Speaker
Description
Zombie narratives are undergoing a significant transformation in contemporary culture, evolving beyond the classic shambling corpse to reflect hybrid, posthuman anxieties (Lauro 2017). M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) envisions a zombie-infested world in crisis, where militarism, science, and morality intersect under the pressures of ecological and biological collapse. Set in post-apocalyptic Britain, the novel portrays a society attempting to sustain control amid widespread devastation and the threat posed by human-fungal hybrid “zombies”. This study examines how Carey reconfigures the zombie apocalypse narrative to interrogate the ethics of survival, the politics of dehumanization, and the gendered dimensions of crisis. Through the coexistence of human and fungal hybrid life forms, the novel raises questions about who is entitled to survive and at what ethical cost. Drawing on ecofeminist and postfeminist frameworks—including Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care (1982), Val Plumwood’s critique of human mastery over nature (1993), and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity (2013)—as well as Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (1975), this paper analyzes how crisis functions as both a mechanism of domination and a catalyst for ethical transformation. The military-scientific complex operates as an apparatus of control, seeking to preserve humanity through coercion and sacrifice, while characters such as Melanie and Miss Justineau embody alternative ethics grounded in empathy, relationality, and coexistence. By contrasting utilitarian rationality with affective care, Carey destabilizes binaries of human/inhuman and protector/threat. Ultimately, this study concludes that The Girl with All the Gifts transforms the zombie apocalypse into a site of moral and ontological renewal, suggesting that the end of the human world may inaugurate new forms of life and ethical relations beyond domination and exclusion.
| Keywords | crisis, ecofeminism, ethics of care, militarism, posthumanism, Zombie apocalypse |
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