For my Sociology Capstone, Sociology of Culture, I’m researching Vampire Culture through consumers of vampire media. As you can imagine, even if you have a limited or minimal amount of knowledge about vampire media, gender plays a big role in the culture. Something that I initially set out to avoid discussing in my research has now resurfaaced in my data analysis and presents itself as something almost immediately relevent to this class. As one might imagine, vampire culture is not the most mainstream form of fiction (although, with the recent creation of works such as the Twilight series, this is becoming increasingly less true). However, through content analysis of different forms of vampire media, everything from Nosferatu, the first vampire movie ever made, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, numerous renditions of Dracula, film versions of several of Anne Rice novels, such as Queen of the Damned and Interview with a Vampire, up until the most recent works of Twilight, there is an interesting progression of gender roles and sexual identity. Although the vampire is simply a literary figure, I think it can be thought of as a social narrative in the context of a specific subculture. Through my analysis, I’ve found that the most common reason people are consumers of vampire culture, no matter what form of media, or what works they were intersted in, is that they feel displaced from mainstream society. Therefore, they look to the vampire as a symbolic character which represents the same anguish they feel over being an outcast. Therefore, people are interested in vampires because they feel like they, themselves do not fit in, so they are able to relate to the vampire in this way.
For this discussion post, I’ll go ahead and keep things simple, though, so that we can focus more on the dialogue of gender roles aspect than the vampire aspect. The three works that seem to stick out the most in this dialogue of gender through this subculture are: Nosferatu (Which is loosely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula) in which an evil vampire prays on young, helpless women, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my personal favorite television show of all time) in which a teenage girl is selected to defend the human world against the forces of darkness, predominantly vampires, and finally, Twilight, the new and strange fantasy novel about a human girl who falls in love with a vampire.
One thing that’s become overwhelmingly apparent to me in this analysis is the shift in gender roles from Nosferatu (1922) and Twilight (2008)., specifically with regard to the female. In Nosferatu, the female is portrayed as simply a helpless victim, and from the way the movie is shot, she almost seems to be portrayed as the sexual object of the vampire. However, in Twilight (the movie at least, out of principle I refuse to read the books), the female has a different role. She has moved from the role of victim to the role of savior, almost. Now, in the content analysis of these sources, it still seems as if the role of the female is still the submissive one. The female has gained some agency, but it seems that this is only through her sexual objectivity. Because she is using her power as a sexual object to now gain some form of agency in the symbolic narrative of vampire culture, it’s intersting to parallel this to what this might mean in terms of social representations of gender roles. It seems as if the parallel of the gender role of females over the course of the past 50-70 years has been one in which the female gender has done just as the female characters in vampire culture: they’ve developed thier sexual agency in order to move themselves from the subserviant role, into one of pseudo-power.
However, the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran for 7 seasons from 1997 to 2003 tells a much different narrative regarding gender roles of women. Since the main character, Buffy, is portrayed as the most powerful force… in the world, she is valued for her strength rather than her agency as a sexual object. However, this does not mean that she’s without sexuality. In fact, her sexuality does have a big role in the show, it is simply not what she gains her power from.
From these different forms of vampire media, we can see that gender roles are given an intersting meaning in vampire culture, which in some ways can be seen to parallel the development of gender roles and performativity that are present at that time in society, while other works can almost be seen as agents that are working toward the empowerment of women by giving them strength or powers that are both superior to and inaccessible to men, both in conjuntion with sexuality and independent of it.
THINKING SEX 