part of our values. And that's true but.... There's just this sense of disconnect. That we cannot detect any clear mechanism within ourselves by which we would adopt clear values at all. There does not seem to be any deeper conviction driving us, despite the fact that we have clear values externally. This probably sounds like nonsense to anyone who does not experience dissociation the way we do.
I'll finish up with a final example. In person we do not tend to be a fluid speaker, we often stumble over our words, backtrack, find ourselves stuttering and repeating even as people can ultimately get the gist of our point. We've long been better in writing than verbally. And people who have been around us know that we don't tend to have outbursts. When something angers us we tend to withdraw, dissociate, implode, and so on. The one exception was around a year ago, when a then friend who we had begun to grow away from a little after flirting somewhat, who was unaware of our own plurality, began talking about how some other systems on campus (who were messy and this ex-friend had legitimate grievances with, for context) were 'faking.' We told them to fuck off. They were startled and began a retort that probably would have come straight from tik tok. We said no, fuck off, im done. We walked off and never spoke to them again. This is perhaps the only time we have cut off a friendship like this, and insofar as we'd ever had forethought about such a situation, our plan was typically to engage and try to reason. But some deeper force, by pure instinct, just ended things. We had no idea we had such forceful or decisive values around this, but we apparently did. But its precisely that instinctual conviction that's typically lacking in our cognicization of our values. What we actually want from the world remains impenetrable to us, except in moments of blinding clarity, brought on like a thunderclap.
The inceptions of the contemporary zombie film genre are found in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), followed a decade later by Dawn of the Dead (1978).
While there was a spate of zombie films earlier in the century, they
focused on encounters with mysterious Haitian magicians and largely
unmenacing zombies. The genre spawned by Romero is typified instead by
massive hordes of the living dead sieging upon a group of survivors, as
well as nascent images of a society in collapse which would become major
themes of the genre going forward. Romero focused his critiques on the
anxieties of modern America, showing the zombies as a spur for the
militarization and entrenchment of White supremacy, as the government
enlists rural militias to hunt down the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.
The main character of the film, a Black man, is ultimately shot dead by
these militias who thought he was a zombie, in a sequence reminiscent
of contemporary Vietnam war footage.[1] Additionally, Dawn of the Dead
focused on the mindlessness of modern consumer society, following a
group holed up in a shopping mall. Romero’s series thus established the
zombie genre as a site of progressive critique of racism and of American
imperialism, which has been lost as the genre grew into a massive
cultural complex. Rather than lambast the racial anxieties of dominant
society, the genre has ultimately grown to reflect them.While other
authors have focused on the racial undertones and anxieties about
migration present in contemporary zombie films, I am focused
specifically on anxieties of settler/imperial expulsion and colonial
return migration present in World War Z (2013), 28 Days Later (2002) and The Walking Dead. [2]
Colonial anxiety is inherent to the zombie figure (and particularly zombies’ popularity in the United States) due to zombies’ origins in the US imperial occupation of Haiti during the early 20th century. Franck Degoul explains that the cultural complex of zombiefication became a form of cultural resistance by Haitians, which struck fear into the American occupiers who could not make it legible: “zombiefication is precisely that which escapes [Americans], and which simultaneously constitutes Haiti’s mysterious power.”[3] The illegibility of the zombie, whose interiority we, the (Western) observer cannot understand, therefore has its origins in the colonial Other. Fred Botting analyzes the early Caribbean focused zombie films like White Zombie (1932) as reflecting a “displaced [American] South” in these Caribbean plantations.[4] In this film a plantation master captures a White American woman using the help of a voodoo master, all set in oddly European gothic settings (obscuring the then-ongoing American occupation to the audience), juxtaposing an industrial modernity with a racialized past. Additionally, the plantation owner uses zombies as his workers, presaging the later anticapitalist critiques of Romero’s films, in which zombies are used as stand-ins for the mindlessness of modern mass society.[5] Thus, inherent to the conception of the zombie is the sense of occupying a land not your own, of peoples whose interiority you cannot understand, and whom you therefore fear, because you cannot predict what they will do.
