Feminist Apocalypse : Representations of Women and Gender in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema

Feminist Apocalypse explores how the post-apocalypse is best seen as a narrative mode rather than genre, and its use in cinematic narrative began in the 1950s, largely fueled by the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation.

In this book, Ezekiel Crago argues early post-apocalyptic films were primarily concerned with the plight of their usually white male protagonist, but this changed in the 1980s, as films and television shows started focusing instead on white women protagonists. Crago explores post-apocalyptic films such as The Terminator, Dawn of the Dead, Tank Girl, Mad Max: Fury Road, A Quiet Place, etc. and their depictions of women surviving extreme conditions, establishing the theme of the need for others to make surviving livable; women surviving and sometimes thriving through the use of violence and military masculinity; films that center the problem of post-apocalyptic natality and the role of motherhood; the children produced after the end of the world; and examines some works that queer a system of binary gender opposition, suggesting utopian possibility. The interest in the role of women after the end of the world has increased since then, and this book examines such representations of gender using interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, gender studies, culture studies, race studies, and film studies.

It argues that these films reveal the ways that the apocalypse has already happened, its effects are not evenly distributed, and that those taking the role of woman are affected by it more than those who act as man. Ultimately, Crago analyzes how the apocalypse acts as allegory for the effects of neoliberal capitalism in the last half century.