Hypatia vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2003) © by Shannon Winnubst

Vampires, Anxieties, and Dreams:
Race and Sex in the Contemporary
United States

SHANNON WINNUBST

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire
to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of
disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fl uidity, of dependency itself. I then turn
to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with
Donna Haraway’s reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self
that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

“philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

There is a recurring dream, a nightmare, in the unconscious of these white
United States. It is a dream of passion, violence, transgression, invasion—and
all the perverse titillation that these bring. It is also a dream of power, viola-
tion and purity, of strict and rigid and obsessive fascination with boundaries.
It frightens, infuriates, traps or protects us according to the bodies and subject
positions we inhabit within this cultural symbolic. Stirring the worst anxieties
of some of the nastiest parts of U.S. history, it is a nightmare rarely mentioned
but always circulating, rarely noticed but always present. It boils and bubbles
just below the surface, silently but perpetually, shaping that surface without
itself surfacing.

The nightmare is the scene of the black rapist, particularly of the black male

raping a white girl. It is the nightmare that convicts Bigger Thomas, the alleged

2 Hypatia

black rapist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), in our national psyche, and
innocent black men in our federal and state penal systems. It is a nightmare
in both its ideal and real senses—as a fantasy that structures and ensures the
hegemony of a phallicized whiteness and as a horrifying material reality that,
despite its ontological status as a fantasy, traps and kills black and brown men
in the contemporary United States With no foothold in actual statistics on
interracial violence or rape, it nonetheless functions as a myth that structures
race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States. Both real and unreal,
it is a collective nightmare that structures power in U.S. culture. But who is
doing the dreaming?

Several subject positions are idealized and worked out in this scene. They

are idealized not as utopic but as regulative ideals. Functioning much as Jacques
Lacan (1977) diagnoses the phallus’ function in phallicized systems, they erase
or subordinate historical variation to their insistence on themselves as the
“true” subject positions. As ideals, these subject positions are never materially
achieved and rarely consciously embodied. But they structure experience, desire,
expectations, and history. They fl oat “above history,” inhabiting a transcendent
and idealized space from which they direct how those historical experiences
ought to be judged and read. They write themselves on our bodies and psyches
through layers of history and cultural discourses. And yet, despite the cracks
and fi ssures that historical differences present to defy the “truth” of this myth,
we remain haunted by these specifi c, idealized subject positions.

1

The codings of this particular scene are fairly explicit: the “raced”

2

man is

designated as violent; all girls are designated as potential victims of rape; the
white girl is designated as the most highly cathected target of “raced” male
violence; and rapists are designated as “raced.” “Raced” men and white girls/
women are thus clearly pitted against one another and “raced” men and “raced”
girls/women fi nd themselves in only a slightly easier relation. Divided against
one another in positions of aggression and defense, sex and violence become
the sites at which gender and race are negotiated. The dynamics between these
subject positions are ones of fear, aggression, violence, and mutual distrust—and
threaded through all of these is a subtle intonation of desire, evidenced in the
fantasizing of the crime as a sexual crime. Coalitional politics is unthinkable,
rendered virtually impossible.

This collective nightmare performs some of our worst cultural anxiet-

ies—about desire, fear, and aggression; about gender, sexuality, and race;
about history, bodies, and violence. It sets the scene of gender and race as the
scene of sex and violence, instilling fear in all gendered and raced (that is, all
“marked”) bodies. It is a myth that will not stop haunting us, even as we prove
its mythical status.

But notice that one salient subject position is missing here: the white man.

The unmarked body. What is his role here? Protector of girls, particularly of

Shannon Winnubst 3

white girls? Benevolent patriarch? Innocent? Nonviolent? The scene does not
explicitly tell us: it only tells us that he is missing, invisible. Is he the one pro-
tected by this fear that courses through these other subject positions? Is he the
one dreaming this nightmare?

Is he also the one who loves the myth of vampires? And will he love the

de-centering, vertiginous myth of Jewelle Gomez’s vampires in her Gilda Stories
(1991)?

Western Subjectivity: The Haunting Otherness of the Body

Perhaps here my more philosophical telling of this story can begin. I begin with
Lacan (1977) and his predecessor, G.W.F. Hegel (1977).

