Meat, Masculinity, and Pathologized Adolescence in Michael Logan’s Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps

In their discussion of plagues in English literature, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz observe that fictional epidemics act as multivalent metaphors that encapsulate numerous cultural anxieties and contradictions (135–36). Contemporary scholarship in literary and cultural studies reflects this observation: zombie plagues and non-supernatural vampire infections have been explored as metaphors for varying intersections of capitalism, race relations, global politics, gender, and media within the contexts of hero narratives, representations of otherness, and anxieties about personal and global intersubjectivities (see, for example, Bakke; Boluk and Lenz; Cameron; Comaroff and Comaroff; Jen; Schneider). When it comes to the consumptive aspect of these fantastic infections, however, the critical literature focuses overwhelmingly on capitalist greed (often within the context of race) as the primary metaphorical referent (Bakke 403; Boluk and Lenz 136, 142; Comaroff and Comaroff 780–83; Jen 120; Schneider 155–57).

Consumption itself is potentially as multivalent as the concept of plague in which it is embedded, and, in the context of zombie and vampire infections, it is a particularly apt platform for contemporary dialogues about adolescent masculinity. The flesh and/or blood consumption that typifies zombie and vampire fictions resonates with a number of prevalent discourses of masculinity in Western cultures. The grotesque act of consuming a human subject as food can reflect assumptions that teenage boys are themselves inherently grotesque, and narratives that associate flesh-eating with the formation of masculine sexual identity are salient in Western mainstream media (see Wannamaker 31; Adams, Sexual 33). The inherent stasis of zombie and vampire figures—undead and unable to age—parallels current cultural anxieties that young men are unable to transition from adolescence to adulthood (see Kimmel 4–6). Not all zombie and vampire narratives explore adolescent masculinity as a central theme, but the above homologies ensure that, where these narratives do focus on young male subjects, zombie and vampire texts are primed to respond to a plethora of fears and anxieties about the nature of contemporary adolescent masculinity. Where zombies and vampires are represented as the result of an infection, these fears and anxieties manifest themselves in processes of pathologization. Adolescent masculinity becomes subject to scrutiny, and the frequently invisible discourses that contribute to contemporary understandings of male subjectivity become apparent.

Michael Logan’s 2012 zombie parody Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 pseudo-vampire novel Peeps highlight the potential for zombie and vampire infections to offer commentary on adolescent masculinity. As works of satire, these novels expose implicit narrative conventions associated with masculinity, flesh-eating, and disease. Insofar as the masculine subjects pathologized in these novels are white, middle-class, heterosexual young men, these texts also challenge the “default” status of normative identities. Nonetheless, although Logan and Westerfeld adopt a critical approach in some respects, their texts also demonstrate that metaphors of zombie and vampire infections can be used as vehicles for glorification as well as pathologization; even as zombie and vampire epidemics stand in for perceived social ills, they may also reproduce metanarratives that represent infectious masculine consumption as a necessary component of human life. Situated in relation to discourses that expose and uphold patriarchal models of masculinity simultaneously, Apocalypse Cow and Peeps reflect both the radical potential inherent in narratives of infection and a deep-seated ambivalence toward such radicalism in relation to twenty-first-century constructions of male subjectivity.

Converging Discourses of Masculine Adolescence

In his contribution to the collection of essays Ways of Being Male, Perry Nodelman observes that Western texts represent masculinity overwhelmingly as a “natural” state that is free from artifice. Within this context, readers of texts for young people are positioned to ignore the social constructs that inform normative models of masculinity (2). Narratives of zombie and vampire infection, however, deny readers a comfortable position from which they can accept any model of subjectivity in terms of natural/artificial binaries. Regardless of whether the epidemic itself is represented as an evolutionary or a genetically engineered phenomenon, inherent in the concept of infection is the intrusion of a foreign virus, bacterium, or parasite that alters the...