Zombie Porn 1.0: Or, Some Queer Things Zombie Sex Can Teach Us

“Death Is the New Pornography”

This essay bites off more than it can chew. Inspired by the work of Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and an increasingly widespread fascination with zombies of all kinds, we track the significance of the recent “zombie renaissance” across a range of popular and academic cultural texts.² As mindless figures introduced into Western consciousness by way of slavery, and possessing insatiable hunger and drive, but no subjective desire, zombies are uniquely positioned to mirror the fears and desires of humans living in a world in which new forms of sovereignty (neoliberal, globalizing, corporate, bio-and necro-political) have transformed the meanings and experiences of life and death.³ Here we focus on what we call “zombie porn,” a heretofore largely neglected if also still emergent subgenre of a much larger zombie corpus. We should note at the outset that, like the film we analyze here, our title defers the promise of its object: our theoretical money shots are less shattering or dramatic than they are impassive or undead, and porn appears less as gratifying sexual representations than as a materialist conceit to think through relationships between sex, queerness, and power. We therefore cultivate definitions of zombie porn that are variously earnest and awkward, camp and critical, in the hope that they might help us to reflect on the sex lives and political presents of zombies and, maybe, the rest of us.

We tie our discussions of pornography, zombiephilia, and necropolitics to recent discussions in queer studies about futurity, normativity, and political possibility. Zombies are kin to queers: they are always already quasi-pornographic bodies opened up to the world in unexpected or unconventional ways; they add to their numbers through contagion and recruitment (in malls, public parks, the local bar, the armed services, the big city, the small town, or the domestic bedroom); and they stand in for a world overrun by a ravenous multitude, a world without a future. LaBruce throws queer desire and sex into this already heady mix. We follow his lead, seeking to understand queer relations to, and complicities with, sex, politics, and deadened living in an era in which living stumbles on in conditions of “crisis ordinariness” and the mindless grind that defines working life as much as it does the figure of the walking dead (“dl,” 182).⁴

Up with Dead People

This project draws heavily on LaBruce’s 2008 gay zombie film, Otto; or, Up with Dead People. LaBruce gained subcultural and academic attention⁵ in the 1990s and early 2000s with films like No Skin off My Ass (1991), Super 8½ (1994), Hustler White (1996), Skin Flick (2000), and Raspberry Reich (2004).⁶ Unlike the more reputable (if also now largely defunct) New Queer Cinema, LaBruce’s films, like those of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol before him, blend avant-garde sensibilities with elements from camp, punk, and porn. Otto tells the stories of Otto, a young amnesiac gay zombie, and Medea Yarn, a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about him while she completes a larger “political-porno-zombie movie,” Up with Dead People. In 2010 LaBruce completed L.A. Zombie, a feature-length pornographic film that even more explicitly brings queer sex and subjectivity into relation with the walking dead.

LaBruce’s œuvre might be best described as “art porn,” in which pornographic scenes form part of a larger, highly aestheticized narrative framework, often with multiple interweaving stories.⁷ His films, and the films within them, are often structured diegetically and extradiegetically as “exploitation.” We are indebted to La-Bruce not only because Otto helped us to feed the notion of zombie porn but also because of the ways his provocative pairing of art, porn, and (especially punk) politics helps us interrogate what counts as pornographic.

Definitions of pornography, especially in contexts of artistic expression, have historically been a contentious and continually shifting topic of debate. Consequently, pornography remains a concept that is chronically under- or misdefined in public and academic discourse. In this essay we begin...