Good Vampires Don't Suck: Sex, Celibacy and the Body of Angel

Abstract

First paragraph: Of all the monsters and metaphors of evil that haunt the popular imagination none is more sexualised than the vampire, whose polymorphous, perverse sexuality is a sine qua non of the horror genre. So how does popular culture represent the atypical vampire who, rather than serving evil, is an agent for good? More specifically, what possibilities are offered by a fictional universe in which the vampire is recast not merely as a creature of moral ambiguity, as much of the vampire fiction of the late twentieth century cast them, but as a champion of the moral order-"helper of the helpless"? How might we creatively re-appropriate a universe in which vampire sex is genital rather than oral, and where the hero has been forced (because of a gypsy curse) into a life of celibacy? Can this serve as a basis for a radical and feminist way of refiguring the meaning of "sex" in an age haunted by discourses of sexual disease and sexual dysfunction - themselves attributes of the vampire - that so desperately needs new narratives of sexuality?