Zombies and the agency of women as the living dead.

Abstract

Gina Wisker states in “Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic” that writers “have engaged since the days of second-wave feminism with the potential of Gothic fantasy and horror fictions to further the feminist enterprise of cultural critique and the exploration of new visions and versions of what it can mean to be women in differing contexts” (408). My dissertation seeks to create a „new vision‟ of women in the liminal space of the living dead. It seeks to explore the position of women‟s agency in the fragmented role of the zombie. This is a role that is familiarly accounted to as having no apparent gender significance or differentiation, even though, on closer inspection and as I wish to argue, it is in fact highly gendered. Edgar Allan Poe‟s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Jean Rhys‟s Wide Sargasso Sea and Toni Morrison‟s Beloved will be the texts discussed. Lastly, this paper will conclude with an exploration into the new wave and definition of the postmodernist zombie in popular culture.