Resilient Evil: Neoliberal Technologies of the Self and Population in Zombie “Demodystopia”

In the twenty-first century and strongly influenced by neoliberalism, the zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, in the terrain of demography, appears as a division of the population into redundant and resilient. This discourse implies a transformation of individuals in a process of subjectivation based on competition and resilience and understood as a cross between technologies of the self and technologies of power as defined by Michel Foucault. The article has two main aims: (1) to analyze the figures of the zombie and the survivor from the standpoint of the division of individuals and populations into “redundant” and “resilient” categories as a reflection of subjectivation in the neoliberal model and (2) to explore superdiversity in postapocalyptic demography (gender, age, ethnocultural diversity, and sexual orientation).