These racial anxieties are crystalized in a modern image of zombies as roving hordes who lead to a breakdown in state sovereignty, evocative of modern racist fears of migration. As capitalism has become more global, and the West has become less White, the visible underclass of capitalism, the ‘surplus population,’ has taken on a racial valence in popular imagination. Johannes Fehrle links this to attitudes in newer zombie media:
For many in the global North, the surplus population has in recent years become increasingly imagined as an Other that is racially, ethnically, or geographically marked. Within this logic, 'immigrants' seem to threaten to tear down national borders and make those in richer countries into parts of a relative surplus population. [6]
Thus, the fears of the unknowable interiority of the colonial Other present in early zombie films coalesced with those of the anti-consumerist Romero zombie films into an image of mass hordes of Others tearing down existing society. The zombie inherently has no respect for borders, and their massive hordes tear down boundaries wherever they find them.
Inherent to the Romero and post-Romero zombie media is the attempts to create a walled shelter which keeps the zombies out. In Night of the Living Dead the protagonists take shelter in a house, while in Dawn of the Dead the protagonists hole up in a shopping mall (reflective of modern consumerist fantasies), while in a show like The Walking Dead the whole series is a continual movement from place to place as the zombies inevitably breach past any wall or fence they establish. These anxieties are surmised by Mary Douglas’s observation that dirt is simply matter out of place, and that this can extend to people as well.[7] Zombies, then, are a type of dirt-people, whose existence humans attempt to order via constructions and edifices and violence, much like the ordering of human mobility in the modern world. The continual anxiety is that the sheer numbers of these dirt-people will continually overwhelm our attempts to contain them. While I will expand upon this further in a later portion, the point should be clear that even before more overt racist subtext was added, there was a continual underlying fear in zombie films of the Other getting into ‘our’ space.
A good example of this demographic anxiety is found in the British film, 28 Days Later. While many people have written about this film, I could find no one talking about the very opening sequence, which I believe grounds the film in a sense of existential racial anxiety. The film opens with a sequence of footage of violent ‘foreign’ muslims attacking and hanging people, cut together with footage of British rioters clashing with police. This section then backs out into a sequence where animal rights activists free a chimp infected with ‘rage virus’ who then escapes and infects people, beginning the zombie pandemic.[8] While some see this footage only as a generalized ‘violence’ which the rage virus-infected chimp enjoys watching, I believe the choices of footage are telling. The footage of British rioters is reflective of the general fears of mass crowds in urban settings which have long undergirded zombie films, however their connection to ‘islamic extremism’ is telling in the context of Britain in 2002.
During
this period (and still today), there were ongoing debates about the
necessity to ‘integrate’ the influx of postcolonial Muslim immigrants to
British society.[9] The reality of a multi racial postcolonial Britain ties closely into
the anxieties Fehrle recognizes in zombie films, of the contradiction
“between the attempt to minimize the restrictions imposed on the
movement of goods through free trade agreements on the one hand, and the
regulation of the mobility of people.”[10]
Furthermore, I believe that the operative fear is not just the presence
of this colonial Other, but rather the operative mechanic of the
zombie, that we might become like them. In 28 Days Later the
means of zombie infection is not just a bite as in some other films,
but rather getting zombie blood inside you. This mechanic is highly
suggestive of fears of racial intermixing and the anxiety about the
potential loss of a ‘White Britain,’ leading to societal collapse as the
perceived violence of the colonial Other is brought ‘home.’[11]
Moving back to the American context, Katherine Sugg looks at the patriarchal settler politics of The Walking Dead.[12] She finds that frontier imagery is central to the show, with Rick Grimes setting out on a horse into the great unknown of the new world, and seeking to find safety in a hostile landscape. This process revolves around figures of masculinity taking control of their community and leading them by making the hard decisions. She identifies how these parallel tropes of frontier lawmen antiheroes in traditional westerns, as well as how the rationalizations of fighting a ‘race war’ against ‘savages’ in these films parallels the logics at play in The Walking Dead. I would also point out that the process of ‘societal rebuilding’ depicted in The Walking Dead heavily parallels early projects of settler colonialism, wherein isolated forts are carved into landscapes filled with hostile entities, with the hope that these centers of control will eventually be able to expand their territory and claim it from the hostile natives, who will be killed or expelled.
