Masculinity and Race in AMC’s The Walking Dead

AMC’s The Walking Dead is back Sunday October 7 for its 9th season. We’re going to run a series of posts about the series that are distilled versions of the arguments of chapters in our edited collection, The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, recently published by McFarland. This collection is not at all the last word –and we’d like to open up more conversations about all these things in the show, especially as the issues raised in the book–and the arguments that get made–change as The Walking Dead narrative continues. To that end, we’re inviting submissions to Horror Homeroom that enter into conversation with this series of posts taken from our book. How do these arguments play out in seasons 8 and 9? If we publish your submission, we’ll send you a free copy of the book.

The first post in the series is from Brooke Bennett . . . This is what she has to say:

The following discussion is a taste of my argument in “‘Things are different now. There’s no niggers anymore…. There’s us and the dead’: AMC’s The Walking Dead in Post-Racial, Colorblind America,” in The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, edited by Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley (McFarland, 2018).

Looking at gender in The Walking Dead requires more than an investigation of the representations of women within the series. We must also analyze masculinity, along with the contextual relationship between popular television texts and contemporary postfeminist and post-racial (i.e., colorblind) politics within popular culture.

Most important to analyzing masculinity in The Walking Dead is the concept of hegemonic masculinity. There is an ideal of masculinity and manhood—as seen via cultural artifacts such as television—which encapsulates the favored behaviors and physical characteristics of a specific time period and culture.¹ Additionally, there are different kinds of masculinity that are competing against one another, creating a sort of hierarchy. Amanda D. Lotz describes how this is a feature of contemporary television.² She argues that each show has its own idealized form of masculinity.

The masculinities of The Walking Dead have become much more entangled with other races in recent seasons. At points these masculinities can be seen as reiterating traditional hegemonic masculinity, symbolically punishing men of color, yet some narrative points seem to challenge the superiority of this ideal, de-centering the “normative, white masculine subject.”³ Postfeminist masculinity is profoundly connected to fatherhood. Indeed, various types of fatherhood representative of postfeminism, such as “protective paternalism, “paternal payback,” and the “widowed single father,” are reflected in The Walking Dead. Race becomes intertwined with idealized white males to shape a morally superior and idealized postfeminist masculinity.⁴

Rick embodies The Walking Dead’s idealized masculinity from the start. His masculinity is largely defined in relation to his status as a father and former sheriff’s deputy, reflective of the “protective paternalism” archetype. (See my chapter for a discuss of the other two archetypes). The subordinated masculinities exhibited in characters such as Glenn, Tyreese, and Daryl open spaces of leadership in opposition to Rick’s. Rick’s masculinity is also part of the post-9/11 environment. Via the seemingly harmless idea of fatherhood, this form of “post-9/11 protectorate masculinity negotiates violent vigilantism and rampaging violence/protectiveness as culturally viable when enacted in the name of fatherhood.”⁵ Though Rick is morally permitted a large degree of violence in the name of protective paternalism, the development of his character, especially during season five, questions his ability to be an effective leader.

Ashley Doane⁶ and Jennifer Esposito⁷ have described post-racism as occurring when categories of race no longer have significance. Additionally, Catherine Squires argues that post-racial discourse involves a celebration of differences.⁸ Within the world of The Walking Dead, as Dawn Keetley argues, “Rick’s banishing of all racial difference (shaping his post-apocalyptic world as ‘post-racial’) allows it to creep back in unrecognized.”⁹ This is seen in Rick’s infamous line that “Things are different now. There’s no niggers anymore…. There’s us and the dead.”

In contradiction to Rick’s masculinity, men of color embody a more relational, thus feminized and subordinated, masculinity, which does actually become a critical facet of leadership in the post-apocalypse. This provides an alternative path to peaceful coexistence with others. Since Rick is not purely heroic in season five, the men of color are given the opportunity to amass directly oppositional, yet morally superior, positions in relation to him.

