Where Have all the Monsters Gone?

ajpc 12 (2) pp. 113–126 Intellect Limited 2023 The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture Volume 12 Number 2 © 2023 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00073_1 Received 17 March 2023; Accepted 22 September 2023; Published Online March 2024 KAREN MACFARLANE Mount Saint Vincent University Where have all the monsters gone? ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Monsters have been rehabilitated in popular culture, moved from the realm of the truly monstrous to the world of neoliberal ‘sameness’. The zombies of In the Flesh and the vampires in True Blood, as only two examples of this trend, have lost their monstrous edge and have come to represent different ways of being human. While some discussions of this reimagined monster describe the weaving of monsters into mainstream culture as a way of acting out discourses of inclusion, I argue here that contemporary narratives that focus on monsters as metaphors for difference and inclusion are, ultimately, not providing a vision of a utopian world of equality. Instead, these representations are enacting a dystopian vision of a neoliberal social order that demonstrates a fear of true or radical difference. monsters neoliberal Gothic Gothic shame post-race True Blood In the Flesh The truly monstrous monsters are all but gone. Where there was once moaning, howling, the creaking of an opening casket, the muffled sound of ancient bandaged feet shuffling along a corridor, there is now an eerie silence. Where there were once creatures with bodies that shifted terrifyingly – from human to animal, to mist, to object and beyond – creatures that appeared and disappeared, that menaced and preyed, that terrified through their difference, there are now lovers, saviours, victims and respectable homeowners. The Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet, for example, focuses on a realtor, Sheila Hammond, who ate some bad clams and became a zombie. Other than her unusual appetite and what she needs to do to fulfil it, and, initially at least, some minor decay (and some zombie hunting members of an ancient order), she leads Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 www.intellectbooks.com  113 Karen Macfarlane a fairly normal life in the suburbs with her husband and daughter. In Sheila, the domesticated monster, or, as I prefer to call them, de-monstered monster, has reached its apex. Sheila is emblematic of the identity crisis that so many monsters in the twenty-first century are facing. This change has been gradual and has not happened in a particularly linear way. One might trace its origins to The Munsters (1964) but, as I argue here, the depiction of the suburban lives of Herman and Lily cannot be connected seamlessly, or unproblematically, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s (1997–2003) troubled Angel or to the post-apocalyptic world of In the Flesh (2013, 2014a, 2014b). Contemporary iterations of de-monstered monsters are particularly removed from traditional monstrosity and so open a space in which to consider the layered and, as I will argue here, problematic reimagining of the monstrous in contemporary Gothic and horror. The figures that we see in contemporary depictions are not called ‘monsters’, and if anyone in these narratives uses the word (or others, like ‘zombie’) they are inevitably corrected. These are all people, or at least subjects, with damaged psyches or terrible events in their pasts, or unfortunate physical differences. My point about disappearance is really misleading, and maybe even a bit alarmist, because monsters really have not ‘gone’ anywhere. Contemporary monsters have just been given some interesting makeovers, engaged good lawyers, and advocated for their rights. They have been ‘mainstreamed’, to use a term from True Blood. Monsters, but most particularly vampires and werewolves, have been rehabilitated: moved from the realm of the truly monstrous to the world of neoliberal ‘sameness’. This ‘sameness’ is what I want to focus on here. While utopian discussions of the mainstreamed monster that describe the weaving of monsters into mainstream culture as a way of acting out discourses of inclusion are convincing and valuable, I want to argue that contemporary narratives that focus on monsters as metaphors for difference and inclusion are, ultimately, not providing a vision of a utopian world of equality. Instead, as I will argue here, contemporary representations of these figures are enacting a dystopian vision of a neoliberal social order that demonstrates a fear of true or radical difference. As they have functioned historically in Gothic and cultural narratives, monsters have been defined and discussed in complex and detailed ways. Traditional monsters do important cultural work. They have served to mark the boundaries of the familiar: they demonstrate the limits of categorization, the limits of civility, of relations, of humanity. And, as Asa Mittman has argued, they ‘don’t do it nicely […] they trouble, they worry, they haunt [he says]. They break, they tear and rend cultures’ (2013: 1). Their role in cultural narratives, then, as J. Halberstam (1995) has argued, is to act as a kind of screen onto which the anxieties of a specific cultural moment are projected. The monster enacts and embodies those anxieties and plays them out to their most illogical extreme. The horror that the monster elicits is the horror of recognition, of that which unsettles settling, temporarily, in its destructive body that is the sign of the potential for a culture’s dissolution. The disturbance that monsters cause registers physically, socially and ontologically on those with whom it comes in contact. As a sign of transgression and excess, the monster traditionally allows the reader or audience