From the first, Rick Grimes’ role as a father has occupied a central place in The Walking Dead franchise. Initially, his quest to find his family drives both him and the narrative onward. Later, he competes violently for the status of sole patriarch of his family (a role that overlaps significantly with his role as leader of his group of survivors), forms new nuclear family units after his wife, Lori, dies, and consistently frames his decision-making as oriented towards making a future for his son, Carl. Perhaps his focus on the family does not seem surprising. Perhaps it even seems “natural.” Perhaps, however, it should not.
My essay, “‘We can’t just ignore the rules’: Queer Heterosexualities,” in the collection The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, proposes that both The Walking Dead comics and television show overwhelmingly present, in their narratives, language, and visual representations, the dominance of the heteronormative nuclear family, the ideology that underlies it, and the mechanisms through which that ideology is enforced and naturalized.
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Theorist Lee Edelman, in the 2004 book No Future, terms this ideology reproductive futurism and argues that it relies on the imagined, figural Child (as opposed to actual, embodied children), produced within the heterosexual family unit, to symbolically guarantee a social future. In so doing, it necessarily closes off, as far as possible, queer alternatives to the monogamous, patriarchal family.
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In The Walking Dead, this containment continues to operate even in the utter social breakdown of the zombie apocalypse, a testament to the strength of reproductive futurism’s cultural embeddedness and the effectiveness of the ways in which its boundaries are policed. We see such policing in the comics in Donna’s condemnation of what she thinks is a sexual triad and Lori’s rejection of Carol’s desire for a polyamorous relationship as insane, as well as in the unnecessary and ultimately deadly competition in the comics and TV show between Rick and Shane over the position of partner to Lori and father to Carl and Judith. In the TV show, Rick labels Shane’s professed love for Lori as an impossibility, a mistake in perception or irrational belief, an exchange in which we see a common tactic for queer foreclosure play out, much as we see the paramount importance accorded to the Child in Lori’s reversal of her abortion attempt.
Donna criticizes assumed polyamory among Dale, Andrea, and Amy
The zombies themselves, with a present-focused drive to consume that has as a byproduct asexual reproduction, can be seen as acting in the role of Edelman’s sinthomosexual, a queer antagonist to reproductive futurism, stripping away its mythologizing of heteronormativity. Thus, when people such as Hershel or the Governor attempt to incorporate undead family members into their lives, these alternative units are consistently destroyed and positioned as the products of irrational thinking. Zombie children, such as Penny and Sophia in the television series, present especially disruptive figures for reproductive futurism, functioning in opposition to its central Child. On the whole, The Walking Dead’s zombies represent, as monsters often do, an opening out into alterity and alternative ways of (re)thinking society.
It is therefore potentially an extremely notable development for such (re)thinking that since this essay was written, the television series has begun to diverge significantly from the comics in the focus on the father-son relationship between Rick and Carl. While in the comics, Carl is on track to fulfill the function of a Child and heir to usher in the future, his death in the TV version arguably presents a failure of reproductive futurism, a failure to protect the child/Child and the patriarchal hierarchy.
Rick, Michonne, and a dying Carl
Further, although Rick promised Carl to create a better social future in his memory, Andrew Lincoln’s impending departure from the series not only calls the consequences of this promise into question but also removes the series’ primary father figure and dismantles what could be considered its last remaining (and partly biological) nuclear family. After the time jump at the beginning of season 9, will Michonne and Judith, the remaining members of the Grimes family unit, become the new Rick and Carl? If so, such a change may at least shift the show’s longstanding traditionally-slanted gender dynamics, even if it still wouldn’t constitute a radical reimagining of socio-sexual practices. At the least, the departure of Rick and Carl opens a space for queer potentialities; it remains to see whether and with what that space will be filled.
Related post: Queerness in The Walking Dead TV series.
John Ziegler is an assistant professor of English at Bronx Community College (CUNY) in New York. His book on the queer family in The Walking Dead was recently published by Palgrave.
