Undead Melodies: Queering Music and Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century British Zombie Audiovisual Media


Cloud, Jemima (2024) Undead Melodies: Queering Music and Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century British Zombie Audiovisual Media. Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

This thesis uses twenty-first-century British audiovisual texts to explore onscreen masculinities. The texts focus on apocalyptic narratives, specifically zombie outbreaks, which allow storytellers to reimagine masculinities in theoretical new societies by suggesting new models and critiquing or confirming old ones. This examination is achieved through soundtrack analysis to determine what messages are conveyed musically regarding masculinity. The soundtrack of 28 Days Later (Dir. Boyle, 2002) binds ubiquitous Christianity, nostalgia, family (and traditional gender roles therein), and hypermasculinity. A discussion of two endings (theatrical and directorial), which result in the preceding film’s ideologies being endorsed or overturned, demonstrates how radically opposing ideals for masculinity in hypothetical new societies result. Shaun of the Dead (Dir. Wright, 2004) has a compiled soundtrack of popular musics that signify myriad masculinities, providing insight to (the protagonist) Shaun’s narrative development. The relationship between masculinity and Shaun appears progressive when he seems to have queer control of sound outside his diegetic space. However, intertextuality lures the film’s experiencers into a sense of social elevation through joke gratification, ultimately pacifying them and enabling the reproduction of problematic ideologies of class and masculinity. The compiled soundtrack of TV serial In the Flesh (2013–2014) enables identification with characters via the intimacy produced by vocal vulnerability. Additionally, the composed score uses queer strategies, avoiding patriarchal historical baggage and othering techniques (regarding sexuality and exoticism). It uses reversed sounds, creates placelessness, and produces staticity (resisting heteronormative temporality and goal-oriented harmonic function). Musical queering techniques match the narrative alignment of sexuality with undeadness, generating an overall message of relatedness and commonality. By examining music’s role in the construction of onscreen masculinities, through the theoretical new societies that apocalyptic narratives offer, access is gained to better understand music’s role in audiovisual media generally. This insight provides potential for innovative models of soundtrack design to be developed.

Item Type: Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy)
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 15 Jan 2025 11:15
Last Modified: 08 Feb 2025 03:06
DOI: 10.17638/03184550
Supervisors:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3184550
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