Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Feminist and The Vampire - Constructing Postmodern Bodies
The Feminist and The Vampire - Constructing Postmodern Bodies
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Fantastic
in the Arts
Sylvia Kelso
47
474
Haraway reverses th
chine/human blurrin
"postmodern" SF, or
tion," and "brain-com
resent body and m
Haraway sees the libe
hybrid, exiled alike f
in "salvation history
power affiliative fem
she draws on Third World feminists like Chela Sandoval. "I would
rather" she writes, glancing toward early '80s cultural feminism, "be
a cyborg than a goddess." In an uncanny echo of Haraway, Bruce
Sterling would later call such figures "hopeful monsters" (qtd.
Hollinger, 206).
Here, then, are some actors for the site of Butler's hopeful sub-
versions, the strange, the incoherent, opportunities for faulty repeti-
tions of the law. Butler's examples, like hermaphrodite bodies and
queer sexualities, come from material reality; but monsters also
swarm in the pages of non-realist fiction like SF and fantasy. As has
been remarked, these genres centre on the question that is the implicit
ground of feminist contest: what is to be considered human? What
subjects, what bodies, are to be allowed "within the law?"
Among the currently most valuable of monsters for thinking "hu-
manity" through the body is the vampire; the title of a recent SF con-
vention panel asked, "Why are vampires so PoMo?" Perhaps this is
not only because, as Judith Johnson comprehensively remarks, they
offer a metaphor for anxieties over class, race, gender and power
(76), nor because the tie to blood and the motif of "passing for hu-
man" are topical in the age of AIDS; vampires also foreground the
rarely considered binary of alive/dead; most valuably, perhaps, they
unsettle the crucial opposition human/not-human, forcing audiences
to confront more nearly the struggles over race and sexuality, for ex-
ample, that lie beneath this metaphorical contest, without deflection
toward either the animal or the machine.
The vampire in 1990s female writers like Barbara Hambly,
Tanya Huff, and Laurell Hamilton is, however, a far cry from Stok-
er's 1890s Dracula; much of this shift derives from two famous '70s
vampire novels. In The Vampire Tapestry (1980) Suzy McKee Char-
nas used SF to construct the vampire as a physically explicable preda-
475
tor, a male body that women can both wound and love, a subject
forced to see his prey as subjects themselves. And in Interview With
the Vampire (1976), Anne Rice produced vampires who could feel
guilt and loss and religious angst; in effect, the two shifted the Other-
ness of Dracula to give vampires subjectivity.
Hambly and company take a further step. Despite its innova-
tions, Interview is driven by the same homoerotic tension Elaine
Showalter, in a TV special, found in Francis Ford Coppola's
Dracula ; "when's he going to bite a man?" Put crudely, the unadul-
terated vampire plot boils down to, "Suck or Fuck, Where, When
and Whom?" Even in Rice, these limited narrative options inevitably
site the vampire as villain. But the later novelists hybridize this plot,
particularly with the detective story, giving a crucial flexibility: the
vampire can be repositioned as a victim of evil, or as the assistant,
even the agent, of good.
With this change, the '90s novelists make unexpected use of But-
ler's strategies to produce some intriguing fulfillment of Grosz's de-
mands. Butler feels that "the reproduction of heterosexual constructs
in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed
status of the so-called heterosexual original" ( Gender , 31). But in
these novels, two of three protagonists are women. The female view-
point thus becomes the norm, the "human"; and when, as in Coppo-
la's Dracula, erotic attraction tangles a woman with a new-style male
vampire, the unquestioned "default position" of heterosexuality fo-
cuses desire on a male body which is marked, abnormal, lacking.
This faulty repetition then destabilizes the heterosexual regime by
changing the question, What is straight? to, What, here, is 'human'?
Barbara Hambly' s novels can be read as an early stage in this
process. In an Edwardian setting she crosses the vampire story with
period forms like the "imperial romance," as in Kipling's Kim, and
the spy thriller, like Conrad's Under Western Eyes. In Immortal
Blood (1988) "somebody is killing the vampires of London," and a
vampire enlists human help. In Traveling With the Dead (1995) vam-
pires threaten to become super-spies for the Austrian "evil empire."
