The Vampire, the Queer, and the Girl
Reflections on the Politics and Ethics of Immortality's Gendering
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2226244 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kimberly J Lau (University of California, Santa Cruz, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-24 |
| Publication date | 2018-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/698274 |
| OpenAlex | W2886768158 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
This article reads Neil Jordan’s 2012 film Byzantium as a bridge between two distinct vampire vogues: one nineteenth century, masculinist, and queer; the other twenty-first century, heterosexualized, and focalized through the girl. In general, the vampire challenges chrononormativity, both because he enjoys a fantastic immortality and is associated with queerness and because the very genre of which he is a part is highly formulaic and intertextual, which produces a recursive form. This recursivity means that the vampire is perpetually defined by an open secret, the characteristic disjuncture between what the audience already knows and what the characters cannot see; for characters and readers in the know, this open secret also condenses codes of queer recognition. Byzantium, as the hinge between the two vampire vogues, uses the figure of the girl to play with both the vampire narrative’s reiterative history and the vampire’s open secret in ways that simultaneously draw out the gendered limitations of the first vogue’s queer resistance to chrononormativity and recuperate the second vogue’s purported depoliticization. In so doing, the film challenges the implicit heteronormativity of mortality and encourages a rethinking of immortality as an ethical project
Aesthetics · Art · BELLA · Bridge (graph theory) · Girl · Heteronormativity · Immortality · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Vampire · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
Death and the Afterlife
Volatile Bodies
Between Men
The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory
Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film
Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction
Nomadic subjects
The urge towards love is an urge towards (un)death’
Listening for the Other
Transitional tastes
No Future
The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
The singularity of being; Lacan and the immortal within
How to bring your kids up sadomasochist
A thousand tiny sexes
Kiss Me with those Red Lips
Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies
The Mortality Effect
When Eve Reads Milton
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |