Queering the Vampire Narrative

Book excerpt: 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.