The Feminist And The Vampire: Constructing Postmodern Bodies

Author(s): Sylvia Kelso

Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 1997, Vol. 8, No. 4 (32), Special Issue:
Papers from the Eighteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
(1997), pp. 472-487
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

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 The Feminist And The Vampire:
Constructing Postmodern Bodies

Sylvia Kelso

In the late 1980s and the

'90s, "bodies" and "the body" have become prominent in theoretical
discussion. Sharing this interest in corporeality that has followed
most obviously from Foucault's influential use of "the body," I hope
to consider how the treatment of bod(ies) in small samples of feminist
theory and popular fiction can be read as mutually illuminating rather
than hierarchically ranked ways of thinking postmodernity. To do so
I'll relate work from Jane Gallop, Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz,
three of the writers often termed corporeal feminists, to some tech-
nocultural theory from Donna Haraway. With them I'll consider re-
cent vampire novels by Barbara Hambly, Tanya Huff, and Laurell
Hamilton.
To begin, for convenience, with the theorists, within the general
feminist project to improve "women's" lot, corporeal feminism
shares the intellectual initiative which critiques not only specific
practices or disciplines but the bases of traditional Western thought.
"Thinking through the body" is a phrase from Adrienne Rich, which
Jane Gallop takes as an injunction to heal the mind/ body split inher-
ent in Western society, Christian thinking, and philosophy from
Plato onward. Gallop's 1988 book, 77 linking Through the Body, first
attempts this "corporeal mentation"; but it largely engages French
male writers like De Sade and Barthes. The one major piece on a fe-
male writer argues that Luce Irigaray's attempt to displace the pe-
nis/phallus as primary corporeal signifier constructs a metaphorical
rather than anatomical "sexuality." As Gallop comments, evenphal-
lomorphism is not a true anatomical map, since it omits testicles (94).
Equally interesting, however, is Gallop's account of how she dressed
herself to deliver the paper1; that is, she enacted her theory, "per-
forming" with body and mind at once.
Elizabeth Grosz' s recent book, Volatile Bodies (1994), offers a
tantalizing manifesto for such thinking. Its object is "to displace the
centrality of mind" in Western thought, and refuse to conceive
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subjectivity
also force
monolithi
"which kin
"more read
social subo
effects of
subject's co
ness or th
By the end
ger fulfil
investigate
poreal map
"mediates
"the flesh,
inscription
and Lacan
jects like
without O
looked to f
ing; and eac
ising base
phrase, "p
To re-use
decentre th
seeing wom
mind, or
"universali
Beauvoir. B
Matter, "w
could not
through th
self does so
has becom
In her we
view of po
Rich's conc
damental i
the problem

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The Feminist and the Vampire Journal of the Fantastic

is in fact no "identity" behind gender patterns: that gender is, in Fou-

cault's term, a "regulatory ideal," a normative regime which con-
structs not only the subjects it constitutes, but its own authority. In
Bodies that Matter she extends this insight, via a Foucauldian "gene-
alogy" of the body, to argue that "sex" is equally constructed. To
Butler, the body is always material, though in Gender Trouble, it is
seen as process rather than object. By Bodies That Matter, body and
psyche are not divisible, but overlap, providing each other's excess;
but there is no way of "thinking a body" - of perceiving, or indeed
of being a body - outside regimes of power, like sex and gender,
constructed by "the law."
Nevertheless, that such "regimes" are self-instituted authorities
rather than natural laws means they must be continually repeated,
"performed, " to maintain their power. But since they are in fact unat-
tainable ideals, these repetitions will never be quite "right." Hence
for Butler the possibility of subversion lies not in attempts to get out-
side the law, like Monique Wittig 's formulation of the lesbian sub-
ject, but "from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities
that emerge when the law turns against itself' ( Gender , 93). Such
possibilities increase at boundaries, where laws are constituted by
ejecting their Outsides - their abjects, their Others - "the strange,
the incoherent, that which falls 'outside,' gives us a way of under-
standing the taken-for-granted world of sexual categorization as a
constructed one," that might be "constructed differently" (110).
Grosz, then, offers a series of goals for Gallop's call to "think
through the Body," and Butler a set of strategies. Another perspec-
tive emerges from Donna Haraway's well-known article, "A Cyborg
Manifesto" (1985). Where Grosz and Butler take humanity for
granted, Haraway foregrounds it, situating bodies, not by sexual dif-
ference, but as "human" between the now blurring "outsides" of ani-
mal and machine. Her work engages that other postmodern concern
with corporeality which is based in technological change. Here anxi-
ety about the threatened humanist subject becomes concern over the
"human" body, caught between now tenable goals of surgical and ge-
netic engineering, and the threat of a realized Cartesian mind/body
split: first by the development of human or computer-based artificial
intelligence, and more immediately, by the potential of computer-
based "virtual reality," which threatens to fulfil the visions of simu-
lacra constructed by that other arch postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard.

