Bitten by a bat and other revelations
One night in the summer of 2001, a bat bit me while I was sleeping. The medical treatment isn’t fun. Since the bat got away, I had to have the anti-rabies regime of shots over 6 weeks. Thankfully, they are no longer in the stomach, but I did have fever, flu-like aching, and felt weak and pale the whole time. Maybe I will be like Blade someday, half human, half vampire. Tell me if you see fangs developing.
That vampire affinity aside, let’s continue the discussion that Professor Benavides opened in such a wonderfully informative and entertaining way and that Jaslee has insightfully begun on the post. I’d like for us to build collectively on the foundations of the themes from his lecture, with his emphasis on capitalism, colonialism, and otherness (alterity) to bring in some specific Foucauldian insights. Together, these will further demonstrate the ways in which the vampire genre brings together psychic and cultural anxieties and fantasies that are produced by (and help reveal) the complex power relations in society.
Jaslee’s discussion of the incestuous vampire family is a good reminder that vampires—and the word itself—appeared at the same time that the 4 strategic unities Foucault talks about emerged. To quote Foucault here: “since the eighteenth century the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feeling, love; that sexuality has its privileged point of development in the family; that for this reason sexuality is ‘incestuous’ from the start (108-9). The vampire family can thus be seen as a mirror of what was happening but that was not to be acknowledged in general—but literature and the visual arts of the times certainly focused on it in all kinds of ways, and obviously still do.
Also take a look at his discussion on p. 149 where he describes the second half of the 19th century as the time of the modern “biologizing,” statist form of racism to emerge—crystallized most forcefully in the Nazi regime of the 20th century, explaining that this kind of racism drew on the thematics of blood (from the system of alliance/kinship) to provide “historical weight” to the newer form of political power that used the “devices of sexuality.
Think about these and other examples (I’m finding them well-articulated in your mid-terms) so that we can further illuminate the complexity of power relations revealed by the vampire concept. Like Hugo said, these relations remains ambiguous—troubling and unresolved, filled with desire for taboo acts and denial at the same time–and that gives vampire stories great drama and power. That integral ambiguity also allows constant renewal so that, as, Nina Auerbach says in her book “Our Vampires, Ourselves,” “every age embraces the vampire it needs.”
