Dundas West, image: Google Maps

Queen West, looking East, image: Google Maps

Queen West serves as a cultural and commercial hub of Toronto. The blocks between Trinity-Belwoods Park and Spadina Avenue house a number of popular clothiers, night-clubs and restaurants; The Australian Boot Company, The Fresh Collective, Starbucks, Terroni, Romni Wools and Helmutt’s Pet Supply to name a few. The area is in a perpetual state of gentrification, and the idea of Queen West as a neighbourhood is being replaced with Queen West as shopping mecca, a product of affluent capitalism and consumerism. Webb and Byrnand (2008) write about the links between capitalism and zombies,

Capitalism, we suggest, works as an analogue of zombiedom because it too is predicated on insatiable appetite, and the drive to consume…Capitalism has the same heartless all-consuming character, particularly in its pure form in which the ‘invisible hand’ of the market is supposed to bring about a dynamic equilibrium between supply and demand…The problem is that capital doesn’t care, and doesn’t weigh human costs. It is simply zombie – hungry, and hence focused on feeding and expanding regardless of the consequences. (93)

The zombie on Queen is a symbol of the consumerist mindset of those who visit the street regularly. The viral nature of zombiedom can be compared with capitalism, with both being linked to a loss of identity, rationality and humanness. The presence of zombie, an insatiable and unstoppable consumer in his own patterns, draws attention to a culture’s capitalist foundation, commenting on the transformation of leisure time into consumer time as well the transformation of neighbourhoods into places of commerce.

North on Spadina, image: Google Maps

Turning north on Spadina Avenue, the Zombie Walk enters a different playing space and the meanings shift. In contrasting Spadina and Queen West, we see evidence of what cultural theorist Ben Highmore (2002) describes as a “discontinuous city” with Spadina representing a different temporality, an “outmoded space with distinct cultural characteristics,” one which “can interrupt the homogenizing and hyphotizing effects of capitalist standardization,” and “rupture the false historicism of modernity, a revelation that can awaken us from the dream of commodification” (141). The Walk’s 90-degree turn draws attention to the differences within the city, confronting the spectator with the many identities of Toronto and the Torontonian.

The procession moves into Chinatown, a neighbourhood of Toronto with a large immigrant and first-generation Canadian population. On Spadina, the presence of the zombie comments on alterity, and the discourse shifts to a commentary on “the Other” and “the foreign” in the city. Zombies exemplify alterity; they are in a fixed state of otherness. One cannot be “partially zombie,” and once bitten one cannot be cured from the zombie virus to rejoin the human race. While sharing human characteristics, the zombie is holistically evil and holistically Other. This otherness cannot be colonized or effectively subjugated.

The zombie’s alterity is a result of a virus that has the potential to infect all types of people, regardless of race. The fear is that the Other will win out. The only way to deal with this Other is through dominant, brutal force as syncretism is not possible. What the zombie plague represents, however, is an almost unstoppable colonization of the human race, wherein the undead are able to wield their powers to subjugate all humanity. Through this fictionalized self-Other dichotomy, the idea of the zombie apocalypse plays with/pokes fun at the notions of colonization, forcing us to consider how to read and position the dominant in relation to alterity, and the power relations inherent in a reading of the zombie as Other.

Zombies in the City

With a number of recent zombie films shot in Toronto, and official Zombie Walks dating back to 2003, Toronto has become familiar with zombie imagery. At the same time, the circumstances and imagery surrounding a fictional zombie uprising are becoming shockingly common and relate-able in urban existence. As Kyle Bishop (2010) suggests, “Scenes depicting deserted metropolitan streets, abandoned human corpses, and gangs of lawless vigilantes have become more common than ever, appearing on the nightly news as often as on the movie screen” (11). With images of the June 2010 anti-G20 riots still fresh in the minds of Torontonians, and recent Occupy Toronto movements garnering media attention, the poignancy of a hoard claiming the streets as their own stirs memories, as well as political and social viewpoints in the citizenry. In a post-SARS, post-H1N1 large urban centre like Toronto, the performance of a viral zombie epidemic recalls the horrors of rapidly-spreading maladies and resulting panic in congested cities. The image of a sick city is an image of terror. In zombie literature and film, a viral zombie uprising “encapsulates the elements of an epidemic that should arouse the greatest amount of dread and anxiety from individuals” (Drezner 100). This breed of fun is one which plays with mindsets and memories, prompting the audience to re-view the meanings attached to shared experiences, gatherings and energy exchange in common spaces, as well as how media covers urban events.

