Post-Apocalyptic Patriarchy: American Television and Gendered Visions of Survival

by Carlen Lavigne

Overview

Twenty-first century American television series such as Revolution, Falling Skies, The Last Ship and The Walking Dead have depicted a variety of doomsday scenarios--nuclear cataclysm, rogue artificial intelligence, pandemic, alien invasion or zombie uprising. These scenarios speak to longstanding societal anxieties and contemporary calamities like 9/11 or the avian flu epidemic.

Questions about post-apocalyptic television abound: whose voices are represented? What tomorrows are they most afraid of? What does this tell us about the world we live in today? The author analyzes these speculative futures in terms of gender, race and sexuality, revealing the fears and ambitions of a patriarchy in flux, as exemplified by the "return" to a mythical American frontier where the white male hero fights for survival, protects his family and crafts a new world order based on the old.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476634456
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	09/26/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carlen Lavigne, Ph.D. (communications studies), teaches at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada, and has published works on genre fiction, gender, queer studies and television.
Carlen Lavigne, Ph.D. (communications studies), teaches at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada, and has published works on genre fiction, gender, queer studies and television.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Nuclear Attack or Nanite Apocalypse? The New Wild West
Jericho
Revolution
Conclusion
2. Pandemics, Plagues and Contagion
Jeremiah
The Last Ship
Conclusion
3. The Alien Other
Falling Skies
Colony
Defiance
Conclusion
4. The Zombie Renaissance
The Walking Dead
Fear the Walking Dead
Z Nation
Conclusion
5. Parody and the ­Post-Apocalypse
The Last Man on Earth
Conclusion
6. After the Fall—The ­Post-Post-Apocalypse
Into the Badlands
The 100
Wayward Pines
Conclusion
Contexts and Conclusions
Chapter Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

Meticulous work done to clarify characters, relationships, and events in the shows... The book’s clarity reinforces its usefulness—scholars examining a particular show will be able to navigate the subsections almost instantly...recommended”—Science Fiction Studies

From the Publisher