QUEER VAMPIRES AND THE IDEOLOGY OF GOTHIC (original) (raw)
Related papers
Vampire Literature Review by Aaron J Clarke
2022
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault put forward the “repression hypothesis” concerning, in the modern age, sexuality. I postulate that Gothic fiction is a significant breakout of this hypothesis by highlighting (with reference to the vampire) its sexual transgressiveness. In Gothic literature, the vampire is an immortal creature who must prey on mortals to maintain their undeadness. Since early vampire stories, the vampire’s predatory behaviour has acquired a connotation of transgressive sexuality. This creative practice aims to explore vampiric desire and its connection to the emotions of love and loss as well with a focus on the same-sex desire of which there are relatively few examples in Gothic vampire fiction. This literature review, therefore, gives more account of Foucault’s “repression hypothesis” and then surveys vampire fiction as a subgenre of the Gothic, touching upon its origins and vampiric folklore and how these fictional creatures stand for Otherness and symbolise sexual transgression. Then I examine a selection of Queer realist fiction from the 20th and 21st centuries that offer insight into the themes of love, loss, and desire. Foucault’s use of Plato’s treatise, Phaedrus, aids in looking at queer realist fiction as models for gay desire, love, and loss. The insights gained by investigating these themes will be applied creatively to write a Queer vampire novella, entitled Lautréamont that challenges the conventions of desire in the genre, and which will ‘remix’ historical vampire fiction with contemporary queer literature on love, loss, and longing.
Gender in the Vampire Narrative (Edited Volume)
Preview and more information available from Sense Publishers (https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/teaching-gender/gender-in-the-vampire-narrative/): Gender in the Vampire Narrative addresses issues of masculinity and femininity, unpacking cultural norms of gender. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender in the vampire narrative traverse a large scope of expectations and tropes. The text offers classroom ready original essays that outline contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms using the lens of the vampire in order to examine the ways those roles are undone and reinforced through popular culture through a specific emphasis on cultural fears and anxieties about gender roles. The essays explore the presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources including novels, films, graphic novels and more, focusing on wildly popular examples, such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and Twilight, and also lesser known works, for instance, Byzantium and The Blood of the Vampire. The authors work to unravel the ties that bind gender to the body and the sociocultural institutions that shape our views of gendered norms and invite students of all levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender. This text makes a fascinating accompanying text for many courses, such as first-year studies, literature, film, women’s and gender studies, sociology, popular culture or media studies, cultural studies, American studies or history. Ultimately this is a text for all fans of popular culture.
The vampires of Gothic literature present a challenge to the monologic reader. Coleridge's 'Christabel' and Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' are perfect examples of this. Rich in symbol and allegory, they offer themselves to an endless variety of interpretations and defy categorisation. There is no one correct meaning to be found in either: there is no one authoritative voice unifying the whole. 'Christabel' remains unfinished, as, to some extent, does 'Carmilla'. Since there is no conclusion, the texts cannot be wrapped in one neat package and forgotten on a shelf-an unfinished text is undead, like the vampire, and 'feeds' on other texts; its meaning, its lifeblood, depends on how it relates to what is outside it. The Gothic is by nature a subversive, parodying genre and its mode is ambiguity and intertextuality. 'Carmilla' and 'Christabel' derive their significance not from any inherently present 'answer', but rather from the questions they raise. By baffling our expectations, they show us our expectations. They hold a mirror up to the conventions of literature and in the glass, darkly, appear the very distortions inherent in our accepted way of thinking. Thus, they question standard notions of value and unbalance authority. They expose the arbitrariness behind our certainties and thereby open up new avenues of thinking. By presenting us with figures that resist classification, they show us the narrowness of usual categories and the failure of language to express the whole truth. "There is a selection of answers which could all be adequate to some degree, there are no answers which are unequivocally correct" 2. The vampire therefore works on two levels: textually, as the sharer whose intimacy shatters the fixedness of identity, and symbolically, as the text itself, which destroys any attempt at classification, remaining elusive to engage an intimacy with the reader, challenging him to his own, personal interpretation. The meaning of such a text is not created by the author alone. It resides in the interplay between text and reader, in the interaction of the specific with the general, in the changing position of the text within the field of discourse.
The Ominous Figure of the Female Vampire in Gothic Literature
2022
In the 19th century particularly, the usage of the vampire in the Gothic novel was increasingly prominent as fin-de-siecle anxieties intensified. Politically speaking the New Woman was a symbol of anarchic hysteria since she threatened male control. The New Woman was characterised by her education, pursuing academic growth, being sexually independent. The three focuses of analysis for this research are Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Le Fanu, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and The Blood of the Vampire (1897) by Florence Marryat. The main objective of this study is to see the historical contextualisation of gender politics and female sexuality in the reflection of the vampire figure. In each text the representation of the female vampire demonstrates the conceptualization of gender and identity, the issues around inequity, social interactions, beliefs around the body, gender, and sociocultural stereotypes. The vampire metaphor is used as a key figure to address the discrepancies surrounding gender norms and how these norms reinforced cultural expectations of what it meant to be a man and a woman.
