Zombies, Gender, and World-Ecology: Gothic Narrative in the Work of Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Montero

Abstract

In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega and Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero – who have engaged with the Gothic from a perspective that is both overtly feminist and consciously ecological. Vega’s ‘Miss Florence’s Trunk’ (1991) and Montero’s You, Darkness(1995) are texts that critically and consciously probe the fault-lines of capitalist modernity, addressing issues of ecology, race and gender within a world context. In both texts, the zombie is merged with, or considered alongside, another classic Gothic figure: the madwoman. Oloff argues that it is through their engagement with the European Gothic and early US zombie films that the texts confront their readers with the Gothic’s gendered and racialized ecological unconscious.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.