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This essay is about the hugely successful sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. The programme is centred on an ensemble cast of five main characters, the central two of whom, Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter, share an apartment, who are highly intelligent and work at California Institute of Technology, and a woman, Penny, whose family name is never revealed, who lives across the hall from Sheldon and Leonard. In this essay, I argue that through the behaviour of the characters, the show reproduces many of the key ideological assumptions of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a socio-economic theory of social life which privileges competition above all affective social bonds. I argue that Sheldon’s lack of empathy, which has led many viewers to assume he has Asperger’s Syndrome, is also a key characteristic of success in the neoliberal order. I go on to explore the complexity of family relations in neoliberalism and compare these to the familial structures in The Big Bang Theory. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At the same time, members of western countries have become increasingly anxious about displaced peoples: asylum-seekers and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those countries. What displaced people, people without the protection of the state and zombies have in common is that both manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls 'bare life'. Moreover, zombies have the qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The genre of the zombie apocalypse centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge for a group of humans. In these texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with displaced people who are 'threatening' the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people constructs them as similar to mythical zombies. This article includes analyses of a number of zombie films including Shaun of the Dead, Fido and Undead. Refereed/Peer-reviewed