One alternative type of masculinity that is opposed to Rick’s and that is symbolically punished (and which I feature in my chapter), is embodied in Tyreese and specifically highlighted by his death. Prior to his death, Tyreese begins a complex metamorphosis in which he starts to question the violent actions and decision-making of Rick. In the season five episode, “What Happened and What’s Going On,” Tyreese is met by the Governor and Martin in his hallucinations. The two repeatedly remark on how Tyreese said he would “pay his way” for protection in Woodbury, implying that he was supposed to follow the Governor’s violent orders without question, as well as Martin’s claims that Tyreese cannot live in this world because you have to be violent and murder others to protect yourself and your loved ones. Standing in direct opposition to the Governor and Martin, Beth, Lizzie, and Micah materialize to tell Tyreese to just “let go,” and that “it’s better now” since they are at peace in death.

Not wanting to adhere to the violent hegemonic masculinity that the white men of the series embody, Tyreese is symbolically punished for his questioning of the hegemonic order via his death. Tyreese’s death could also be read as the realization that in the white order of masculine leadership in his new world, men have to surrender themselves over to this hegemonic masculinity or die. As Tyreese was becoming more humanized by not killing humans, he was beginning to be pushed out of the violent universe in which Rick thinks he exists. In a world dominated by white men who remain in positions of leadership, can men of color—or some type of alternative form of approaching dilemmas—be given opportunities to form a more peaceful existence? Tyreese certainly wanted to do so, only he was killed off too early to see this potential narrative through.

Overall, The Walking Dead establishes its own hegemonic masculinity via the show’s protagonist, Rick Grimes. He repeatedly illustrates idealized masculinity through protective paternalism: women and children must be protected against the enemy by any means necessary. Yet Rick’s approach to the new world order is not sustainable, and the serial collapse of his communities demonstrates how untenable his violent approach to leadership becomes. These flawed aspects of The Walking Dead’s hegemonic white masculinity enable an oppositional space to disrupt the narrative universe via men of color. Glenn, for example, becomes (for a while) representative of the possibilities of a more relational form of masculinity, one not focused completely on violence and that subsequently challenges Rick’s ability to make complex decisions from a holistic perspective.¹⁰

In my chapter, then, I begin a conversation about the complexities of race and masculinity within AMC’s The Walking Dead. The series cannot be portrayed as conservatively “bad” or progressively “good” but necessitates an analysis demonstrating the interwoven politics of representational issues and subjective identities within individual characters. Any analysis of identity within the series thus necessitates attention to particular identity politics which emphasize intersectionality, rather than the generalizations solely based politics of “race” or of “gender.”

 

Brooke Bennett has an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California. She completed her BA in English (with a minor in Gender Studies) at the University Arkansas, graduating Cum Laude in 2016. Her research interests include feminist media studies, television studies, and gender studies. Her work on race and gender in Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season One is forthcoming in Feminist Media Studies.

She has written about Until Dawn, children in The Walking Dead,  and the TV series In the Flesh for Horror Homeroom.

 

Notes and Bibliography

 

1. Connell and Messerschmidt
2. Lotz
3. Harris
4. For more on postfeminist masculinity see Wayne, Hamad
5. Godfrey and Hamad
6. Doane
7. Esposito
8. Squires
9. Keetley
10. After this writing, Glenn was subsequently killed off from the series during the season seven premiere, “The Day Will come When You Won’t Be” (23 Oct 2016), which obviously seriously compromises the ideals he stood for in opposition to Rick.

 

Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (2005): 829-859.

Doane, Ashley. “Shades of Colorblindness: Rethinking Racial Ideology in the United States.” In The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America, edited by Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner, 15-36. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Esposito, Jennifer. “What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty?: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom.” Television and New Media 10, no. 6 (2009): 521-535.

Hamad, Hannah. Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2014.

Harris, Geraldine. “A Return to Form? Postmasculinist Television Drama and Tragic Heroes in the Wake of The Sopranos.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 10 no. 4 (2012): 443-464.

Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: ‘We’re All Infected.’” In Keetley, We’re All Infected, 3-25.

Keetley, Dawn. “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

Lotz, Amanda D. Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Squires, Catherine R. The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Wayne, Michael L. “Ambivalent Anti-Heroes and Racist Rednecks on Basic Cable: Post-Race Ideology and White Masculinities on FX.” Journal of Popular Television 2, no. 2 (2014): 205-225.