Additionally, as Camilla Fojas identifies, these masculinist politics are heterosexual politics. The zombie apocalypse is taken as a reversion to more base social norms, wherein the excesses of modern consumerism are cast off. This critique obviously builds off those already present in Dawn of the Dead, but with an increasingly cultural-reactionary/libertarian slant. Part of the social reversion in post-Romero zombie media is the supremacy of heterosexual, reproductive coupling, with the eventual goal of repopulation in mind. The heterosexual family unit is taken in zombie media to be the core social unit, with multiple family units banding together in shows like The Walking Dead. As she elaborates: “The series suggests that the social order is dangerous without the intervention and social control of institutions, and this results in the ever more autocratic rule of their self-appointed leader, Rick Grimes.” [13]
Bringing these disparate pieces together, we see that contemporary zombie media embodies anxieties of mass mobility of the foreign/colonial Other, as well as anxieties about modernity as a whole, the rejection of which leads to an embracement of a fictionalized view of patriarchal-autocratic social norms as the core of apocalyptic social organization. Even in 28 Days Later, where the dangers of military/patriarchal control is explored via nefarious soldiers who want to entrap women to rape them, the previously meek male character escapes into the woods and becomes smeared in blood, embraces his primal (savage, native, zombielike) nature and returns to slaughter the soldiers and save the women. This masculinist warfare is inextricable from settler politics, where the concept of men ‘taming’ the land and the colonial body is often an essential image.
One might object that the evocation of real world racism is unfair to the context of zombies, who truly are mindless creatures without internality, and thus totally able to be killed without ethical scruple. However the critical aspect of fiction is that it is fictional, and thus reflective not of any inherently extant reality but of the priorities of our reality. The question is then, why are we so obsessed with figures who can be endlessly slaughtered in hordes without issue. As Jason Morrissette explains: “Once the enemy is socially constructed as somehow less than human—or, at the very least, less than civilized—we find ourselves in a policymaking environment wherein otherwise extraordinary measures are deemed acceptable.”[14] The convenience of zombie narratives is, therefore, to imagine a world wherein our impulses about surplus populations or colonial masses need not be tempered by ethics, but rather taken to their fullest extent without issue. Zombies are the imaginal playground for political policy.
The intersection of masculinism and settler politics with anxieties about human movements in a globalized world finds its apogee in World War Z, which will be discussed at length. The first key point is how human and zombie mobility are approached in the film; fundamentally the film embodies the tension in the globalized world where the free movement of people from the imperial core is taken to be good, whereas the free movement of the subaltern zombies (embodying the masses of third world peoples) is a danger to the US-Imperial world order. As Fehrle pointed out, in affirming the virtues of the US imperial world order, the film conversely reveals a political unconscious which is self aware of how the present global crisis (zombies:mass migrations caused by ecological collapse) is produced by this very same order. [15]
Early in the film the main character, UN investigator Gerry Lane (played by Brad Pitt), is trying to escape with his family to a rooftop, so he can be picked up by a UN helicopter. They end up hiding with a Mexican family, whose parents do not speak English, but luckily there is a young multicultural boy who can translate. Though the film makes sure to emphasize that the worldly and multicultural Gerry can speak Spanish, as he emphasizes ‘movimiento es vida’ (movement is life) to explain to the parents why they need to work on escaping. It’s very lucky for these poor folks that they had a White man to explain to them the need to keep moving because obviously these immigrants had no idea that moving could possibly be important. Anyways they get unceremoniously killed like two minutes later but thankfully the multicultural son survives and gets to go with Gerry! He seems fine with it anyways and stays silent for the rest of the film.
Gerry then spends the rest of the film flying from place to place, making a grand tour of the American Empire, from a massive floatilla, to a military base in South Korea, to Jerusalem and finally to a WHO facility in the UK. The initial scene of Gerry and his family escaping from the rooftop by helicopter is itself heavily reminiscent of the evacuation of Saigon at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, and further repeatedly precarious escapes by plane further evoke a sense of the US empire in retreat, but a retreat made possible by its aerial might.
Furthermore, the internal collapse of the mainland United States is also couched in imperial anxieties: “The fears around this massified crowd, particularly in large urban spaces—Philadelphia in World War Z and Atlanta in Walking Dead—are coded with racial meanings; they might be associated with antiracist urban uprisings by people of color that have taken place in major cities.”[16] Thus, World War Z reflects the two primary anxieties of the US Empire: of a loss of international policing power as its presence in traditional strongholds like South Korea becomes tenuous, and of internal insurgency in the form of its own racial minorities. Ironically, these are some of the very same anxieties already present in Night of the Living Dead, whose imagery drew parallels to an earlier era of Black American struggle and to the Vietnam War, but while Romero approached it critically, World War Z takes these concerns only as background noise, taking for granted that the audience shares its sensibility.