Gender in the Vampire Narrative
2016
The haunting durability of the vampire in popular culture attests to our enduring fascination with the undead as well as the figure's rich and dynamic complexity. Amanda Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo have brought together a diverse and far-ranging collection of essays that chase the vampire through history and across literature, film, television, and stage, exploring this complexity and offering insightful and accessible analyses that will be enjoyed by students in popular culture, gender studies, and speculative fiction. Authors pay homage to the classics-from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer-but push consideration of the vampire in new directions as well, from graphic novels to the Vegas stage, interrogating the vampire's presence and influence across multiple spheres of cultural production, always with a keen eye on gender and sexuality. This collection is not to be missed by those with an interest in feminist cultural studies-or the undead."
In this thesis, I provide an analysis of Angela Carter’s and Anne Rice’s works based on their depiction of vampires. My corpus is composed of Carter’s short stories “The Loves of Lady Purple” and “The Lady of the House of Love” and of Rice’s novels The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. My analysis of this corpus is based on four approaches: a comparison between Carter’s and Rice’s works, supported by their common use of vampire characters; an investigation of how this use consists of a particular way of exploring gothic elements, related to the contemporary context; an identification of the mechanisms through which this use of vampire characters conveys discourses on the issues of sexuality and gender in the 1970s and 1980s; and an investigation of the possibility for the vampire characters to express such discourses, in terms of their symbolisms. I demonstrate here that Rice and Carter explore the potential of abjection of the vampire and the subversive potential of a gothic representation of life experiences to question and subvert in their works patriarchal ideologies about the issues of sexuality and gender. This strategy of questioning and subversion is informed by the debates about these two issues in late-twentieth century, a period marked by the development of theories about sexuality and gender, by political movements towards sexual and gender freedom, and by the eminence of the AIDS epidemic that influenced the direction followed by these theories and movements. My analysis of Carter’s and Rice’s works demonstrates that, although they are different in their focuses and concerns, both authors represent, through their vampires, discourses against the imposition of gender roles and of sexualities by patriarchal societies, reflecting the contemporary view of gender and sexuality as constructed, complex, and fluid categories. In this sense, their works can be said to characterize a contemporary gothic fiction written by women.
Repressive bodies, transgressive bodies : Dracula and the feminine
2010
Dracula has long been associated with the repressive qualities of Victorian society and the oppression of the emerging New Woman. However, taking into account that the novel is part of the gothic genre, a genre which endeavours to infringe the social boundaries in any given era, this thesis will demonstrate an equally visible and potent transgressive feminine element playing out in Dracula. Using Michel Foucault's idea of discourse to show how subjects are generated, the novel can be seen as facilitating both productive and repressive ideas of femininity. Power, as it operates through discourse, tends to produce its own resistance, and so at the same time as a discourse serves to reinforce the dominant ideology, it also acts as a starting point for opposing discursive strategies. One discourse functioning in the novel is a monstrous femininity that is projected onto Lucy and the female vampires, producing their bodies as a site of contamination and danger. Operating simultaneous...
Gender, Genre and Dracula: Joan Copjec and “Vampire Fiction”
Humanities, 2020
This article critiques a certain psychoanalytic approach both to the genre of "Vampire Fiction" and the "anxiety" it induces. Joan Copjec's claim is that these are founded on "nothing", genre and affect being defined by the "overwhelming presence of the real", for which all "interpretation [. .. ] is superfluous and inappropriate." It follows that Copjec does not understand the encounter with "the real" staged within Dracula through the words on the page, genre and affect being located instead of either within the bare bones of the textual structure or in an unreadable "aura" surrounding the text. This article counters this understanding through a focus on precise textual formulations within Dracula. It begins by reading in detail linguistic constructions of gendered identities, and the identity "child"; moves to question Copjec's wider claim that genre transcends textual considerations; and closes with a comparative analysis of Dracula and Rousseau's Émile, a text that Copjec takes to be its "precise equivalent", but not because of language. What is finally at stake in this article is whether a detailed engagement with language can be jettisoned when considering constructions of genre and gender. It argues that reintroducing textuality problematises Copjec's arguments, and the empty identities upon which they are founded.
2020
Adaptations of classic vampire tales are not uncommon, however Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella Carmilla (1871-72), which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula as one of the first vampire narratives, is one story that has seen many retellings. The story of young girls succumbing to unholy and perverse temptations has found its way into many book, radio, film, stage, television, comic, video game, and music adaptations over the last one hundred and forty years. More recently, the classic was re-imagined in a Canadian web series Carmilla (2014-2016), which differentiates itself from its traditional roots with its camp and comedic storylines and its representation of LGBTQ characters. This chapter examines how the story and characters have been explored across the Carmilla transmedia storyworld, including the web series, film, social media, and forthcoming novel.