to explore the dark places within and beyond cultural narratives. When that work is done, it is safely dispatched and order is restored. The Gothic monster is, as monster theorists such as J. J. Cohen (1996), J. Halberstam (1995) and A. Mittman (2013) have suggested, fundamentally paradoxical: destroying culture even as its presence, its embodiment Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 114   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 Where have all the monsters gone? of the things the culture most fears or disavows, serves to reinforce the terms through which that culture defines itself. Almost every discussion of monsters focuses on their position as symbols of disruption, as discursive challenges to hegemonic order; in short, as the products of a collective cultural and narrative imagination. And while monsters themselves are acknowledged as imaginary, their effect has a register in the real. Think of the physiological response that the monstrous body of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Hyde has on the respectable bodies that he encounters: Mr Enfield describes Hyde as ‘[bringing] out a sweat on me like running’ and the doctor, that ‘cut and dry apothecary [who was] about as emotional as a bagpipe’, describes himself as ‘turn[ing] sick and white’ (2015: 33) in Hyde’s presence. The respectable, ‘normal’ body responds in ‘real’ physical ways to the monstrous body. The real borders between acceptable and unacceptable, order and chaos, even life and death are made visible and felt physically, not only imaginatively, through the presence of the monstrous body. In the same way, as a method for creating an irretrievable other, monsters reflect, and reflect on, real social and cultural conflicts that need to be named, seen, played out, and resolved. Think, for example, about how the fear of women’s sexuality and modern masculine impotence is played out over the bodies of Dracula’s voracious vampire women and Jonathan Harker’s fainting form. The masculine order is restored to its (up)right place at the end of the novel, but only after the spectacle of the implications of succumbing to the anarchic order of the monster have been fully played out. These monsters indeed straddle the borders of the factual and the imaginary, their presence highlighting the tension between the real and the ideal, between stories we tell ourselves and our lived experiences, revealing that what we call the ‘real’ is a cluster of competing, ultimately unstable discourses (Dendle 2013: 448). In spite of its otherness, though, there has always been a level of sympathy for the monster from its earliest appearances in Gothic narratives. It is for this reason that I avoid describing the monsters I discuss here as ‘sympathetic’ and prefer the term ‘demonstered’. As Robin Wood has said, the impact of the monster in horror ‘depends partly on [its] capacity to arouse sympathy; one can feel little for a mass of viscous black slime’ (1979: 135). It is that sympathy, that tension between fear and repulsion, between fear and desire (in short, that terror) that has historically has made monsters such potent and central figures in Gothic and horror. As we entered into the second decade of the twenty-first century, though, it became clear that the figure of the monster had started to function a bit differently in popular culture. In contemporary manifestations, they become, more often than not, metaphors for defining tolerance, inclusion and the positive recognition of difference. True Blood, for example, opens with a televised debate about the ‘vampire rights amendment’ in the United States, and the representation of vampirism throughout the series is couched in terms that echo civil rights movements and AIDS activism. The BBC series In the Flesh similarly focuses on sufferers of ‘partially deceased syndrome’ after a zombie rising. In these and other cases, being a ‘monster’ simply signals a kind of difference, equal to other classifications, that we as a culture should accommodate. This was taken to another level by Lady Gaga around the same time as these series originally aired. Gaga deploys the figure of the monster as a way to emphasize individuality and inclusion based on a celebration of difference.1 In her ‘Manifesto of Mother Monster’ she envisions ‘A race within the race of humanity/A race which bears no prejudice/No judgment/But boundless Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 1. See Macfarlane (2012). www.intellectbooks.com  115 Karen Macfarlane freedom’ (Lady Gaga 2011). Being a ‘monster’, and the concept of monstrosity itself for Gaga and for the writers of series like True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Bitten, Being Human, and the Twilight film franchise, is just another way to be human. This is a gesture that Harvey Roy Greenberg calls a ‘heimlich manoeuvre’, where monsters are made canny, familiar. He argues that there is a history of heimlich monsters in popular American culture, and that these figures almost always functioned as a strategy for coping with encounters with difference: ‘One is pleasured by the category collisions implicit in the heimlich monster’s disingenuousness during interactions with alarmed “normals”’ (Greenberg 2001: 136). Greenberg’s heimlich monster is a figure of fun, a protector of children that draws ‘each category (inhuman/human; threat/safety) to its obverse, to become the other’s Other’ (Greenberg 2001: 139). Greenberg’s definition is perhaps most clearly evident in early manifestations of the heimlich monster, like The Munsters, in which the ‘normals’’ fearful response to members of the Munster family is shown to be a result of ignorance or misunderstanding, not the reaction of the ‘natural’ body to the ‘unnatural’ that we saw in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The