The retreat of the United States to a floatilla far out in the ocean where the remnants of the military stage their operations is reflective of two political principles. First is the retreat to ‘rational’ masculinist autocratic control elaborated by Fojas, with the US essentially taking over the remaining UN in order to make the ‘hard choices’ about whose lives to prioritize and who to send back to the mainland, with Gerry remarking that “men like [the UN deputy secretary general] aren’t in charge anymore”. The hapless and effeminate virology doctor brought in by the task force hilariously trips and shoots himself in the head soon after the team touches down in South Korea, further reflecting how men like him are not the right type for the job. The second political principle is what Morrissette identifies in zombie media as a base assumption that the critical forces for a return to normality are the state, and particularly the military, who are presumed to be the only forces capable of organizing such a response.[17] In World War Z the civilian government collapses, but thankfully the real core of the United States (its massive internationally capable military, centered around its massive naval power) survives and is thus able to organize a capable response, thanks to its international mobility.
While World War Z reflects American Imperial anxieties to a massive extent, there is not as much American settler anxiety present, as our position as settlers in the United States is largely not present in the American consciousness. However, the section in Jerusalem very heavily reflects Israeli settler anxiety, as well as Americans’ fetishistic regard for Israeli security culture. After a failure in South Korea, Gerry hears that Israel is still standing strong, and that they had prepared weeks in advance for the zombie invasion and had sealed off Jerusalem behind a wall and he sets off to find out how that was possible. The explanation given to him by a Mossad agent was that Israel was prepared to take any potential threat seriously, due to the experiences of the Holocaust, and the Yom Kippur war. He also shows that they’ve been letting people into the city, in order to decrease the potential numbers of dead. About two minutes later a group of mixed faith people are singing a prayer to peace, and the zombies flood on top of each other until they get over the wall and destroy the city.
This sequence is semiotically rich, reflecting both Americans’ security-fetishism for the great Israeli wisdom of population control and border/checkpoint-policing as well as Israeli settler anxieties about expulsion and Palestinian mobility/demographics. Again returning to settler politics, the operative sensibility here is of Israel as a land under siege, needing walls, constant surveillance, massive policing systems and so forth in order to secure itself. Ironically this sequence also reflects the country’s own existential anxieties about the possibility of the failures of these measures.
There is also a dual tension at play; the American perspective presumes that under an outside existential threat, the Israelis would let the Palestinians freely into their territory of it would rob the zombies of some power, however this very same liberal rationalism is what dooms the country, as the excessive mirth of liberal multiculturalists cause the zombies to flood in. There is thus an underlying sense of the obvious logic of putting aside racism, and also a converse need to affirm the logic of the racism as it exists today with the sentiment that living together in a unified state would simply mean destruction. Additionally, the imagery of hordes of human figures flooding over the walls is obviously reflective of the demographic anxieties which haunt Israel, where comparative discussions of the Palestinian birth rate are used as constant justification for the suppression of Palestinians.[18]
Thus, we return to the justification that there need be no ethical considerations for zombies, because they have no knowable interiority. Nicola Perugini analyzes Israeli ‘evacuation trauma’ wherein the experience of settlers being made to leave territories in Sinai and Gaza were described as ‘traumatic’ in ways that affirmed the legitimacy of their presence there, and erased the fact that they had also expelled people to be there.[19] Evacuation trauma thus goes hand in hand with settler anxiety, these fears are taken as moral justifications in themselves for why no consideration must be given to those being policed and expelled. The zombie metaphor maps perfectly onto the Israeli perception of the situation: the reasons for zombies flooding into the city are simply unknowable, there is simply a primordial urge for them to slaughter everyone, and their interior nature can never be known or rationalized. Again this maps on to Israeli rationalizations for the the rhetorical dehumanization of Palestinians, as explored by Rabab Abdulhadi, wherein Palestinian death and sexual abuse is justified by their supposed barbaric nature.[20]
The points elaborated above are not meant to exhaust the semiotics of zombies or even their semiotics within the films discussed. Rather, I have sought to push an extant line of critique further in places where I noticed the existing literature fell short of taking their critiques to their fullest extent. Particularly while many authors have written about the zombie as colonial subject, none made this connection to the Israeli settler politics of the sequence, with only Fojas framing it as a simple extension of US imperial hegemonic anxieties. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak concluded that the subaltern is unable to speak, silenced by hegemonic narratives.[21] The implicit figure of the colonial Other is overwritten in much the same way by the speechless, violent zombie. Imagery of violence against settlers must always be decontextualized, isolated as a moment with its perpetrators presumed to be irrational, mindless, bloodthirsty and barbaric. The condition of zombies, then, is not a pathology of the body, but a pathology of the settler consciousness, which cannot fathom the rationality or the interiority of its victims.