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 in the Arts

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-

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The Feminist and the Vampire Journal of the Fantastic

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,

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in the Arts Sylvia Kelso

unnaturally white faces, icy touc

sites the male body in the positio
( Immortal , 77) female vampire c
agent cum Oxford don who is th
Simultaneously, Hambly's fideli
tionalism constructs the vampires
are grave discussions of their "ps
light and silver, and the possibilit
But where Stoker upholds scientif
such folkloric data does defeat
against itself." Firstly, the scient
Dracula disintegrates because a va
thus the scientific object speaks, a
his own voice." Secondly, Hambly
villain of his patriarchal scientist
medical researcher who, in a Victo
to produce vampire super-spies; bu
Guards uniform" ( Immortal , 80)
comes the vampirized monster/
thoroughly confiises Stoker's mo
lains, from the height of the Edw
by a man and woman with vampi
In this hybridizing of an imperia
ideology, gender politics is vital.
pire folklore; but though made a hos
naped by the killer, the possessor
Lydia. It is she who uncovers the
actual villain. Science thus become
pearance as a stereotypical female
tea gown," with hair unraveled. B
the spectacles caught in her "long,
Hambly refuses to resolve this ma
of a vampire Lydia' s "whole soul
closer look at the tongue and muc
but a chapter later she still has "
vulnerable to anyone who had n
rooms" (143).
While Lydia problematizes the n
Don Simon problematizes it as an

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The Feminist and the Vampire Journal of the Fantastic

than Undead, a killer, superhumanly strong, and dangerous. But

where the female vampires are sexual predators and the Master of
London a huge bully, Don Simon is unfailingly elegant, controlled,
and, most frequently, "delicate." Hambly's descriptions of his eyes
as sulphur, amber, golden, the "antique sweetness" (20) of his rare
smile, and glimpses of his lost humanity, make him the erotic centre
of the novel. But since he appears only through his male helper's
eyes, the "heterosexual default" restricts this effect to glamourizing
imagery.
Heterosexually eroticized vampires, or hybrid vampire ro-
mances, are actually quite common, as in Freda Warrington's A
Taste of Blood Wine (1992) or Elaine Bergstrom's Shattered Glass
(1989). Here the vampire becomes a romance hero, and Warring-
ton's heroine happily vampirizes to join him. Hambly scouts this op-
tion in Travelling With the Dead , when, as they pursue her husband
and the enemy spies across Europe, an attraction rises between Don
Simon and Lydia.
Unlike Bergstrom or Warrington, however, Hambly will not let
her vampire become a fully attainable object of female desire. In-
deed, she satirizes Don Simon's cold-blooded use of romance tropes
- meeting at an Elizabethan masque, a kiss on the moors, a Hugue-
not rescue out of Dumas - in the dreams of a woman he virtually ab-
ducts to act as Lydia' s escort. This unfortunate female behaves like a
lovestruck adolescent, while Lydia is destabilized between the roles
of heroine, scientist and "lady"; thus she observes Don Simon's
nails, which "project[ed] some half inch" beyond his fingertips, and
were "far thicker than human nails. Some kind of chiten? It would be
rude to ask for a cutting" ( Travelling , 52).
Hambly walks a similar tightrope with the romance plot, where
stereotypical situations such as Don Simon's salvaging Lydia after a
night assault, are not allowed to mature. Instead, Lydia stays in love
with her other don, her husband, and Don Simon seesaws between
"human" and "nonhuman." He is repeatedly imaged as a mantis, a
scorpion, a skeleton, Death in an opera cloak; when Lydia forbids
him to hunt humans he is found to be feeding on Turkish dogs. Again,
the male body is constructed as marked, monstrous, lacking; most
importantly, since Hambly's vampires cannot have intercourse, Don
Simon can never consummate his love.