audience in the stories of the heimlich monster has bought into the domestication of these figures, has become familiar with them so that their difference only becomes fully evident with the intrusion of the ‘normal’ character. In these examples, the fear of the monstrous figure – an appropriate response to a traditional monster – is clearly wrong (Herman Munster is a comic, not a frightening, figure). The monster, here and elsewhere, is not so different from the people around them, as the ‘normals’ quickly find out. Herman goes to work with his lunch box, Lily is a stay-at-home mother, their children go off to school; in short, they are an – albeit odd, but fundamentally normal – American family whose claim to that normality is rehearsed and asserted over and over in the credits at the beginning of each episode. In these cases, encounters with monsters (as audience, as characters within the narrative) signify differently from encounters with traditional monsters. Herman, Lily and the rest have come to stand in for acceptance and inclusion and their function is to reinforce a concept of difference as safe and recognizable rather than to play out larger questions of social terror or cultural anxiety. In fact satirical television shows like The Munsters, The Addams Family and other supernatural series that aired around the same time opened a space for a discussion of the intrusion and assimilation of European ethnic ‘others’ into American suburbs in the 1960s. These series routed ‘the Gothic otherness of [their] families through a comedic lens and therefore safely contain[ed] and relegat[ed] their quirky existence and domesticity’ (Ní Fhlainn 2019: 18). And while they signified a distinct kind of ethnic or cultural difference through their family structures with grandparents, nieces and cousins, living under one roof, or through their unfamiliar diet, their music, and so on, their goal was not to disturb, but to be accepted into American culture and to reinforce cultural myths of inclusion and acceptance. Even as the Munsters and the Addams went about their daily lives, though, more traditional monsters still flourished and did frightening and shocking and truly monstrous things in film and television. It was only a few years after these shows went off the air, after all, that we were first introduced to Romero’s zombies. The twenty-first-century heimlich monster, though, seems to be more powerful than its predecessors and has almost completely overshadowed its frightening, Gothic counterpart. Monsters in contemporary culture are often given detailed personal histories and are revealed to have become monsters Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 116   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 Where have all the monsters gone? as the result of trauma or misadventure. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is emblematic of this. As Sorcha Ní Fhlainn has argued, ‘this Count Dracula is presented not solely as a monster but rather is sympathetically inflected as a foreign viral being longing for compassion and love’ (2019: 127–28). In Coppola’s reimagining of Dracula, the vampire is provided with an elaborate background story that explains that he became a vampire because he was grieving the loss of his wife. As a result, his predations in England are not, as Stoker told us, focused on conquest, but are instead the result of his desire to find and win back the latest incarnation of his dead love. Coppola’s Dracula is not so much a monster as just a sad, lovelorn and misunderstood tourist. In this sense, the heimlich monster simply enacts another way of being human. While these figures still carry some of the symbolic significance of their earlier representations with them – vampires still, horrifically, need blood to survive and can still become inhumanly violent – overall, their position in contemporary narratives works to accommodate difference and foster inclusion, to take on what Jeffrey Weinstock calls ‘the oppressive cultural forces that unjustly ostracize or victimize those who are physically divergent’ (2013: 276). In fact, like Gaga’s redefinition of the term ‘monsters’ as a way of creating a positive space for the fans that she calls ‘her misfits’, many discussions of the domesticated monster take a decidedly utopian turn. Some argue that contemporary monsters are part of a larger posthuman trend in popular culture, suggesting that they ‘trouble the notion of what it means to be human’, that they act out ‘the allure of losing one’s human identity’, and suggesting that their purpose is to ‘unsettle the Self/Other binary’ (Campbell 2013: 99). Discussing the vampire, in particular, Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman have argued that ‘today’s vampires offer a romanticized view of monstrosity in which Self transcends death and people are eternally unique’ (2013: 80). Perhaps because it is grittier, more adult, more ‘real’, than a number of the other series about domesticated vampires,2 HBO’s True Blood raises questions about the politics of uniqueness, transcendence and vampire ontology. The series is often discussed with a focus on the complexity of the ways in which its vampires are represented. For some critics, they ‘embody difference in a way that is difficult or impossible to homogenise across the entire vampire population’ (Campbell 2013: 100), while others think of the series as a model because it demonstrates a ‘wilful effort toward coexistence’ (McCrystal 2017: 93) and that it shows ‘a world in which the foreign or unknown, particularly that which causes fear, can exist harmoniously with humans who have felt threatened […] encourag[ing] an environment that embraces opposing forces [as it] rethinks monstrosity’ (2017: 93). These readings – what I have been