G20 Clown Protest cc: flickr.com/photos/chrishuggins

Recent scholarship on zombies has discussed the place of the zombie in popular culture, the impact of its presence in literature and film as well as the metaphors and meanings associated with these characters. Two recent articles explore zombie walks specifically. In Reclaiming Public Spaces Through Performance of the Zombie Walk (2011), Cocarla describes the zombie as a disrupting force and suggests that the walk “becomes a postmodern act in that it is comprised of a postmodern subject (the zombie) that causes disruption in modernist spaces” (117-8). Cocarla discusses how zombie walks disturb the structure of the city and capitalism in general, by “reclaiming urban spaces and disrupting dominant ideologies” (114); symbolizing an end to rationality and the modern, highly-organized nature of our urban spaces. This echoes Bahktin’s (1984) description of the carnival as a performance which suspends all hierarchy (10). In Playing Dead: Zombies Invade Performance Art…and Your Neighbourhood, Lauro (2011) compares the zombie walk with the work of the Situationist International movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which, like contemporary zombie-themed urban performances, used art to blur the boundaries between actor and citizenry/audience, to question the notion of public and private space, and to explore the relationships between performance and protest, sparking discourse on the place and nature of art, community and the city. Through a “uncanny process of depersonalization”, zombie walks serve as a “willingful rewriting of the everyday” (Lauro 205-6). The Walk and the carnival are founded on the idea of taking familiar spaces and transforming them temporarily into places of performance. In the disguise of spectacle and fun, they promote a radical re-consideration of the normal uses of these spaces.

In contrast with zombie literature and film, the performance of the Zombie Walk is devoid of true notions of fear and anxiety. By design, the walk is not meant to terrorize the neighbourhoods that it transforms into its play-space. In removing this fear, the idea of the zombie as unstoppable evil is turned into a camp-like performance and however true-to-life the make-up and costumes of the participants is, it is widely recognized that the Walk is performance. No longer seen as an image of terror, the camped-up zombie pokes fun at its own image and the anxieties that are attached to it, challenging the viewer to make sense of its presence. Lauro (2011) suggests that the zombie is open metaphor; a recognizable cultural signifier that is open to individual interpretation, challenging the viewer to make sense of its presence (217). This openness is spatially and situationally constructed by the site-specificity of the performance.

The medieval carnival and the contemporary zombie performance make fun through an exploration of the human body. In the Walk, zombies become the fools/clowns of a modern carnival experience. “One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere” (Bakhtin 20). Medieval carnival promotes the celebration of the human body through exaggerations of bodily functions–eating and drinking, defecation and sexual life–what Bakhtin defines as “grotesque realism,” (19) where “the bodily element is deeply positive” and “the images of bodily life are fertility, growth and brimming-over abundance” (19). Similarly, zombies’ leaky, open sores and deteriorating bodies remind us of our materiality, our constructed sense of beauty, and our mortality, a kind of grotesque grotesque realism. Where medieval carnival imagery serves as a celebration of our physicality, zombie imagery challenges our dismissal and fear of our material selves. Physically, zombies are human-like in many ways. “Never forget that the body of the undead is, for all practical purposes, human” (Brooks 6), a “biologically definable animated being occupying a human corpse” (Dezner 21). The zombie, having at one point been human, maintains a close connection with human beings and shares and reflects our materiality, literally embodying and occupying our selves. The fact that the zombie virus can be transmitted to humans points to this human-zombie intimacy as viruses generally only travel between similar species. Medieval and zombie imagery can be seen as a exploration of the abject, defined by Kristeva (1982) as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4) and also “the place where meaning collapses” (2). Bakhtin writes that “the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19-20). Both performances promote a degradation, a coming down to earth, an examination of flesh.

