Queering the Vampire Narrative offers classroom-ready original essays that continue our explorations of vampires as representations of the cultural Other, which builds on the work of our previous texts. The editors argue, ultimately, the vampire is a queer icon, infinitely blurring the boundaries of identity and cultural norms and queering even the most seemingly stable notions, such as life, death, humanity, and monstrosity. The Vampire is the undead monarch of subtextual articulations of Otherness, especially queer behaviors and desires, offering explorations of the AIDS epidemic, the destabilization of ideas of fixed and stable sexuality, the search for community and chosen family, and the issues of individual and generational trauma. In current fictions, vampires are coming out of the coffin and the closet, identifying as openly queer and often created by queer writers, artists, and directors and bringing the subtext to the surface of the narrative. This volume seeks to create a dialogue about the impact and importance of the vampire on queer identity and queer theory and to answer the questions of why the vampire is such a compelling queer icon and what visions of vampires articulate about our ideas surrounding issues of sexuality, sexual orientation, sexual behaviors, and desires.

About the Author
Amanda Jo Hobson, Ph.D., is Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She has published on gender and sexuality within vampire narratives and is the co-editor of Gender in the Vampire Narrative (2016).

U. Melissa Anyiwo is Associate Professor of History and Director of Black Studies at The University of Scranton, PA. She has edited multiple texts on the vampire as metaphor, including Gender Warriors (2018).


Book Information
ISBN 9789004688872
Author Amanda Hobson
Format Hardback
Page Count 184
Imprint Brill
Publisher Brill
Weight(grams) 435g