Essays: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film

[bibliogramma]

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Connecticut, is a fascinating collection of essays for anyone interested, as I am, in how these issues are presented in science fiction, and in the post-apocalyptic vision in particular.

I have always been rather a fan of the post-apocalyptic subgenre of speculative fiction, I think in part because it mirrors the worst fears of our society - how the world ends, which of the classical horsemen, or some other, newly imagined devastation, predominates our nightmares - and partly because it offers the opportunity to suggest what might follow if everything we know has been torn down. Will we recreate current social structures, classes, institutions, or will we strike out in new directions?

This is a collection of essays that look at our visual media and try to explore some of these questions. As Gurr says in her Introduction, “The writers in this volume are interested in the ways in which post-apocalyptic fictions interact with—produce, reflect, interrogate, accommodate, and resist—hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Early post-apocalyptic imaginings tended to focus on the reconstruction of society after a devastating, often nuclear war, or as the result of science gone wrong; such narratives were heavily influenced by the experiences of WWII. The Cold War introduced the apocalypse brought about by stealthy invasion, the infection and spread of disease or mind control agents - The Invasion of the Body Snatchers being the classic film example. Infection of the body, and the body politic, and fears of immigration blend in both alien invasion and zombie narratives, which have become increasingly popular after the events of 9/11. All these scenarios and more are explored from various perspectives in these essays, which address works as varied as the Hunger Games films, Firefly, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica (the remake), True Blood, the Resident Evil films and others.

What many of these essays make clear is that despite the opportunities for change of all kinds inherent in the post-apocalyptic scenario, many of these works fail to really challenge contemporary gender, race and class relations. Even with the presence of major characters who are people of colour or white women, the societies being recreated remain patriarchal, male-centred, and white-dominated, and perpetuate existing stereotypes about race and gender. Through analysis of the social milieus in series such as Firefly and films such as Hunger Games, it becomes clear that simply having a female action hero does not necessarily imply a break with traditional gender roles - the presence of an exceptional woman serves merely to divert attention from the ways in which the status quo is maintained.

The post-apocalyptic narrative is, above all, a narrative of survival. Its tropes tell us what are the threats humanity fears will threaten its survival, and the parts of our culture that we believe are essential to our survival. It shows us what we fear and what we value, and lets us question whether our fears and values are indeed the ones that will affect whether we as a society will indeed survive.