Citation

Domingo A. Front. Sociol. 2018; 3: e20.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fsoc.2018.00020

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article starts with a hypothesis that the sociological analysis of literary and film production on the "living dead" in the 21st century, owing to the triumph of neoliberalism that has accompanied by the process of globalization, allows us to better understand the transformations that act on the population and the individuals that integrate it. The zombie genre, considered a dystopia -where the scenario of the uncertainty surrounding the risk has happened to that of the catastrophe- reflects the split between resilient and redundant population, inviting us to explore three fundamental features: (1) the causes of this split; (2) The construction of a new subjectivity that accompanies it; and, (3) the displacement of bio politics to the thanatopolitics that accounts for the fracture between liberalism and neoliberalism. Dystopian thinking, based on detecting the germs of negative evolutions in the present, the causes and their possible consequences, posing different scenarios for the future, can be understood as a method of cosmopolitan sociological analysis, which ends in what Ulrich Beck described as "emancipatory catastrophism," that is, not only to identify the seeds of the negative, but the good of the bad.

Language: en