As both of these writers, writers who are surely exemplars of “western

civilization’s ethos,” develop across their corpus of texts, Otherness is that
disavowed but constitutive necessity for the possibility of subject formation.
Otherness is that which “we” (that is, we white, rational, upstanding subjects)
depend on and simultaneously disavow. We disavow our dependence, thereby
announcing ourselves as freely created individuals, freely chosen subjects in a
world made for our taking.

For Hegel, the subject craves the recognition of another subject to affi rm

his—and for Hegel and Lacan, it is always “his”—place in the world as a subject
who is seen, not an object who is looked upon (1977, 111–19). It is that scopo-
philic locking of eyes that the Hegelian subject craves. And yet, as the drama
of the Phenomenology (1977) unfolds, we fi nd that it is exactly this reciprocal
“looking” that seemingly can never be achieved. Bound by his Cartesian roots,
Hegel cannot fathom the possibility of two subjects. And so the subject him-
self splits into the warring factions of Master and Slave, where the drama of
disavowal and dependence concludes with a consciousness that can never be
happy, a consciousness that can never enter into a subject-subject relation—a
consciousness that is body-less, fl oating off through skepticism into the ahistori-
cal, immaterial world of pure spirit.

The stuff of dreams . . .

In good twentieth-century form, Lacan rewrites this drama in the register of
psychic development, replete with yet more harrowing twists, turns, reversals,
and evasions. In the dense eight pages on the mirror stage, he narrates the
emergence of this necessary—and necessarily disavowed—Otherness as a pro-
jection of the infant’s battles with his own refl ected image. Beholding his own
refl ection, the infant is torn between the refl ected whole body that signifi es his
own physical otherness and his relentless internal fragmentation. This confl ict,
this simultaneous desire for and fear of this wholeness, marks his dynamics with

4 Hypatia

Otherness throughout his psychic development. It is this simultaneous desire
and fear, simultaneous dependence and disavowal, that shapes him into a split,
violent subject warring always against the Otherness of his own embodiment.

The stuff of nightmares . . .

I want to look more carefully at these boundaries—boundaries between self and
Other; and the projection of this internal, psychic Otherness onto boundar-
ies between physical selves and others. I want to look more carefully at these
boundaries and projections, at our cultural obsession with them, and at the
violences that these produce.

It is perhaps too easy in the telling of this story to turn one more time to

René Descartes (1986) and lay this all at his doorstep—Descartes, the dualistic
madman who forever severed our bodies from our minds, and consequently
our selves from other selves. That story is perhaps too easy and too worn to
illuminate these dynamics. In a more contemporary telling of the Cartesian
dualism, Lacan portrays for us in the mirror stage the formation of a subject
as an effect of the idealization of a body-in-control. To become a body-in-
control—or at least to pursue this as an ideal, which is necessary to become a
legible and meaningful subject in western symbolics—the subject must clearly
identify the rigid boundaries between itself and others, including that Other
refl ected back to it in the image of the mirror. The warring against his Other-
ness that marks this subject as forever split demands that he separate himself
from that Other—that he construct clear and distinct and rigid boundaries
between himself and the Other, even if this Other resides internally within
his own psyche, within his own body. It is a futile task. But the effort becomes
frantic in the face of its futility: the more the subject realizes his dependence
on the Other, the more vehemently he rejects all connection to and violently
distances himself from that Other.

3

While many feminists have also labored to show that this subject is always a

male subject in Lacan’s discourse (for example, see Grosz 1990; Irigaray 1985a),
locating this subjectifying separation in the idealization of the phallus, I want
to show that this subject is also always a white subject, a subject of phallicized
whiteness. It is both the whiteness and the maleness of the Lacanian subject
that belie our cultural racializing of sex and sexualizing of race. It is both the
whiteness and the maleness of the Lacanian subject that perpetuates my open-
ing dream sequence and lingers in anxious fascination before the images of the
vampire.

4

Shannon Winnubst 5

Whiteness, Maleness, Heterosexuality: The Guises of Universality

Richard Dyer, in his provocative book White (1997), argues that heterosexuality
always protects whiteness in the contemporary cultures of the United States
and Great Britain (1997, 3–8). (One could argue, further, that this protective
stance between heterosexuality and whiteness also extends globally, given the
hegemonic status of the United States and Great Britain across transnational
boundaries.) Giving us a thumbnail sketch of the white male sexuality guarded
by this protective stance, Dyer links the white ideal of masculinity to the fi gure
of Christ, notably invoking race and Christianized religion simultaneously as
signifi ers for “whiteness” (1997, 14–18). As the savior of a religion fraught with
somatophobia, Christ represents that incomprehensible fusion of the divine
and the human—or of the spirit and the body. The principle of incarnation,
which sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic religions, is to be in the
body but not of it—to appear in the world in fl esh but always to be capable of
transcending it, to suffer the temptations of the fl esh but always to transcend
them into the purifi ed realms of spirit.