Bibliography
Abdulhadi, Rabab. “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence.” Feminist Studies 45, no. 2–3 (2019): 541–73. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.45.2-3.0541.
Bleich, Erik. “The Legacies of History? Colonization and Immigrant Integration in Britain and France.” Theory and Society 34, no. 2 (2005): 171–95.
Botting, Fred. “Globalzombie: From White Zombie to World War Z.” In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 188–201. Manchester University Press, 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mbfxg.19.
Degoul, Franck, and Elisabeth M. Lore. “‘We Are the Mirror of Your Fears’: Haitian Identity and Zombification.” In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 24–38. The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. Fordham University Press, 2011. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c84gh2.7.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1966.
Fehrle, Johannes. “‘Zombies Don’t Recognize Borders’: Capitalism, Ecology, and Mobility in the Zombie Outbreak Narrative.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 61, no. 4 (2016): 527–44.
Fojas, Camilla. “Zombie Capitalism: Night of the Living Debt.” In Zombies, Migrants, and Queers, 60–81. Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture. University of Illinois Press, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1m3p0zs.7.
Morrissette, Jason J. “Zombies, International Relations, and the Production of Danger: Critical Security Studies versus the Living Dead.” Studies in Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2014): 1–27.
McAlister, Elizabeth. “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies.” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2012): 457–86.
Perugini, Nicola. “The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the ‘Evacuation Trauma.’” History of the Present 4, no. 1 (2014): 49–74. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.4.1.0049.
Rouhana, Nadim N., and Nimer Sultany. “Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship: Israel’s New Hegemony.” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2003.33.1.5.
Sugg, Katherine. “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (2015): 793–811.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 271–313. 1988.
Williams, Tony. “Night of the Living Dead.” In The Cinema of George A. Romero, 2nd ed., 26–37. Knight of the Living Dead. Columbia University Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/will17354.7.
Tony Williams, “Night of the Living Dead,” in The Cinema of George A. Romero, 2nd ed., Knight of the Living Dead (Columbia University Press, 2015), 26–37, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/will17354.7.
Settler-colonialism is the process whereby one People migrate into a territory in mass numbers and destroy and expel the priorly existing societies.
Franck Degoul and Elisabeth M. Lore, “‘We Are the Mirror of Your Fears’: Haitian Identity and Zombification,” in Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (Fordham University Press, 2011), 29-30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c84gh2.7.
Fred Botting, “Globalzombie: From White Zombie to World War Z,” in Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester University Press, 2013), 193, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mbfxg.19.
Botting, 193-195.
Johannes Fehrle, “‘Zombies Don’t Recognize Borders’: Capitalism, Ecology, and Mobility in the Zombie Outbreak Narrative,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 61, no. 4 (2016): 534.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, (Routledge, 1966).
While the sequence with the Chimp has been better discussed, typically evoking fears of zoonotic epidemics like AIDS, no one I found had linked its message to that of the preceding footage sequence.
Erik Bleich, “The Legacies of History? Colonization and Immigrant Integration in Britain and France,” Theory and Society 34, no. 2 (2005): 171–95.
Fehrle, 528.
The irony here being a total lack of recognition of the colonizers’ violence, which is similar to settler-colonial erasures of history discussed later.
Katherine Sugg, “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions,” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (2015): 793–811.
Camilla Fojas, “Zombie Capitalism: Night of the Living Debt,” in Zombies, Migrants, and Queers, Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2017), 80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1m3p0zs.7.
Jason J. Morrissette, “Zombies, International Relations, and the Production of Danger: Critical Security Studies versus the Living Dead,” Studies in Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2014): 15.
Fehrle, 529.
Fojas, 62
Morrissette, 19.
Nadim N. Rouhana and Nimer Sultany, “Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship: Israel’s New Hegemony,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 5–22, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2003.33.1.5.
