Making the World Safe for Patriarchy: Trump and the Zombie Apocalypse

Abstract Both Donald Trump in the White House and zombies in American fiction, movie, and television serials, highlight changes in American social structures, especially marriage and childbirth. Instead of a critique of such structures, however, the zombie genre largely reinforces traditional norms. To be sure, Trump himself is not a zombie, although his followers are often represented the living dead in American political cartoons. What is the connection between the two? In the first place, zombie fiction can be viewed as culturally conservative in orientation, because of its emphasis (whether intentionally or not) on the traditional nuclear family. Second, zombies, almost by definition, do not have a leader, except that the genre deliberately toys with this theme in one recent television series. This paper discusses the two themes – crowds that become like zombies and leaders who create zombie-like followers – in the context of the genre’s overall conservative critique.