describing as ‘utopian’ – argue that demonstered figures demonstrate that racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination are no longer systemic but are regressive positions that are held onto by individuals, and not by the culture at large. So, while the vampire myth has not fundamentally changed in these and other popular manifestations, the focus in these narratives is on community and on the politics of interactions between communities.3 Positioning vampires as symbols of inclusion and as a model for a progressive culture without prejudices, these utopian readings point out the extent to which the monstrous has been drained out of the monster so that instead of posing a threat to the social order, they ‘conserve culture and protect Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 2. That is, vampires in series such as Angel (The WB 1999–2004), The Vampire Diaries (The CW 2009–17), Midnight, Texas (NBC 2017–18) and Vampire Academy (Peacock 2022–present) in which the world of the vampires is generally focused on domestic and romantic relations which represent the vampires as more human than monster. 3. See McClelland (2010). www.intellectbooks.com  117 Karen Macfarlane the individual’, even as they ‘connote social and political stability’ as ‘upholders of human social codes’ (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 77, 78). These demonstered figures, though, cannot shake off their monstrous pasts – either in terms of the self-reflexivity of all these narratives (we know what to expect from monsters), or in the development of individual characters. As a result, the protagonists of these depictions are often characterized by their ‘self-loathing, empathy and pathos’ (Abbott 2016: 177). Citing Barnabas Collins from the 1960s television series Dark Shadows as the quintessential version of this type of vampire, Stacey Abbott argues that ‘he became a figure that embodied tragic loneliness and isolation as well as self-loathing for his cursed condition, a condition that he repeatedly attempted to cure’ (2016: 147). Barnabas Collins seems to have become a template for the heimlich and tortured monsters that have succeeded him. That the desire that drives these figures is the desire to become human foregrounds the assumption that is, I would argue, the most problematic element in utopian representations of demonstered monsters; that is, that this specific longing to become human, rather than to be a better vampire, for example, reflects on contemporary western assumptions about normative cultures, bodies, appetites and desires. Vampires who have the humanizing influence of a conscience, who have a level of self-awareness that transcends the limits of their positions as a monster, are characterized by, among other things, silence and shame around and about the actions of their ‘pre-domesticated’ selves. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, Angel suffers deeply because he is constantly aware of his inhuman actions in his early days before he was cursed with a soul, and similarly, True Blood’s Bill Compton lingers over the shame of his past, which is shaped not only by shame about his actions as a vampire but also about his all-too-human complicity in oppressive regimes of race, class and violence in the Southern United States before and during the American Civil War. What is important about this aspect of the representation of the demonstered is that they do not only silence themselves by refusing to talk about their nonhuman actions and desires, they are silenced by the people and the culture around them. While we, as the audience, see those actions in flashbacks, for example, seldom, if ever, do we hear the vampires opening up about their preenlightened feelings or about any pleasure they may feel or might have felt about hunting or drinking blood or killing. This silence is one of the elements that makes the demonstered monster a figure that, rather than revealing the anxieties or fears of twenty-first-century western culture, instead seems to reinforce its overriding myth of inclusion and equity – of normalization. The fact that the domesticated vampire, a figure that is emblematic of the desire to be ‘normal’, is also so often described as self-loathing can be productively read through the lens of queer theorizations of shame. This is not to suggest a too-close parallel between conceptions of monstrosity and queerness but, as Xavier Aldana Reyes has argued, these terms are both ‘clearly prey to similar patterns of exclusions and anxiety, those generated by the “normalizing” imaginary’ (2014: 2). The discursive and political parallels that bolster constructions of normativity, hegemony and exclusion in queer theory, then, invite the kind of connection that I am arguing here. In this sense, it is productive to think about how shame has been articulated as a way of working through a transformation to mainstreamed social identities that David Halpern and Valerie Traub have described as ‘the relatively recent move [in descriptions of queer subjects] from [having/being a] perversion to [being] a social identity’ (2010: 9). They posit this as a fracture between Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 118   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 Where have all the monsters gone? Gay Shame and Gay Pride, the latter, they argue, pulling queerness towards homonormative identities that mirror heteronormative cultural practices, and reinforce a narrow definition of what it means to be gay (i.e., full of pride). What this does is to efface the articulations of difference from heteronormative definitions of relations, sexual practices, and so on, in the queer community, so that identities, events, actions – what Halpern and Traub describe as ‘uncomfortable topics’ (2010: 11) – that could happen