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This chapter considers the shared ideologies embedded in Confucianism and Christianity, and how they are played out in the lives of the middle-class Straits Chinese characters that people the fiction of Shirley Lim. Confucianism is viewed as a deeply patriarchal-inflected belief system, and when a Chinese (especially woman) trades this faith for Christianity, she often finds that her position in her new religion is not unlike that of her old one, thus perpetuating her sense of helplessness and inferiority. Lim's narratives persistently reveal the ideological entrapment experienced by Chinese women in either religion, and the difficulty they face when negotiating their increasing modern outlook with belief systems that reify traditional, patriarchal values. However, this chapter concludes with a criticism of these stories, and directly Lim herself by asking two related questions: how is Lim helping modern Chinese women escape their ideological positions if her stories continuously plot them as deeply embedded in these structures without offering any alternative perspectives? And is it always the case that religion necessarily circumscribes women by reifying their sexual/gendered position as inferior; is religion not also possibly a way in which women can escape such a position?

This chapter discusses the argument that zombie fictions are in a privileged position to discuss progressive visions of gender politics. Following the book’s larger argument that zombies open spaces of possibility, rather than symbolically represent a particular politics, it briefly reads a number of zombie fictions for their depiction of women’s roles and relates them to literary form. It posits the possibility of something like a “genrécriture feminine” that limits writers in the ways they can depict women in the zombie apocalypse, a possibility explored by contrasting the initial set of texts with an exploration of two novels, Madeleine Roux’s Allison Hewitt is Trapped and Sadie Walker is Stranded. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, while zombie fiction offers possibilities to explore progressive gender positions, few texts actually make use of this possibility.

This concluding chapter argues many who espoused the positive position on mixed race were men of privilege. Women, the poor, the laboring, and minorities also constructed similar opinions, but the evidence of this unpopular position was more likely to survive coming from men with access to outlets that would disseminate their views. This gender position influenced the discourse they produced. For instance, T .T.'s reverie in the Liberator and Scott Turow's praise of Barack Obama cast racially mixed men as agents of change. Meanwhile, William Short's 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson cast mixed women as objects of beauty, and mixed children as symbols of reconciliation.