The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead : Essays on the Television Series and Comics

From the beginning, controversies have swirled around the ways in which both Robert Kirkman’s comics and AMC’s series of The Walking Dead represent race, gender, and sexuality.

This collection of essays will be the first to address those controversies in a sustained way.

Critics and fans have protested that identity politics in The Walking Dead have veered toward the decidedly conservative, offering up traditional understandings of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy. And while some critics acknowledge that the series has undeniably evolved toward less conventional representations, there is still much more to be said.

All of the essays in our collection explore the complicated nature of relationships among the survivors as they adapt to the conditions of a new world—and, in the end, characters demonstrate often surprising permutations of identity, consistently serving to comment on identity politics in our own world.

While individual chapters in this collection sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with the critics of The Walking Dead, together they offer a rich view of how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in complex new ways in the TV series and the comics.