Nicola Perugini, “The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the ‘Evacuation Trauma,’” History of the Present 4, no. 1 (2014): 49–74, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.4.1.0049.
Rabab Abdulhadi, “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence,” Feminist Studies 45, no. 2–3 (2019): 541–73, https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.45.2-3.0541.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 271–313. 1988.
I've rarely ever struggled to make friends. Only in the deepest pits of depression soon before transitioning when my body was dying around me did it feel almost impossible, and even then I made plenty. No, what plagues me isn't some general inability to 'meet people' but rather a struggle to derive meaning from being around them. What does it mean to be friends with someone you hardly speak to, or with whom most talk feels meaningless and inane. There is definitely value to the friends you see only occasionally of course, all people and all connections are valuable, but these connections cannot themselves fulfill me, they do not occupy the many empty hours of the day, or fill the mental and emotional spaces I have. Only a few periods in my life have I fully experienced intersubjectivity on a regular basis, the sense that I was experiencing a really mutual communication, that I was existing on the same plane as another person, that I was fulfilled by their presence, and that they were not just online but physically with me, and able to fulfill all the extra physical comfort that entails.
Years of efforts have made me a better person to be around, and yet the status quo for me feels much the same: I spend most of my time just bored. A lot of that boredom is probably attributable to ADHD, as I struggle to find interest in most things, especially on a scope large enough for me to feel entertained or truly engaged on a moment to moment or day to day basis. Instead I fulfill that need for activity with the stress of work and other things, allowing adrenaline and cortisol keep me feeling alive by crushing myself under intellectual endeavors. But I get tired. I get bored and tired. I lose focus. Even the best subjects can't occupy me forever, and at the end of every day I find myself bored and lonely and unfilfilled.
The weirdest part is that when I spend too much time with a person then all I want is to be alone, to be away from them and alone. I have yet to find any balance that works on a long term, I've never had the opportunity to try. I'm spending another Saturday as I've spent many Saturdays: bored, in bed, lonely, confused about what I want, craving stimulation of some kind but finding all available prospects dull, and feeling miasmically disappointed with everything.
I say all this not out of a desire to be negative towards myself, I don't think this is a failing of my own creation, I'm just reflecting. ADHD medications would help, but it's practically not worth pursuing a diagnosis and prescription considering that I have heart problems already and no psychiatrist would prescribe them to me, not to mention RFK jr is about to ban them all anyways. I'm stuck always feeling somewhat less alive than I want to be, and I don't see many ways out. Meeting more people helps, but it's not enough to know someone, you have to know them to the point of operating on the same human plane, and that's proven much harder to accomplish. But, here's to more chances and renewed efforts anyways.
Many years of shame surround the fact that I really, truly love other women's feet. My fixation was evident since I was a child, not in a sexual connotation at first (and even still my fascination crosses boundaries) but in a clear, obsessive curiosity, a sense that they were somehow special, and a desire to touch, view, and examine them. Years of development, intimacy and maturation later and this is still a hallmark of my deepest love for others. It's become much more exclusive now, sure I love erotic art of feet or seeing them in porn and stuff, but unless I really care for someone, I don't come to obsess and fret over their feet in the same way.
My passions being able to positively impact the women around me is its own reward, and with my relationships largely involving other trans women there is a consistent pattern wherein I see a woman realize that this part of her body had been neglected, she had accumulated either subconscious or conscious dysphoria and insecurity around them. Seeing that all melt away when I kiss her soles with passion is positively narcotic. Being able to care for her feet as though they were their own person is as rewarding as it is silly. There's always a mixture of play and total sincerity from me in that regard, and I think something as embarrassing as loving feet demands a high amount of sincerity to make it work, to feel rewarded by its continual practice.
I'll never know exactly what it is that makes me this way. There's always the superficial explanation that feet are just hot: their curves, their figure, the softness, the scent. But the passion goes beyond this, it's also about caring for something vulnerable, neglected, somewhere sensitive and under treated, rendering warmth and unbridled attraction to somewhere unexpected. I also just think there's something gratifyingly playful about feet; they always have their own personality, their own mischievousness, there is just nothing like having a woman have you chase her feet around. Of course there's the opposite dynamic as well. Nothing compares to the implicit, loving degradation of having a woman press her foot right onto your face, to push you around a little, to have you make out with her sole and kiss her toes. When you're devoted to someone, nothing else is the same.