before the homogenizing imperative of the idea of Pride are not discussed or acknowledged. As Eve Sedgwick argues in her 2003 discussion, shame ‘represents a failure or absence of ­identity-constituting identificatory communication’ and becomes ‘an interrupted identification’ (Sedgwick 2003: 36). The insidious construction of narratives that are couched in terms of inclusion, of respect, of equality, foreclose discussion and reject true difference through the very terms that seem to encourage it. They interrupt any identifications that might not be fully absorbed or absorbable into the larger construct of the normative. Shame, as Sedgwick says, ‘effaces itself, shame points and projects, shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display are different interlinings of the same glove’ (Sedgwick 2003: 38). In terms of the monster, then, the shame that characterizes the ‘self-loathing’ vampire can be seen to be enacting the same kind of silencing of non-‘normative’ practices, identities and histories that make up the specific identity, the specific construction of the ‘self’ as vampire, as gay, as queer, before the shift from ‘perversion’ – from ‘Other’ – to the figure’s absorption into the position of a normative ‘social identity’. Shame, as Sedgwick says, interrupts the linear narrative of power bent on enforcing normalizing social identities. It signals a paradoxical simultaneous presence and absence – as enunciation through elision and silence – and makes visible what neoliberal narratives of sameness and normativity work so diligently and frantically to hide. Perhaps the best example of this is not a vampire, but a zombie: Kieren Walker from In the Flesh. The kind of shamed silence that Sedgwick talks about, the move from ‘perversion’ (rotter) to social identity (Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer), is acted out initially through the denial and re-naming of Kieren’s experiences. In the first episode of the series, he tries to describe his flashbacks to his time as a zombie to the medical team at a treatment centre, but is interrupted, told to repeat an affirmation and effectively silenced (‘Episode 1’ 2013). This silencing is later manifest in shame about his appearance. Early in the series, Kieren is unable to look at himself without the mandatory makeup and contact lenses that hide the undead’s appearance to make them look more like the living. In the first episode of the second season, Kieren covers up his mirror before he removes his makeup and contacts. At other moments, he is unable to tell his father about the flashbacks he is having about waking up in the grave, and later about his memories of hunting as a zombie. The condition of his acceptance into the ‘normal’, living, human world is his refusal of everything that he is or that he has done that deviates from the practices of that world. Experiences, emotions, drives that are exclusively connected with his zombie self and that do not mirror those of the living are relegated instead to the register of shame. In fact, Simon, a disciple of the Undead Prophet tells his followers, ‘If we are serious about becoming free, the first shackle we have to throw off is shame […] no rising story should be left untold’ (‘Episode 4’ 2014b). Later in the same episode, during a family lunch with his sister and her boyfriend, both members of the militia Human Volunteer Force during the zombie rising, Kieren finally breaks his silence, Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 www.intellectbooks.com  119 Karen Macfarlane 4. See Habel (2011, 2012). insisting that his family listen to him as he tells the story of how he clawed his way out of the grave, his stories of hunting, of killing, breaking the cycle of silence and shame. Shame, then, makes visible the paradox of the narrow terms through which identities are policed and lived in a culture invested in elaborate performances of inclusivity. In this sense, the process of demonstering in these narratives might not be an exploration of utopian ideals of cultural inclusion at all, but the demonstered monster could instead embody a disquieting and disturbing contradiction to western articulations of difference, equality and diversity. It is the zombie that makes the function of the monster, and the potency of its absence, clear. The world of rehabilitated vampires and sexy werewolves had left a horror vacuum in the cultural space of the monster in the twenty-first century. But that vacuum, as Tenga and Zimmerman (2013: 84) have argued, has been filled by the zombie. As Sam George and Bill Hughes suggest, ‘[I]ndicating desire rather than fear, vampires fail to satisfy the audience’s need for horror. Zombies, however […] are increasingly abject and menacing, figuring bodily and cultural decay as opposed to the social integration upheld by the vampire’ (2013: 5). In this sense, the zombie has been understood to be the last stand of the monstrous. As pure corporeality, the zombie has all kinds of cultural anxieties encoded in it. We are reminded over and over in their narratives that zombies are ‘mindless killing machines’, ‘ambulatory corpses’ and so on. They are sort of ‘us’, but rather ‘us’ irretrievably made ‘them’: monster. And because the zombie can only ever be an animated corpse, the interest in zombie stories has historically been focused on the survivors, from the beginning of the genre until almost the present day. Zombies function as the kind of blank slate that the monster always was supposed to be: something that we can write our cultural fear onto and then fight and maybe, sometimes, defeat. If the zombie is truly the last Gothic monster, then the proliferation of de-monstered figures should not be a concern. We have a monster. It can be identified, it does its cultural work and we can work through