We Are the Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman’s Zombies and Buddhist Body Image

Abstract

Robert Kirkman’s popular horror comic The Walking Dead offers the basis for a constructive Buddhist reading of the identification of the body with the authentic self. By applying both traditional Buddhist readings of charnel ground meditations and theorist Julia Kristeva’s understanding of “abjection,” this article argues that the comic can be read in a socially progressive mode, destabilizing the identification of authentic personhood with specific and particular bodies.