The Biopower of Zombies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Horde

Authors

Mary Hedengren, University of Texas at AustinFollow

Abstract

I like zombies. I really like zombies. But I'm not the only one: why do so many of us seem to be enjoying a zombie moment? What does it say about our fears of a decentralized government and the power of human bodies? And what is that faintly discernable groaning sound? In this article, I draw on the theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as Foucault's "biopower" concept to examine our collective fascination with a collective threat.

About the Author(s)

Mary Hedengren is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies the rhetoric of emerging identities. Her research interests include post-transnational identity, nascent disciplinarity and things of that ilk. Mary is the host of the rhetorical history podcast Mere Rhetoric, also available on iTunes. This is not the first time she has produced academic work about zombies, despite a relatively happy childhood.

DOI

10.15760/harlot.2014.12.5

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39466

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Hedengren, Mary (2015) "The Biopower of Zombies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Horde," Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion: No. 12, 5.
https://doi.org/10.15760/harlot.2014.12.5