This tension, this pull, this Lacanian splitting is what distinguishes whiteness

and maleness from their counterparts of “non-whiteness” and “non-maleness,”
as the characteristics of racial and sexual difference are signifi ed, in our binary
symbolic. Rather than fastening on more “feminine” traits of Christ or his
teachings (for example, his doctrines of peace or championing of the meek and
humble), white male heterosexuality in U.S. and British culture has idealized
the specifi c trait of Christ’s transcendent relation to corporeality. With this
transcendence as their structuring, regulative ideal, whiteness and maleness can
come together in white male heterosexuality to engage this struggle between
spirit and body with the assurance of ultimately transcending the body and
conquering the struggle. In its idealized form, the white male is in the body,
but is not ultimately captured or constrained by it (and hence is never at fault
or slandered for submitting to it).

5

He stands in a place that transcends the

messiness of materiality.

The resonances with western subjectivity’s haunted relation to otherness

thus ensue. Just as the Hegelian-Lacanian subject is haunted by his dependence
on the Other for his concept of self, so too is the white male haunted by his
dependence on his body for his identity—both physically and psychically. As
a quintessentially Cartesian subject, it is clear to him that he must have a body
to exist (and to feel pleasure, those temptations of the fl esh), but he also cannot
get mired in particularities that will block his participation in the universal, in
that “human nature” which has played such a large role in shaping our white,
male symbolic. He must have a body, but just as necessarily he must get rid of it,
transcend it. How does he navigate these dependencies that must also (neces-
sarily) be disavowed? Where does he project these dependencies?

6 Hypatia

As both Luce Irigaray (1985a; 1985b) and Elizabeth Grosz (1989) develop,

this body-in-control of the straight white male symbolic is haunted primarily by
one substance—fl uidity.

6

To be a body-in-control, it must be tightly sealed—rig-

idly separated, distinctly individual, and straightly impermeable. A metaphys-
ics of solids is integral to its survival as a participant in the universal. Strict
boundaries between itself and the Other are what allow this subject to count
itself as a solid individual with universalizable traits (for example, rationality,
free will, conceptual understanding, and other such clear and solid faculties).
And yet it is fl uids that it contains—soft, gooey, sticky fl uids circulate through
this body’s veins and cavities. And so, as yet another disavowed dependency, it
is the control and containing of these fl uids—in their sexualized and racialized
forms—that this tightly sealed body-in-control must maintain. Lest they jam
the theoretical machine, fl uids must always be kept at an idealized distance,
always excluded from any mode of symbolizing, as Irigaray shows (Irigaray 1985b,
107). It must be a solid body, not a leaky one. Or, as Grosz suggests, it must be
a straight male body, not a queer one (Grosz 1989, 198–202).

And the idealized form of phallicized whiteness both feeds on and reinforces

this rigidity.

As Dyer writes, “[t]he invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white

(which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity” (1997, 3).
Invisibility and ubiquity. Whiteness maintains its power in our racist cultural
symbolic through its invisibility: to be white is not to be of a race, it is just to
be “human,” “a person,” “an individual.” This is also how maleness and het-
erosexuality operate: in erasing themselves as anything particular, they parade
(silently, invisibly) as the universal, as the norm, as “natural.” Again, the erasure
of the body, as the material index of particularity, is a fundamental necessity for
the universality of the subject. It can maintain its strict and rigid boundaries
from all others by denying itself the very condition of possibility of boundaries,
corporeality. Transcending the question of how there can be a self without a
body, this white male heterosexual rests assured that there can be no Other or
others within the totalizing, body-less spirit of the universal.