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in the Arts Sylvia Kelso

Unlike Hambly, Tanya Huff in

step to vampire as attainable ob
agent of the good. Her villains
raises demons, a fundamentalis
urrected Egyptian mummy who
a private investigator called Vic
defective night vision. Her vam
who earns his living by writin
Toronto condominium, and t
"Henry" is given subjectivity; l
making and his past, and the te
in Huff's work the pragmatic
neatly side-stepped by Hambly
late? - are gaily ignored. "Henr
active, and forthrightly eroticiz
In this case the heterosexual no
ambiguity enters female desire.
Vicki has to feed Henry when h
As Judith Johnson notes, femal
ling" as nurturance (78); but suc
compacted incident. Firstly, it is a
pleasure; but it invokes fellatio
dary, often tabooed sexual plea
conflates milk, semen and blood
"naughty" pleasures of straight
duce such powerful displacemen
where "Kiss me with those red
latio; which in turn, as Chris Cr
bly taboo "kiss" between Hark
In texts like Dracula, vampire
to masculinity: it is fellatio seen
either to the women men own,
remains in Stephen King's "Ri
tion" (1982) as in James Dickey
coerced fellatio rather than ana
death. " But in Huffs novel, as
jectivity. And when Henry suck
of her neck rose," "[h]er breath
swering experiences in other parts

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The Feminist and the Vampire Journal of the Fantastic

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-

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 in the Arts Sylvia Kelso

comes her bite, and the novel c

happy nuclear couple. In fact, h
will lose him, either through de
pirizes him. Huffs version of th
only superficially without fault
Where Hambly's novels use th
ent, Laurell Hamilton construct
America swarms with supernatu
in St. Louis, vampires are legal c
nal Life, " and lobby for the vo
Against Vampires - while wer
infectious attacks or faulty vac
endangers their jobs, marriages
This obvious metaphor most c
ists' common awareness of AIDS
vampires theorized by gay cr
Dyer. But Hamilton's treatment
faulty repetition. Firstly, the "
rific explicit physical details of
promotes "thinking through th
literally dismembered corpses,
of small intestine, this corporea
tions. The toughest of the three
first-person narrator Anita Blak
pire executioner, and later, a
powers, she thus walks the edg
gym culture, Anita also gauge
"able to bench press a Toyota
five-foot-three 106 pound body
inscribed:

It had only been a . . . month since a shape-shifting leopard had

opened my [left foreļarm . . . The cross-shaped burn-scar was now
a little crooked. . . The mound of scar tissue at the bend of my arm
... dribbled white scars like water {Bones, 24-5).

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

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The Feminist and the Vampire

her black but deadpan humour, Anita is also a po

tion, a practicing Christian determined to keep s
Nevertheless, it is in heterosexual relationshi
turns the law against itself. Though Anita repeat
triangles, both her "men" are "monsters"; indee
ton's erotically attractive "men" are human. Th
male body constructed by this female desire is fo
ta's fiancé, who "passes" as a junior high sch
"scrumptious," repeatedly described as "warm,"
cular. But he is also an alpha male lycanthrope;
shifting appears several times, but always for m
There was something on the floor. It writhed and
flowed over it like water. A hand reached skywar
ing, shoving upward through the flesh... All that
blood. The bones slid in and out with wet sucking n

Afterwards, "Liquid formed a thick puddle on th

fluid flowed down his back in a wash that soaked
149). Here flows that parallel women's "curse,"
ened because shapeshifting is compelled by the m
of Grosz's demands: that "flows" be foreground
too. But Hamilton denies these "flows" their typ
abjection, of male bodies gone "bad." While she
bestiality, as a pack eats a dead comrade, she insi
ity. Thus Anita's fiancé is "loyal, honest, caring
riest boy scout" ( Lunatic , 172). And when Ani
marriage, the concerns of a '90s career woman
ness:

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).

Richard's rival takes heterosexually eroticized "monsters" to the

point of caricature. A vampire mob boss, Jean-Claude runs half the
night-club district. Repeatedly called "perfect" or "beautiful," he
has long black hair, midnight blue eyes, and always dresses in tight
black pants and white lacy shirts, usually open to reveal "a lean bare
chest" ( Guilty , 12); but most often the focus is his nipples, revealed
by wet fabric, or bared by the shirt itself. As Iris Young remarks,

