Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead ed. by Shaka McGlotten, Steve Jones (review)

Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, eds, Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. US$35.00 (pbk).Sarah Juliet LauroZombies are dead. I do not mean that literally, but in the sense that one says 'Art is dead' or 'literature is dead' or 'punk rock is dead'. Of course, none of these things are actually dead, or even 'over', the way my kid sister keeps telling me that my haircut is 'so over'. For the past decade, we have seen a veritable onslaught of publications on zombies brought forth, and the commercial popularity of the monster seems to indicate that like the hordes of the undead in cinema, they are going to keep coming at us. Particularly common among the throng is the edited collection, in which a variety of scholars from different academic disciplines address the undead in various media, using a specific thematic or methodological approach. Often when one asserts that something is 'dead', what is meant is that there is a need for reconceptualisation of the treatment of the subject. And in that spirit, I say to you: 'Zombies are dead'.This is risky, of course, especially as my own monograph on zombies was only published this July - but the latest offering from McFarland's 'Contributions to Zombie Studies' series, Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, edited by Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones, both provides a much-needed intervention in the field, and leads the way to designing a new protocol for how the subject is treated.Both McGlotten and Jones have previously published important essays on the zombie. In particular, I count McGlotten's article 'Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality' (in Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz's 2011 Generation Zombie) as one of the best pieces of scholarship published on the zombie in the past ten years. The living dead has long deserved more critical attention from the vantage point of both queer studies and disability studies, both of which are offered in this volume. Heretofore, the field of study of zombie sexuality had been limited to the treatment of a handful of overtly eroticized texts (most notably, perhaps, discussions of Bruce LaBruce's excellent film Otto; or, Up With Dead People (Germany/Canada 2008), as in Jennifer Cooke's book Legacies of Plague), and previous articles by Jones and McGlotten themselves, so this collection provides a useful treatment of a previously neglected theoretical lens for discussing the relevance of this monster. To my mind, the paradoxical nature of the inherently living-dead zombie is useful for thinking through dichotomies such as self/other, human/animal and especially master/slave. McGlotten and Jones's collection reminds us that we need to add to this list male/female, gay/straight, disabled/nondisabled and, especially, in terms of sex, reproductive/non-reproductive (whether the latter signifies homosexual sex, non-fertile heterosexual sex, or a variety of other sex acts.)I will briefly address here my favourite essays in the collection, before moving on to some of its few problems, and then I will summarise it as a whole suggests about the future of zombie studies.Marcus Harmes's contribution 'Victorian Values: Necrophilia and the Nineteenth Century in Zombie Films' provides a novel approach in its address of the few zombie films set in the Victorian era. Harmes connects the zombie's framing in such films to the mourning rituals of the period, which I found fascinating, especially in its statement that mourning works to preserve the body as an object in a manner similar to zombification; 'Victorian mourning reduced the deceased individual to a dispersed collection of artifacts' (48) like a lock of hair; the empty relics of the body are then, in some sense animated by the survivor's grief.Another of the highlights of the collection is Sasha Cocarla's 'queered reading' of Isaac Marion's Romeo and Juliet remix Warm Bodies (US/Canada 2013) in 'A Love Worth Un-Undying for: Neoliberalism and Queered Sexuality in Warm Bodies'. …

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