I’ve been trying to write this post for a while, and keep not finding the right words.
I’ve read several great posts about how the zombies-as-std idea from a while back is rather terrible and homophobic. However, I think all of these miss the fact that zombie stories have pretty much always been hideously ableist. There is certainly a need for discussion of why writing about a zombie virus as an STD ignores decades of systematic violence done to the LGBT community through the way people with AIDS were (and are) treated. However, there’s also a need to discuss the way that most zombie stories have been and continue to be about glorifying violence against any people with communicable diseases (and sometimes about glorifying violence against people with any diseases at all).
The traditional zombie is a shambling, groaning horrorscape of illness, against which any level of violence is not just acceptable, but Necessary and Right. Zombies were once human, until the disease took away their ability to think and began to rot their bodies. The hero in a zombie story is a healthy, able bodied person who can beat zombies to death with baseball bats, blow them to pieces with shotguns, and hack their way through hoards of nameless, faceless zombies who’s lives no longer matter now that they are ill.
Traditional zombie stories are pretty inherently massively ableist. Disabled people are often treated with hostility, suspicion, and violence in the US (as I live in the US, I can’t speak to other cultures). People with serious illnesses, including mental illnesses, are often dismissed and/or treated as though their lives aren’t worthwhile already in our culture. There’s this idea that if you are or become severely disabled, your life becomes less worth living, and thus also less worth caring about by other people. Illness is treated like a monster that takes over everything that a person is, rather than simply an aspect of their body that lives them with different abilities than a non ill person. Many people with disabilities or mental illnesses are already seen as less intelligent than able-bodied people, with less worth to society. Zombie stories take that to an extreme.
I suppose my overall point is this: It’s great that people are calling out the zombies-as-std post for its homophobia. That is a conversation that needs to happen. It would just also be nice if there were more people calling out the entire zombie genre, because the whole thing deserves to be critiqued for the ableist mess that it is.
If a zombie apocalypse occurred, people with the zombie virus would deserve compassion, respect, and medical care, not be gleefully put down like rabid dogs.