In both novels vampires are produced in corporeal terms. The re-
cruiting agent, the sixteenth-century Spanish hidalgo, Don Simon,
offers his wrist to prove he has no pulse. The vampires are recorded
in terms of smell- "Patou perfume" over "a dim exhalation of putre-
fying blood" ( Traveling , 112)- and as life/not life: glittering eyes,
476
477
478
479
minded her of an infant at the breast," and, "she felt her nipples
harden at the thought." This was "one of the most intimate actions
she'd ever been a part of" (Huff, Price 209-10). But though the
phrasing - " Could he stop ?" "intimate actions"- implies inter-
course, the central image is maternal; and Vicki's nipples harden "at
the thought. "
Thus a woman's viewpoint and a powerful strand of women's ex-
perience, an erotic/maternal reaction discussed by feminists like Iris
Young (199) and Beatrice Faust (45, 59), destabilize the event's tra-
ditional sexual focus. Huff then reverses Stoker's "corrupted" image
of life-giving, because Vicki is a biological lifegiver and she is, in
good truth, giving "life." But is a vampire "alive?" And Huff desta-
bilizes the déstabilisation; Henry needs a second feed from a young
male hooker, another "lifegiver" who becomes sexually aroused.
Women's biological role is invoked, valorized, and then a "faulty
repetition" problematizes it as well.
"Faulty" female desire brings equally remarkable convolutions
in the last book, Blood Pact (1993), where Vicki must rescue the ani-
mated corpse of her mother from (female) scientists trying to emulate
Frankenstein. Her mother has been subtly "vampiric" throughout the
series; always ringing at the wrong time, competing for Vicki's at-
tention with her work and her men, who include Henry and another
male cop. When Vicki ignores a call just before her mother dies, she
suffers a classic daughter's guilt. An incursion of female pre-Oedipal
desire then threatens to destabilize the thriller form, as it enacts an
Oedipal sub-text of female romance. Here, as in Rebecca, heroine
and mother achieve a traumatic separation, often with a "maternal"
death. Huff splits the daughter's role between the "bad" scientists
and Vicki as "good" rescuer; but when Vicki is mortally wounded in
the struggle, her two "men" face the choice of letting her die or vam-
pirizing her.
Eventually the human chooses to save her. Henry then becomes
her surrogate "mother"; here Dracula' s suckling is again faulted, be-
cause he is a positive "lifegiver," and since Huffs vampires cannot
live together, let alone feed off each other, he also sacrifices their het-
erosexual tie. In a further convolution, the closure returns Vicki to
her human lover. The question "When's he going to bite a man?"
then becomes "Is she going to bite a man?" The woman is again posi-
tioned as the abnormal, the body that lacks. But Vicki's lover wel-
480
But like Lydia, Anita retains her femininity; the fetish-like listing of
clothes in recent popular fiction promotes ambiguity, as she de-
scribes classy jackets - chosen to cover a shoulder-holster - and
and how you manoeuvre a short skirt while raising zombies. Despite
481
Kids. No one had mentioned children. Did Richard have this domestic
vision of a little house, him in the kitchen, me working, and kids? . . .
Shit. Kids, me? Pregnant, me? Not in this lifetime. I thought furriness
was our biggest problem (254).
482
483
484
Note
485
References
Routledge, 1990.
Chamas, Suzy McKee. The Vampire Tapestry. 1980. NY
Craft, Christopher. ""Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Ge
sion in Bram Stoker's Dracula ." Dracula: The Vampi
Critics. Ed Margaret L. Carter. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. R
1988. 167-94.
de Lauretis, Teresa. "Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical
Consciousness." Feminist Studies 16.1 (1990): 115-50.
Dickey, James. Deliverance. 1970. London: Pan, 1972.
Dyer, Richard. "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality,
Homosexuality as Vampirism." Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender
and Popular Fiction. Ed. Susannah Radstone. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1988. 47-72.
Faust, Beatrice. Women, Sex & Pornography. London: Melbourne
House, 1980.
Fuss, Diana. "Inside/Out." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories.
Ed. Diana Fuss. NY: Routledge, 1991. 1-10.
Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body. NY: Columbia UP, 1988.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St.
Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
Hambly, Barbara. Immortal Blood, a.k.a Those Who Hunt the Night.
1988. NY: Del Rey, 1989.
487