the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary western culture through our imagined encounters with it. But zombies, too, have become demonstered. As the last bastion of the monstrous, it seemed – for a while – as if the zombie could not possibly be drawn into the fold of the heimlich or, worse, the romantic monster. Their mindlessness, their rotting bodies, their appetite for human flesh all conspire to make them the least likely monster to become a neighbour or an object of desire. But they have been domesticated. The most popular early manifestation appears in Isaac Marion’s novel Warm Bodies (2010) and continues shortly thereafter in Lia Habel’s teen romance series.4 In these, and any number of similar texts, zombies have become the undead counterparts of Twilight’s Edward and The Vampire Diaries’s Stefan. In a growing number of young adult novels full of intrigue and football games and romance and walking corpses, zombies range from being odd classmates to love interests and wronged protagonists. The demonstered zombie has also been making an appearance on television. Series such as In the Flesh, iZombie and, most recently, the Santa Clarita Diet portray zombies who run the gamut from teen heart throbs (without the throb) to fully functioning, fully integrated, fully adult zombie characters. Liv (from iZombie) and Sheila (Santa Clarita Diet) are thoroughly domesticated. They hold down jobs, have families, hobbies and active social lives. These zombies out-heimlich the vampire by miles. Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 120   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 Where have all the monsters gone? If the zombie was the last bastion of the monster, then the siege is over and the monsters have lost. And while discussions of this transformation that suggest this is not a loss at all but another incarnation, another way of thinking about the symbolic possibilities of the monster, are persuasive, my argument approaches this change in another, admittedly less optimistic, way. Pulling together theories of monstrosity – as a warning, as the physical manifestation of cultural unease – with arguments about the inclusivity and potential for harmony in the construction of domesticated monsters, and the homogenizing, silencing effects of the discourse of shame with neoliberal discourses of sameness suggests intriguing connections. In the latter two instances, the individuality of the monster is both created and lost, caught in a contradictory spin cycle of inclusion and conformity. The discourse of shame, as Sedgwick has said, is not so much about actions, but about identity. It is the individuated identity (the ‘perversion’) with its specific and possibly anomalous proclivities, rather than the conforming social identity, that participates in the sudden recognition of difference that precipitates shame. She says that ‘one wishes to commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar’ (Sedgwick 2003: 35). Sedgwick, of all people, would, of course, have recognized the confluence of terms here – the shock of the familiar rendered unfamiliar – and its connection with the Gothic’s obsession with transgression, hidden or forgotten identities and secrets. The breaking of expectations here, expecting familiarity and getting unfamiliarity, foregrounds the process of eliding transgressive individuality that the discourse of sameness is dependent upon. Considering the ‘self-loathing’ vampire and zombie in terms of shame makes those elisions visible. As a way of thinking that performs difference, what shame is suppressing makes visible the power hierarchies that police normative identities, normative bodies, normative actions. The de-monstered monsters’ investment in discourses of inclusion ultimately reveals its opposite. Their presence in contemporary narratives denies the political possibilities of talking about difference and turns recognitions of difference into shame, so that any reference to non-normative – that is, non-human – identities is seen to undermine apparently benign, well-meaning, neoliberal narratives of equality. It is perhaps telling that vampires and zombies are the two monsters who are most often normalized in recent narratives and both of these have strong historical connections to critiques of capitalism. Karl Marx claimed the vampire for capitalism early on saying that ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Marx 1996: 163). And zombies, from Romero’s mall-walkers in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead on, have been deployed as symbols of insatiable consumerism and disenfranchised labour. Tenga and Zimmerman have suggested that, in the new millenium, zombies have also ‘highlighted the seemingly inevitable result of capitalism practiced on a global scale, a borderless, nationless, world that destroys uniqueness and the capacity for independent thought’ (2013: 83). This is certainly the case in television series like The Walking Dead and Z-Nation, where the mindlessness, the mind-numbing numbers, of the zombie hordes stand in direct opposition to the individuality and humanity of the survivors. It is also no coincidence that zombie narratives that have focused on bare survival proliferated after the global financial crisis of 2008– 10. The crisis was precipitated in part by the bursting of the US housing bubble and was fuelled by the unregulated sale of subprime mortgages with Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 www.intellectbooks.com  121 Karen Macfarlane variable interest rates, the overvaluation of bundled mortgages, and a lack of adequate capital holdings from banks and insurance companies to back the financial commitments they were making, which, in a kind of domino effect, caused the values of securities tied to US banks – deemed too large to