Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities

Abstract

This essay examines two gay zombie films by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. I look to the ways LaBruce brings together the already intimate genres of horror and porn to paint an ambivalent picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls ‘the death of gay culture’. Zombies and zombie sex are deployed to level an anarcho-punk critique at contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power. At the same time, explicit scenes of zombie sex gesture toward an always immanent political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Rather than herald only a dead or failed future, LaBruce's gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities, and especially forms of sex and politics that are deemed retrograde but that paradoxically suggest undead presents and futures. These necropolitical socialities are stubbornly animate, undying efforts that improvise intimate publics appropriate to contemporary precarities.

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