Nevertheless, she persisted

This essay examines two recent post-apocalypse films that depict women forced to survive extreme conditions. In The Survivalist (2015), two starving women must befriend a lone man surviving on his own in a forest, an examination of how fraught intimacy can be when one (the man) holds all of the power in the relationship. In Here Alone (2016), a lone woman survives a zombie apocalypse, foraging on the remains of the previous world, grieving the loss of her family, and facing an existential crisis regarding whether she should continue living – until two other survivors appear. Although society has fallen, both films fall back on heteronormativity and the survival of its norms, including binary gender identity, revealing how much work still needs to be done reforming our cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality to escape assumed “biological destiny.”