With several ironic twists of “logic,” the white male heterosexual body erases

its own corporeality—its own particularity and specifi city—so that it can enter
into the totalizing realm of the universal. In turn, it assures its strict and rigid
boundary from the Other by erasing all otherness—to be Other is to be in
the body, to be particular, to be less than the universal, to be fl awed, limited,
marked, different. And this difference makes no sense without any access to
that guarantor of meaning, the universal, which in turn necessarily erases any
difference—any particularity, any body, any Otherness. A perfectly sealed circle
of self-refl ecting, solipsistic Sameness—or what has passed as “truth.”

The boundaries are thus maintained through whiteness’ and maleness’ and

heterosexuality’s invisibility. But this invisibility is itself haunted by the pos-

Shannon Winnubst 7

sibility of its being revealed—as both Lacan and Irigaray recognize, the power
of the phallus relies on its remaining veiled. And what might make this invis-
ibility, this “invisible body,” more graphically visible than the spilling of fl uids?
To write Grosz’s reading of Julia Kristeva’s (1982) and Mary Douglas’s (1980)
readings of menstrual blood in the registers of both sex and race, what might
make it more gruesomely visible than the spilling and mixing of blood?

7

Festivals of Vampires

In Modest_Witness @ Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse (1997),
Donna Haraway beckons us to the fi gure of the vampire: she initiates us into the
rituals surrounding the vampire’s nutrition, the rituals of blood. As she writes, “A
fi gure that both promises and threatens racial and sexual mixing, the vampire
feeds off the normalized human, and the monster fi nds such contaminated food
to be nutritious. The vampire also insists on the nightmare of racial violence
behind the fantasy of purity in the rituals of kinship” (1997, 214). If the obsession
with strictly defi ned and rigidly upheld boundaries haunts western conceptions
of subjectivity, perhaps the fi gure who lives by crossing those boundaries tells us
something about how they are made and how they might be dismantled. And
so I turn to the vampire, that fi gure who confounds corporeality itself.

The iconography of vampires has been alive and well in Western European

and North American cultural psyches since the popularization of vampire stories
in the late eighteenth century (Haraway 1997, 215; Case 1991, 4). As many stud-
ies have shown, the linking of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism
is often unmistakable in the majority of these stories.

8

Jews, like whores and

blacks and queers, are vampiric—in the fantasy life of Western European and
North American psyches.

And so what is it to be a vampire? And what are these anxieties that keep

calling us white folks back to their bloody stories?

Veronica Hollinger (1997) explains that, in these days of deconstructing

boundaries, vampires have become “the monster-of-choice . . . since it is itself
a deconstructive fi gure” (1997, 201). As she elaborates, “It is the monster that
used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that
looks like us” (1997, 201. Italics in original). But it is not us. It is the monster
that is closest to us, seducing us into its erotically charged feeding frenzies, only
to be dispelled, even expelled—fantasized into some neatly confi ned unreality
of the unthinkable, the undead.

But the vampire crosses some of phallicized whiteness’ most precious bound-

aries. As Eric Lott (1993) writes in his glossary of “whiteness,” Dracula func-
tions as a “sort of one-man miscegenation machine” (1993, 39). The vampire
is a bloodsucker. He sucks blood, transferring an illegitimate and disavowed
substance, transforming his “victims” from the living to the undead, giving

8 Hypatia

birth without sex, traffi cking in the strange and unruly logics of fl uids, mixing
and spilling and infecting blood.

9

As Haraway writes, the vampire “drinks and

infuses blood in a paradigmatic act of infecting whatever poses as pure” (1997,
214). The vampire pollutes all systems of kinship, pollutes all systems of blood,
pollutes all systems of race and sex and desire that must be straight. He infects
the body and thereby alters the spirit—no body can transcend the metamor-
phoses of his bite, not even the straight white male body that is in the fl esh
but supposedly not of it. The vampire crosses even these boundaries and, with
powers that are transfi xing for the rigid self of the white male heterosexual,
brings his victims across them as well.

Where does the vampire get these powers?
According to the “orthodoxy of vampirism,” the vampire can never become a

legible subject in the straight white male symbolic of Western Europe and North
America. He can never become a subject in the ways that Lacan has read subject
formation, for the vampire does not have the one necessary condition to become
an upstanding, rational, straight, white, male body-in-control: it has no mirror
refl ection. A hallmark of all vampire narratives, this “lack” (which is certainly
not any lack Lacan conceptualized) is traditionally linked to the embedding
of vampire stories in Christianity, where the lack of a mirror refl ection is most
often read as the lack of a soul, which is then connected to the vampires’ fear
of crucifi xes. While this connection in itself already places the fascination with
vampires in the fantasy life of the straight, white, male, Christ-like psyche, the
lack of a mirror refl ection troubles the logics of subjection and abjection that
we fi nd in the Lacanian schema of our cultural psyche.

