Is there law in a post-zombie world? a critical discourse analysis of power, authority, and governance in AMC's The walking dead

Abstract

Using one of AMC’s “original series",The Walking Dead, as a narrative frame, this thesis offers a qualitative critical analysis of different and competing discourses of power, authority, gender, race, class, the law, governance, risk, and the body in the first two seasons of the series. I critically examine and analyze these discourses to demonstrate how the power and authority to govern, the management of risk, and the control of the body are brought into being in the text as well as how these discourses produce régimes of truth in the series. In particular, I argue that the power and authority to govern are gendered, raced, and classed, overwhelmingly falling in the purview of those who are male, white, middle-class, and heterosexual; I also argue that discursively the able, clean, and living body is privileged as normal in the text and that the body is governed through the management of risk, more so than through overt physical violence or force. I draw on Jacques Derrida’s vocabulary of deconstruction, Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse, knowledge, power, truth, governance, normalization, resistance, and the body, and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to compile the conceptual tools and language I need to deconstruct, critically analyze, and speak about this text.