Special Session

Cultural Studies / Genres and Audiences

Rigoberto Gutiérrez Piñón (University of Washington - Seattle)
rigo@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

"Zombie Hierarchies: Power, Class, and Conflict in the Undead Imagination" invites papers on zombies and the undead as figures through which literature, film, television, games, and popular culture imagine power, hierarchy, and social conflict. In keeping with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the panel explores how zombie narratives expose the fragility of social order, the failures of ruling elites, and the tensions between collective survival and unequal power. Zombie texts often dramatize class division, colonial violence, biopolitics, labor exploitation, contagion, and revolutionary upheaval, asking who governs in times of crisis and who is excluded from protection or personhood. This session welcomes approaches across periods, genres, and media. Topics may include zombies and class consciousness, undead labor and capitalism, colonial and anti-colonial undead, gendered hierarchies in survival communities, elite collapse, dehumanization, and the global political afterlives of the undead.

"Zombie Hierarchies: Power, Class, and Conflict in the Undead Imagination" invites papers on zombies and the undead as figures through which literature, film, television, games, and popular culture imagine power, hierarchy, and social conflict. In keeping with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel explores how zombie narratives dramatize the fragility of social order, the failures of ruling elites, and the tensions between collective survival and unequal power.

Zombie texts often expose the violence, decadence, and instability of political, economic, and cultural hierarchies. Whether represented as mindless masses, exploited labor, contagious populations, or uncanny returns of the excluded dead, zombies provide a powerful framework for thinking about class division, colonial aftermaths, neoliberal precarity, biopolitics, and revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, zombie narratives frequently ask who gets protected, who gets abandoned, and who claims authority in moments of crisis.

This panel welcomes approaches to zombie studies across periods, genres, and media. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, zombies and class consciousness; undead labor and capitalism; apocalyptic governance; colonialism and anti-colonial resistance in zombie narratives; gendered power in survival communities; the zombie horde and fears of the masses; aristocracy, decay, and elite collapse; contagion and social control; race, exclusion, and dehumanization; and the political afterlives of the undead in global popular culture.