As we have seen in my brief foray into Lacan’s mirror stage, the infant’s

refl ection of himself in the mirror is the doorway into subject-formation for
Lacanian psychoanalysis. More broadly, this mirror refl ection becomes the
site at which a subject begins to form ideas of wholeness and self-conscious-
ness—crucial characteristics in virtually all western notions of subjectivity. The
vampire, in lacking a mirror refl ection, does not even register on the radar of
identity-formation: he does not have the necessary condition for the possibil-
ity of becoming a subject. But, consequently, nor can he be fully abjected, nor
can he be caught, labeled, categorized, and expelled as the Other. Given that
subjectivity hinges on this visual image, the mirror refl ection, it works its power
out on the fi eld of visual images. One is categorized as the Other on the basis of
how one appears—for example, both racial and sexual difference are signifi ed
through visual markers on the body in U.S. culture. But the vampire fails to
be refl ected in the mirror: he does not offer up the necessary visual image to
be coded by the dominant signifi er of phallicized whiteness.

The vampire is thus neither subject nor Other. The vampire, that crosser of

boundaries extraordinaire, is forever haunting because he is forever beyond the
grasps of straight white male subjectivity. The vampire infects his blood, alters

Shannon Winnubst 9

his spirit and—damned most of all—exceeds his concepts. And in exceeding
them, he always carries the power to expose them, to expose them and their
anxieties—about blood, about boundaries, about kinship and purity and control,
about the racing of sex and the sexing of race.

The Other of the Other: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories

If we can fi nd ways to follow the vampire through his erotic acts of transubstan-
tiation, we may discover that these acts expose some of the fundamental knots
of race and sex—and racism and sexism—in our cultural symbolic.

Jewelle Gomez gives us such an opening in her vampire novel, The Gilda

Stories (1991). Unlike Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1975), who is neatly expelled from
the rational, virtuous, patriarchal world of Victorian England and thus, as Hol-
linger again writes, “in its role as evil Other, necessarily guarantees the presence
of the Good” (1997, 202), Gomez’s protagonist turns the structures of racism,
sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism in classical vampire narratives against
themselves. Referring to her vampire novel as a recasting of (straight white male)
mythology, Gomez’s protagonist is not a white European aristocrat, but a black
lesbian descendent of African-American slaves. Gilda is, in every way possible,
the opposite of Stoker’s Count, which is the vampire-norm.

10

And in being the

opposite of the desired opposite, the Other of the Other, Gilda opens the volatile
powers of the vampire and disrupts the desired return to the Same.

As Gomez describes her own text, “the vampire functions . . . as a fl oat-

ing category of all things ‘alien’ to the normative forces of offi cial cultural
discourses” (Gomez 1997, 154). The vampires in Gilda’s family range from her
Native American lover/mother/sister to her African American lover/brother to
the pair of white male lovers who are her best friends and brothers. (The only
white straight male in the novel is a deranged, obsessive stalker who should have
never been brought into the family—a nice inversion of the usual narrative traps
of homophobic Hollywood.) For Gomez, the vampire “fl oats,” assuming many
different embodiments. It is slippery. It cannot be neatly reined in, categorized
as the Other and expelled in an act that reinstalls the power of the Same. In
enacting their sensual, erotic bloodsucking rituals, Gilda and her family expose
what is already at play across the genre of vampire stories and vampire readers:
they expose the dynamics of sensuality and power fundamental to the fi gure
of the vampire—and invert them.

11

In classic vampire stories (and, particularly, fi lms), the moment of transub-

stantiation, the bloodsucking ritual that will either kill the victim or initiate
him/her into the realm of the undead, often violates—and enacts—one of the
greatest taboos of this straight white male mythology: the male vampire, with
greedy lust in his eyes, leans in to take his victim’s blood, a thinly veiled act of
penetration.

12

In the cinematic telling of this moment, the camera often shifts

10 Hypatia

to the perspective of the victim so that the viewer becomes the victim being
taken and penetrated by these male, lustful eyes. For women, this is no new
story; for men viewing these fi lms, this enacts a cinematic climax par excellence.
Filled with the fear and exhilaration that only a homoerotic act can bring in
this straight white male symbolic, it is a moment of climactic truth.

