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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?
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Introduction
Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Contemporary Vampire Romance
1. More than a Backlash: The Contradictions of Postfeminist Culture
2. Paranormal Romance: A Quintessentially Postfeminist Genre?
3. The Politics of Looking: Female Protagonists between Subject and Object
4. Vampire Transformation as Makeover: The Making of Ideal Postfeminist Subjects
5. Fantasy Solutions to Postfeminist Culture: Vampire Heroes and Postfeminist Masculinity
Conclusion: Paradoxical Pleasures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
Summary
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?
Foreword
Explores the contemporary vampire romance genre’s intricate connections with the ideologies of postfeminism through film (Twilight) and television series (The Vampire Diaries and True Blood).
Additional text
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.
