{"id":3282,"date":"2010-12-09T14:12:37","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T19:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=3282"},"modified":"2010-12-09T14:12:37","modified_gmt":"2010-12-09T19:12:37","slug":"ill-take-zombies-over-racists-rapists-and-wife-beaters%e2%80%a6any-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2010\/12\/09\/ill-take-zombies-over-racists-rapists-and-wife-beaters%e2%80%a6any-day\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ll Take Zombies over Racists, Rapists and Wife-Beaters\u2026any day"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was originally posted on Girl w\/ Pen<\/a> on December 8th. \u00a0Adina Nack<\/a> is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University and the author of Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases. <\/a>.<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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*Spoiler Alert: in order to critique this show, I need to reveal some plot points.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Zombies do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or ability\u2026people do.\u00a0This sad truth played out in the short but compelling 6-episode first season of AMC\u2019s new show\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0Zombies eat any living thing they come across \u2013 scary but not evil creatures because they don\u2019t have a functioning brain which would allow them to be human, to distinguish right from wrong.<\/p>\n

The living human characters, on the other hand, do have the cerebral capacities to be moral or immoral, act selfishly or with compassion, believe and act in ways which show they believe all humans deserve equal rights.\u00a0And, that\u2019s what made the series interesting to this feminist sociologist.<\/p>\n

Disaster scholars have often noted that privilege (often based in being white, male, heterosexual, of higher socioeconomic status, physically and mentally healthy, etc.) still plays out when natural or human-made disasters strike.Girls and women, in particular, often suffer in sex-based ways when anomie strikes, when norms disappear and laws become meaningless in a \u2018post-apocalyptic\u2019 society.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, I haven\u2019t read the\u00a0graphic novels<\/a> of\u00a0Robert Kirkman<\/a>, on which this series is based.\u00a0So, I\u2019m not 100% sure who to credit for the plot twists that portrayed the violent racism of a white supremacist, the vulnerability of daughter and wife to a physically-abusive man, and the terror of a woman fighting off a former lover who is trying to rape her.When the hospital is invaded by \u201cwalkers\u201d (a.k.a. zombies), the living soldiers choose to execute ill and disabled patients rather than try to rescue them.\u00a0[Mind you, the zombies do not seem to move fast enough to cause problems for someone armed with a semiautomatic weapon, but the choice is still made to sacrifice these lower status people.]<\/em><\/p>\n

If a common enemy should unite, then social scripts of bigotry and bias should disappear.\u00a0As one character notes in the season finale, human beings may have reached their point of extinction.\u00a0The question is whether the zombies or our own human failings are to blame.<\/p>\n

With record\u00a0ratings<\/a>,\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> and other\u00a0sources<\/a> report that this Sunday night\u2019s finale attracted 6 million viewers.\u00a0 I may not be the typical fan of this show, so I wonder: will most viewers remain focused on the horror of a gruesome, fictitious zombie epidemic?\u00a0Or, are there others like me, who despite flinching every time a zombie lunged for a bite of human flesh, left the season finale feeling acutely aware of the very real pandemic that plagues almost all societies: that potent combination of bigotry and selfishness which manifests as one of the many \u2018isms.\u00a0I\u2019ve yet to see a \u2018walker\u2019 lurching down a street, but I have encountered far too many living human beings who lack empathy, respect, and compassion for each other and for the diversity of life on this planet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was originally posted on Girl w\/ Pen on December 8th. \u00a0Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University and the author of Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases. .. *Spoiler Alert: in order to critique this show, I need to reveal some plot points. Zombies do not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9064,9065],"class_list":["post-3282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-the-walking-dead","tag-zombies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3286,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282\/revisions\/3286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}