The Modern Vampire And Human Identity PDF Download

Vampires have recently established an extremely visible space in popular culture, especially among women. There are a myriad of book series, television shows, films, and more that are inundating popular culture with the vampire. The vampires portrayed in this fad, however, are not the same monsters vampires once were. The most important question for my research concerns how and why the modern vampire has contributed to the recent explosion in popularity of vampire fiction. Using texts such as the books and films of The Twilight Saga and the television series The Vampire Diaries and True Blood, I address the modern vampire assemblage as it breaks down binaries that are simultaneously restabilized by a foundation of heterosexuality. I explore the fans of modern vampires as they attempt to collapse reality and fantasy in their attempts to make modern vampires a reality. I trace the major changes that have occurred within vampire fiction in the portrayal of the vampire, from the original inherently evil, monstrous vampires to the modern vampires who choose to act against their "nature" in motivation of a good, humanitarian existence. While early representations of vampires served to draw strict boundaries between monsters, humans, and animals, modern vampires confuse the borders surrounding these beings, becoming a multiplicity of hybrids. These hybrids are provocative to fans who are able to use them to develop alternative spaces of identities in which they can question the legitimacies of binaries, categories, and the conceptualization of the human. Despite the potential for nuance, these destabilized elements are simultaneously recuperated through the reinforcement of heterosexuality. Thus, even while modern vampire fiction succeeds in providing audiences with blurred binaries and hybrids, any possible complexity is canceled out by the upholding of the foundation of heterosexuality. In order for the modern vampire phenomenon to occur, however, all of these elements must be present in modern vampire fiction. Thus the modern vampire phenomenon is constituted by contradictions that only when executed in perfect harmony do they produce the ultimate opportunity for a phenomenon such as this to occur.