fail – to do just that. The result was to damage financial institutions across the globe. The complex interplay of unregulated exchange and backroom deals that was considered normal in the early twenty-first century and that caused the crisis was based on neoliberal economic concepts: what Herb Wyile has called ‘that familiar cocktail of deregulation, privatization, reduction of taxes and diminution of social programs, emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency, competition, private property rights et cetera that has been the drink of choice since the 1980s’ (2013: 29). For many commentators, neoliberalism is the Darwinian philosophy that drives contemporary capitalism. Neoliberal practice benefits financial capital not industrial capital; it is sustained by the invisible, often untraceable, movement of virtual, not material, assets. In his discussion of neoliberalism George Monbiot has said that ‘the ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. […] Modern capitalism is largely nameless and placeless’ (2016: n.pag.). Practised on a global scale and focused primarily on the exchange of information and disembodied capital, neoliberalism is spectral. But what Linnie Blake calls the ‘seismic energies of neoliberalism’ (2015: 27) have very real, very physical effects. While the economic impact caused by neoliberal policies was profound, it is the way that these philosophies have made their way into social practice that most potently relates to the silenced, mainstreamed, normalized position – that is, the disappearance – of the Gothic monster. The borderless, nationless world that neoliberalism has created deplores uniqueness and discourages – if indeed it does not destroy – the capacity for independent thought. Feminist, queer and critical race theories have outlined the ways in which neoliberalism influences and shapes social relations by deploying discourses of equality that efface difference and promote ‘sameness’. The social relations that these critics discuss are revealed to be as abstract, and as spectral, as the capital that is exchanged in the haunted spaces of the neoliberal market. Diane Richardson argues that the politics of queer sexuality in neoliberal societies has ‘increasingly been about seeking access to mainstream culture’ (2005: 515) and that ‘lesbians and gay men are now constituted as citizens worthy of inclusion […] this is explained by reducing or eradicating forms of difference’ (2005: 521). She notes that the idea of equality in this context is understood as an ‘equality of resources and recognition’; but that this ‘equality’ is dependent on being recognizable. In short it is predicated on and defined through ‘sameness’ (2005: 519). This move, as Rona Halualani notes in her discussion of race in so-called ‘postrace’ America, ensures that systemic social and governmental structures that disenfranchise groups based on race, class, gender, identity and sexuality are not addressed, because this emphasis on difference undermines neoliberal notions of ‘equality’. As a result, the complex intersections that uphold these controls are not acknowledge and, indeed, are dismissed. Halualani delineates the ways in which terms like ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘muticulturalism’ have been emptied of meaning and have come to reproduce and perpetuate systems of white dominance: Diversity [in American mass media] signifies an abstract, idealised, and/ or faceless representation and reality, in which cultural communities Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 122   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 Where have all the monsters gone? are collocated, while simultaneously emptied of any particular histories. […] Diversity and difference are depicted as universal […] each cultural group is deemed to be the same and equal precisely because they are all equally different. (2011: 248, original emphasis) 5. I use ‘weres’ here to denote the variety of hybrid and shapeshifting creatures that appear in popular narratives: werewolves, weretigers, werebears, werepanthers, etc. By abstracting difference, any cultural impetus for change is couched in terms of individual positions in relation to the nebulous category of ‘human rights’, rather than in relation to the specificity of group rights: a move that obfuscates and silences any possibility of political action, any way of articulating the fact that operations of power – operations that restrict access to resources, to government representation and so on – are systemic. The language of ‘sameness’ silences; it limits and forecloses group action that names and acts upon specific and unique histories, geographical realities, and cultural practices that perpetuate inequitable access to resources, and places the emphasis on the individual emptied of affiliation. The language of ‘sameness’ assumes that difference is not really, truly, different at all. In this sense, celebrations of inclusivity are deployed as a way of foreclosing political action, and as with shame, refuse to recognize difference in favour of the larger, unwieldy, all-consuming, ultimately undefined category of ‘diversity’. Think of the dizzying variety of individuals in Monsters Inc., all of whom are distinct, with no two monsters being alike beyond the fact that they all participate in the larger, ultimately meaningless – because it is to huge and so varied – category of ‘monster’. And think of the wide variety of ‘supernatural species’ in True Blood. Dale Hudson argues this variety encourages us to think about ‘interspecies relations in non-heirarchical, non-anthropocentric terms of interdependency’ (2013: 662), and Michelle Smith suggests that these narratives ‘champion a multiplicity of “racial types”, and critique those who are intolerant of difference’ (2013: 193). But these celebratory readings miss the danger of such moves to sameness. By interpreting these narratives’ approach to difference as ‘progressive’, this sort of reading ultimately replicates the problematic terms of a ‘post-race’ culture. By not distinguishing between the differing needs, histories and cultures of vampires, weres,5 shapeshifters and the rest, they highlight the reality that the invisible measure of the success of a culture as ‘post-race’ is not, in fact, its recognition of difference, but rather its absorption of innumerable differences into the sameness of the majoritarian identity: in this case, the human. And so the vampires in True Blood are able to ‘come out of the coffin’ and demand ‘the right to rights’, as the series puts it, not because of solidarity or group action, but, as stated explicitly in the pilot, because of a consumer product: the invention of a synthetic form of blood by a Japanese firm. The risk that the vampires pose to human society is mitigated by making their appetites less their own and more those that can be regulated by (human) consumer culture. The discourse of ‘sameness’ lets vampires drink at bars, and gives humans something to offer them when they are guests in human homes. ‘Tru Blood’ is mass produced, has snappy slogans like ‘All Flavour and No Bite’, and is sold in bottles like beer in corner stores. This ‘mainstreaming’ of vampire appetites is not about simple access to a life-sustaining resource. It insists on channelling the vampires’ access to that resource into ways that are the same as Human (i.e. dominant) modes of consumption and exchange. Here, as elsewhere in neoliberal discourses of diversity, ‘equality’ means being all but indistinguishable from the normative. Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03 www.intellectbooks.com  123 Karen Macfarlane While the heimlich Vampires, like Marx’s terrifying, life-draining monsters, are still intimately connected with the economies of the worlds in which they live, then, what they are ultimately consuming – and producing – is sameness. Similarly, the zombies in series like iZombie or Santa Clarita Diet are generally gainfully employed: they work for their money and pay their rent, they shop. These heimlich zombies’ difference is couched in terms of their physical limitations: they suffer from a chronic illness, the ‘partially diseased syndrome’ of In the Flesh, that is managed by public health nurses and prescriptions for drugs that keep them ‘normal’ so that they can function in the ‘mainstream’ (albeit with coloured contact lenses and carefully applied makeup). Through their performance of diversity emptied of difference the monsters in these narratives perform the neoliberal elision of the political potential in categories of race, sexuality, ability, class and on and on…. So perhaps the mainstreamed twenty-first-century monster is the embodiment of the subject, the citizen under neoliberalism drained of true difference, denied a discourse of resistance. Or perhaps the semantic transformation of the ‘monster’ into ‘supernatural species’ is more frightening even than that. The disappearance of the monster means the disappearance of the very thing that marked the limits of identity, system and order. The Gothic monster is not only a screen onto which cultures project their worst fears and anxieties. It is also a harbinger. It warns as well as tells. And its absence now is like the sudden realization of the absence of bird song in a classic horror film; the sudden silence that does not bode well at all. Where have the monsters gone? Why have they cleared out? What can we do without them? Perhaps their disappearance is their final warning: that the true monster is the one whose name we do not know … the one that is too big for us to see. The one that has assimilated all the other monsters and transformed them into a terrifying sameness and is poised to devour us all as we speak. REFERENCES Abbott, Stacey (2016), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The Addams Family (1964–66, USA: ABC). Aldana Reyes, Xavier (2014), ‘Beyond the metaphor: Gay zombies and the challenge to homonormativity’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 13:2, pp. 1–12. Being Human (2008–13, UK: BBC Three). Bitten (2014–16, Canada: Space). Blake, Linnie (2015), ‘“Are We Worth Saving? You Tell Me”: Neoliberalism, zombies, and the failure of free trade’, Gothic Studies, 17:2, pp. 26–41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–03, USA: The WB and UPN). 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SUGGESTED CITATION Macfarlane, Karen (2023), ‘Where have all the monsters gone?’, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 12:2, pp. 113–26, https://doi. org/10.1386/ajpc_00073_1 CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Karen Macfarlane is associate professor in the Department of English at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada. She is also currently serving as co-president of the IGA. She is most interested in mummies, creepiness and technology in ghost hunting. Most recently, she has published ‘Creepy Little Girl’ (Gothic Studies, 2023), ‘“We are all humans”: Selfaware zombies and neo-gothic posthumanism’ (Neo-Gothic Narratives, 2020), and ‘Zombies and the viral web’ (Horror Studies, 2018). Contact: Department of English, Mount Saint Vincent University, 166 Bedford Highway, Halifax, NS B3M 2J6, Canada. E-mail: Karen.Macfarlane@msvu.ca https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5941-7126 Karen Macfarlane has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. Delivered by Intellect to: Karen Macfarlane (33342686) 126   The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture IP: 142.67.142.114 On: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:48:03