This article examines how biological and political insecurity have become increasingly imbricated with one another. Building on Priscilla Wald's assertion that contagion reveals the connections of an imagined community, I show how it also reveals disconnections: who is dispossessed by these imagined communities. Through examinations of the Resident Evil franchise, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion , and Max Brooks's World War Z , I demonstrate how through contagion, individuals are marked as biologically and politically threatening, dispossessed of an imagined community, and then subjected to violence. In all of these texts, the globalization of an imbricated health and security complex enacts a generalizing logic that obscures local history and cultural specificity. This logic works to dispossess individuals of imagined communities along racialized, gendered, and classed lines, and makes that dispossession appear apolitical. This article advocates instead for a recognition of the history and relation of the terms and figures that populate the cultural imaginary.

Abstract:This essay offers an intervention in biopolitical theory-using the term "vulnerable life" to recalibrate discussions of how life is valued and violence is justified in the contemporary bioinsecurity regime. It reads the discursive structures that dehumanize and pathologize figures in U.S. zombie narratives against the discursive structures present in contemporary legal narratives and media reports on the killing of black Americans. Through this unsettling paralleling of structures, the essay suggests how the current ubiquity of zombies and the profusion of racial tension in the U.S. are related. In the process, the essay emphasizes the highly racialized nature of the zombie itself-which has never been the empty signifier it is often read as-and drives home just how dangerous the proliferation of postracial and posthuman discourses can be if they serve to elide historical limitations about the highly political determinations of just who is quite human.