Loving feet this way is about kink, but it's more than that to me, it's about something fundamental in the way I desire intimacy with others. I'm not simply a 'fetishist,' I'm a real foot lover, through and through. I want to share that with the women I love, and it's a fundamental part of what makes me myself. I pray simply that the women I love will allow this, and perhaps have something transformed in themselves as a result.
I arrive at the decision to try blogging through a path that has led me to many of the interesting things in my life, namely on a structured whim with deep roots. That is to say, I had the sudden urge to begin for real, to just get something out there, simply because my dear friend was showing me her blog, and it struck me that she was writing and posting the sorts of things that I had long wished to toss out in the world, but which I had never found an appropriate setting for, as the restrictive and sickening setting of a twitter vent account lends itself only to bile-filled spirals, and despite many years of progress lost and gained I have yet to ever feel entirely at ease simply spewing any semi-structured thoughts in the DMs of even the best of friends. Writing is both a difficulty, and yet also a necessity to me to channel my best thoughts. Unfortunately I've never been very good at finding the appropriate setting to write in more than a tweet form, outside of the academic writing which I hope to do for a living. As fulfilling as that writing can be, structured research papers can never substitute for the introspection and clarity of a post like this
That explanation provides the acute need I feel, which I hope this blog might fulfill, but there is also a somewhat longer history. I first realized I wanted to write a journal of some kind (I have abandoned the need for that particular format for reasons soon to be explained) approximately 8 years ago, around the age of 14 or 15, for very juvenile and melodramatic reasons that I wanted some record of all my grievances and suffering (of fumbling a beautiful girl in middle school) in the case that I soon killed myself. But I never tried then. I've never been good at starting things. They have a way of just lingering with me for a while, morphing in their conception in my mind. For years I would have these fantasies of grandiose suicide notes, treatises, essays, novels, a literary canon to petty suffering that would leave my mark on the world. Of course the self obsession of these fantasies is just a testament to how fiercely obsessed I am with myself and the continuance of my own life. Which leads us to the present moment, many years latter, to my (our) still half-baked nature, but on a path of development.
I want this to be a place where I can get some thoughts out, the sorts of thoughts that line my subconscious but which, after years of practiced repression, sublimation, redirection, and avoidance, have become hard to think explicitly without the sort of process of free-thinking writing. At the same time, having the tendency to spiral into obsessive negativity, I want to promise myself to not let myself get bogged down into the minutiae of my ever present depressive fixations, self-destructive obsessions and absurd compulsive flagellating ethical pathologies. I have many ideas of things I want to muse, but all are half baked, which I think is perfect here. But we will see. I have no plans for structure. But we will see.
A second goal, somewhat roped into this post entirely so I can bring up what a cool little film nerd I am, is to begin thinking my way out of isolation, to build myself back into someone who can consistently experience intersubjectivity, meaning a sense of being truly commensurable to others in my interactions with them, rather than feeling that either they or I are lacking something fundamental to existence. If this is alien to you I apologize, I may try to explain better at a later date. If you understand this viscerally as though staring into a mirror, well, I also apologize.
Clunkily, I want to connect this sense to the fears at the core of one of my favorite films: Cure (1997) dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Kurosawa the Younger). This psychological neo-noir thriller is the masterpiece of the younger Kurosawa, and focuses on a serial killer who hypnotizes people to kill others. SPOILER: the killer himself is nothing more than a vessel, having himself been hypnotized. The film channels this oozing undercurrent to postmodernity, an anxiety of rootless violence, of 'psycopathy' as a meme. Kurosawa's films speak to very Japanese anxieties in many ways, but also to a general condition of society, where we find it difficult to operate on the same plane as others. There's this gorgeous scene near the start where the killer is wandering around on the beach aimlessly, and talks to a man. The plot is less important to me here than the mise-en-scène. The colors are dull, the ocean feels crushing, the two figures are together but feel dwarfed by their surroundings. There's a loneliness to it. I feel like this shot is really key to the sentiment of the whole film, these two people are talking to each other, but they're both empty in their own ways, despite being right next to each other they're both totally alone, surrounded and penetrated by an emptiness. It's that emptiness I seek to annihilate in myself. Everything in this world pushes us to be lonelier, to make less of ourselves, to seek out less, to try less, to be less. In my own way, I want to fight an infinite front war against this, and make the most of myself in every aspect, and hopefully inspire others to do the same.
