Postfeminism and Contemporary Vampire Romance: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television

About the Author

Lea Gerhards is Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, Germany. Her research interests include gender and queer studies, feminist theory, and popular culture studies.

Angela Smith is Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.

Claire Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-editor or Bloomsbury Library of Gender and Popular Culture and Deputy Editor (including reviews) of the open access journal C21 Literature.

Product Description

In this book, Lea Gerhards traces connections between three recent vampire romance series; the Twilight film series (2008-2012), The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017) and True Blood (2008-2014), exploring their tremendous discursive and ideological power in order to understand the cultural politics of these extremely popular texts.

She uses contemporary vampire romance to examine postfeminist ideologies and discuss gender, sexuality, subjectivity, agency and the body. Discussing a range of conflicting meanings contained in the narratives, Gerhards critically looks genre's engagement with everyday sexism and violence against women, power relations in heterosexual relationships, sexual autonomy and pleasure, (self-) empowerment, and (self-) surveillance. She asks: Why are these genre texts so popular right now, what specific desires, issues and fears are addressed and negotiated by them, and what kinds of pleasures do they offer?

Review

"Insightful, compelling and provocative, this book offers an enlightening analysis of the global phenomenon of vampire romance that has as much to tell us about gender, sexuality and post-feminism as it does the vampires that we love, or love to hate. A must-read for fans and scholars alike" - Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton London, UK.

"Interrogating the tricky terrain of post-feminist discourse via a close reading of three vampire juggernauts of the early 2000s, Gerhard's book offers an incisive deep-dive into contemporary gender politics." - Natalie Wilson, California State University San Marcos, USA.

"Gerhards offers a comprehensive look at three populist vampire texts that provides a strong introduction to vampire studies for undergraduates across the liberal arts. Using a sophisticated analysis, she reconstructs arguments from many well know feminist and cultural theorists to help guide new scholars through the ways vampire products can help students navigate gender and identity in the 21st century." - Melissa Anyiwo, Curry College, USA