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in the Arts

though patriarchy con

nipples, which irrecov
But male nipples, and
romance. Yet if the er
body vampire, with th
lifegiving, is all but to
linity. And when An
peasant raised an arist
passed around by stro
thetic subjectivity.
Anita too saves Jean
eroticism is suppressed
now it just hurt." J
minded determination
ilton, Bones, 244). Her
placed when a male ag
text veers to parallel H
ta's mother, and in a t
to share the agony as
In both these novelist
an irruption of femal
heterosexual regime.
norm. Her first book
courtship. "I don't dat
third concludes, "Mos
straight men left. I'd
329). The last ends, "
found to my mother'
gained. " Hamilton de
Jean-Claude's arms ho
that line that a handf
of him as a monster a
Anita's humanity is re
because she saves Jean
monster, the text scou
soul" {Bones, 370).
Writing this paper aff
ing the body, theory an
erarchical. Theory off

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The Feminist and the Vampire

others' ideas, the tools of abstraction and logic, the s

tellectual endeavor, a correspondingly influentia
feminist hands, the ability to extrapolate from p
Without Gallop, Butler and Grosz, the novelists'
triguing, but not explicable with a sometimes rivetin
well be that theory is to fiction as Butler sees regim
der to the body: requiring critique, but, re-usin
vak's, "something we cannot do without" ( Bodie
Nevertheless, theory can all too easily lose bot
difference. As Butler acknowledges, "those train
are always distanced "from corporeal matters" a
miss the body, or, worse, write against it;" som
'the' body comes in genders" {Bodies, ix). And as
wistfully about Diderot's Les Bijoux Indiscrets
novel, so . . . sexual research is given emotional
an everyday omission many feminist critiques of
pair. Attempting to (re)think through the body, non
got much beyond injunction, abstractions, anecd
summaries of male theory.
In contrast, fiction, especially popular fic
women's popular fiction, has low status, a relativ
ence, restrictive plot lines, largely unquestion
heavy publishing and audience restraints. But such
abstraction; it cannot do without, but rather mul
and, by its default heterosexuality, sexes represe
And though it operates within the law, as Foucaul
critics have argued, all fiction exposes the flaws
ogy. By its very nature, then, a faulty repetition of
inevitable.
Again of its nature, fiction is a construct that mediates between
theory/abstraction and anecdote/experience. It allows the theorist to
flesh out abstractions in the shape of characters, while the novelist
can move beyond personal experience to draw on cultural generali-
ties; in effect, fiction becomes a third way of hypothesizing about
material reality. But in genres like science fiction - and vampire
novels - it can also overstep the bounds of realism. And while politi-
cal action may not, as feminists once claimed, be inspired by repre-
sentations of all-women Utopias, even popular fiction does not
merely reflect but constructs meaning, for and in society. People who

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 in the Arts

never read But

Butler's ideas.
The forced boundary shifts and wider view of "human" in these
novels also invoke postmodernism. In art, science and culture, it has
been considered a period of boundary-blurring. Indeed, its widest in-
tellectual initiative has been a sustained attack on traditional binary
thought. But if you discredit either/or, what mode of thought can take
its place? An answer appears in the construction of Haraway's cy-
borg, as in Butler's demand that race, gender and sexuality be
thought as "vectors of power" that cannot be teased apart (Bodies,
181-82). It reappears in Teresa de Lauretis' and Diana Fuss's formu-
lation of feminist positions and alternate sexualities as inside/out so-
ciety. Just as the slogan "Think global, act local" demands that we do
not one or the other, but both, so these novelists consistently site their
vampires - and their humans - as both human and not human. Per-
haps postmodernism' s crucial change may not be in technologies or
economic structures, but in re-thinking thought itself: producing a
new logic, whose paradigm is not the exclusive either/or, but an in-
clusive both/and. In these times, then, it may be that one rethinks the
body, not by doing either theory or fiction, but by doing theory and
fiction, without privileging one above the other. Both/and, if not both
at once.

Note

1 . In the Headnote to this paper, Gallop writes, "I tried to . . . speak . . .

despite my body, but also in my body. Since I experienced my inability to
transcend the body, where women were trapped, I had to think a way that the
body . . . belonged in the realm of high literary theory where I aspired to be. . .
Delivering that talk felt like an enormous triumph, for it seemed... I had
moved the body (my body?) from an embarrassment to a source of power. . .
I dressed in a manner that bespoke the body as style, stylized sexuality. I
wore spike heels, seamed hose, a fitted black forties dress and a large black
hat. I was dressed as a woman, but as another woman." (91-2)

485

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The Feminist and the Vampire

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