ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Body—Undocumented zombies and sea creatures,” connects language from movement analysis regarding shape and movement qualities (“movement efforts”) to recent work on the performativity of monstrosity, such as Michael Chemers’ analysis of the work monsters perform by standing in for “others.” Specifically, the chapter examines the perversion of two basic forms of locomotion: walking and swimming. The first part of the chapter, “Undocumented zombies,” looks at ways that the US television series The Walking Dead uses zombie hordes as racist code for overland Mexican immigrants. The second part, “Creatures from the deep,” discusses the dangers (physical, legal, mythological) of crossing water in the Mediterranean region, especially in the surreal context of international maritime law. Chapter 2 culminates in a reading of images of a drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, and the ways that Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s use of shape-matching in his enactment of the boy’s body cuts through monstrous transformation by creating kinesthetic empathy.
