From Prom Queen to Zombie Barbie: A tutorial in make up, gender and living death.  

Esther Priyadharshini offers another example of zombie pedagogy through the case of a YouTube make-up tutorial that teaches viewers how to transform themselves into not one, but two figures of horror - a Prom Queen Barbie and a Zombie Barbie. Both figures raise questions about what a zombie pedagogy can offer women in particular. Given the context of successful on-line Asian American women tutor-entrepreneurs, she argues that these tutorials may be politically ambiguous and pedagogically contradictory, when viewed from the standpoint of traditional, institutionalised notions of pedagogy. Nevertheless they offer a ‘monstrous public pedagogy’ that can function as an exposé of hyper-feminine culture and an exposition of the resistance that doll play in the form of excessive, plastic fantastic Barbie offers. Zombie Barbie in turn, brings ‘life’ through its emphasis on despoiling the plastic hyper-feminine with blood, tissue, veins and rotting flesh. In doing so, zombie pedagogy also reveals the inevitable imbrication of human and non-human, dead and living, woman and doll, self and other.