We have to go into the subjunctive world of monsters, demons, and clowns, of cruelty and poetry, in order to make sense of our daily lives, earning our daily bread. And when we enter whatever theatre our lives allows us, we have already learned how strange and many-layered everyday life is, how extraordinary the ordinary. (Turner 122)

The characters depicted in the 2011 Toronto Zombie Walk are a product of popular culture and Hollywood depiction. While arguably inseparable from connections with Caribbean traditions (Moreman and Rushton 1-11), the costumed characters depict “viral zombies” as opposed to Caribbean “voodoo zombies” (Brooks 17).  Much of the imagery and definitions of these fictional ghouls is drawn from George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968). The characters are pop-culture zombies, separated from religious, supernatural or magical intervention. In literature and film, the generally agreed upon defining characteristics of these viral zombies are that zombies desire and feed on human flesh; that zombies’ bodily fluids carry a virus which is highly communicable and fatal so that any human infected through fluidic contact will inevitably become a zombie; and that zombies cannot be killed unless their brain is destroyed (Brooks 1-19, Drezner 22). Zombie uprisings in literature and film are depicted as a great and almost unstoppable threat to humanity.

October 22nd, 2011 marked the 9th annual Toronto Zombie Walk. An estimated 7,000 costumed people gathered at Trinity-Belwoods Park to participate in the event. Pre-walk activities began at noon, including a celebration of “unholy matrimony” between walk organizers Adam Invader and Thea Munster. At 3 p.m., participants began a 5 “kill-ometer” route; east on Queen Street, north on Spadina Avenue, west on Dundas Street and returning to the park (torontoist.com). The promotional website for the event includes a Frequently Asked Questions section wherein “Why are you dressing like Zombies?” is answered with “What other monsters have such unity as a mass in death?! Plus it’s just fun” (torontozombiewalk.ca, FAQS!).

The Toronto Zombie Walk participants serve as iconic representations of the viral zombie. One of a growing number of contemporary urban zombie-themed performances, the Walk transforms the streets of Toronto into performance space where the characters interact with each other, the audience, and the environs of the walk. The processional nature of this performance accurately reflects one of the general characteristics of zombies, in that they are mobile creatures, with no sense of home (Brooks 17).  In contrast to zombie norms in film and literature, participants are encouraged to be respectful of people and property (torontozombiewalk.ca, FAQS!). The organizers suggest that participants and on-lookers interpret this performance simply as people dressed up like zombies with the intention of having fun. While it is widely recognized that the beings participating in these walks are costumed humans, as an urban performance the Toronto Zombie Walk serves as a strong commentary on identity, interactions, life and art in the city and the definition and use of public and private spaces. It is in the spirit of fun or what Lefebvre describes as a “renewed fête” (Writings171) that the Walk encourages citizens to participate in a playful examination of self and the city, recognizing the urban space as a cultural product of ‘moments,’ performances, and interactions.

Here’s a link to my Seminar Report.

And below, the presentation slide deck:

cc: flickr.com/photos/celesteh

If “sexual behavior is clearly not the determining factor” to identity, then what is? Meyer suggests “some sort of public signification in the form of specific enactments, embodiments or speech acts”. But how is “queerness” defined? It would seem that the definition rests with the audience, the one who is reading and interpreting the enactments. Do we run the risk of everything potentially being labelled “queer”? If so, does queerness cease to have meaning? If we’re all potentially queer, is anyone queer?

cc: flickr.com/photos/kevinsteinhardt

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) Judith Butler posits that “the gendered body is performative” and “that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality”. This arguement is echoed by Moe Meyer in the Introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Camp (1994), where he suggests that “the Self” is “performative, improvisational, discontinuous and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts.” Both are suggesting that there is no self without performance, that we are defined by our actions and utterances, that we cannot be defined except by what we do.

Where does self-identity fit with respect to these statements? When one self-identifes as queer, or if a woman identifies as male, but there is no outward performative action or statement to this effect, is identifying considered an act? Is thought performative, or does a performance always need to involve social discourse with others? In this scenario, is the discourse internal, between the self and the imagined self?