The electrifying fear of this moment is one of its defi ning features. It is not a

simple fear, not a simple helplessness in the face of something abhorrent. To the
contrary, this highly charged fear is fi lled with erotic tension that only titillating
desire can bring. We love vampire stories, we long for them; moreover, in my
merely anecdotal experience, white straight males particularly hunger for and
devour them with particular relish.

13

Beckoning these creatures of the undead

to “scare” us, what is it in this fear that draws us towards it?

My opening dream sequence may give us some helpful clues here. The myth

of the black male rapist also feeds on fear—it both feeds on fear and, in turn,
feeds it. But the benefi ciary of this fear is conspicuously absent from the scene.
As many feminist and antiracist theorists and historians have exposed, it is
the white straight male who benefi ts from demonizing black men and thereby
further controlling white women by posing as their protectors (preferably while
wearing crucifi xes).

14

If forced to choose (or to admit), the white straight male

identifi es with the rapist in this violent scene—he identifi es with the body who
instills fear in the white female and thereby controls her. But, as ever, he is
absent from the—necessarily corporeal—scene. He is behind the scene, working
the projector. (He is the one dreaming the dream that we all must then live out.)
Literally, he has projected this violent control and diet of nutritional fear onto
the black male body, disavowing yet again that he has any such urges—or any
such body. He not only disavows responsibility, but uses this fear to legitimate
violence against these (allegedly, apparently) threatening black male bodies.
He thereby avoids the threats and violences that emerge from such demonizing:
the white male body—or, to bring race and religion together explicitly—the
white male Protestant body—is never the body that is lynched.

15

What can this tell us about the cultural fascination with classic vampire

stories? I suggest that for the white straight male viewer/reader, these stories
operate differently than for the rest of us. For the rest of us, when the vampire
is male as in classic vampire narratives, we are constantly placed in the role of
victim, identifying easily with the victim taken by the vampiric powers. But
for the white straight male, identifi cation with the victim or the vampire may
not be so simple. He may, although most likely not consciously, identify with
both. Or, to put it differently, he may identify with the fear itself—the titilla-
tion of the climactic scene may be in identifying as both the penetrator and
the penetrated, a homoerotic identifi cation par excellence.

In playing out the mise-en-scène of vampiric fantasies, this straight white

male symbolic plays with fi re. As Sue-Ellen Case elaborates so well, bringing

Shannon Winnubst 11

this queer desire to life may unleash all the “unnatural” powers that the queer
has historically constituted. As she writes, tempting same-sex desire into the
scene of representation may drive a stake into the heart of this straight white
male ontology, shifting “the ground of being itself, thus challenging the Platonic
parameters of Being—the borders of life and death” (1991, 3). Feeding on the
fear itself, the white straight male attempts to transcend this bloody mess by
neatly projecting it across all other bodies. He strives to protect his self as the
body-in-control. But the cracks are already seeping open in his desire.

It is here that Gomez interrupts the classic vampire narrative and ushers

in new ontologies. If the (good) vampire is never a straight white male, then
identifi cation with the “penetrator” for the white straight male is rather troubled.
For example, if the vampire is a black lesbian, the white male symbolic resists
identifi cation with her. Suddenly, this is no ordinary vampire story, which in
turn exposes the subtle mechanisms of identifi cation at play in classic vampire
narratives. This crack in the straight white male mythology allows other ques-
tions to surface: what is this fear that beckons really about? And, following out
the more explicit connections to the sibling myth of the black male rapist, what
fear is being enacted and exploited there? If it is the case that the white straight
male body is pulling the strings on both of these scenes, what fears of the Other
drive it? What fears of blackness? Of femininity? Of homoeroticism? Of the body
and all its messy desires? And, fi nally, who is the real monster here?

16

Interrupting the classic identifi cation schemas, Gilda and her family open

other possibilities for this powerful nexus of Eros and Thanatos. While the
straight white male body is troubled in his habitual identifi cation with the
vampires, other bodies fi nd themselves amidst unusual opportunities. As listed
above, multiple subject-positions—namely, non-white, non-male and/or non-
straight bodies—assume vampiric powers here. But, fi ttingly, those powers are
themselves quite different.

Rather than feeding on fear, