ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, “Housing, Labor, and Comic Evolutionary Narratives in Sorry to Bother You,” addresses consumption by interrogating the intersection of race and class intertwined with efforts to address housing, labor, and overpopulation. The chapter centers its reading of this important environmental issue around the science fiction comedy, Sorry to Bother You, which offers drastic housing and labor solutions to life on an Earth that has become an environmental disaster plagued by overpopulation and the crime and starvation it produces. It also connects this reading with the YA Netflix film Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), which explores the impact of gentrification and overdevelopment through coming-of-age comic horror. These fantastic comic horror films also intersect with the recent comic drama, Blindspotting (2018) which confronts the loss of home to gentrification through an overt racial lens. The communities in each of these films search for economic stability and racial justice.
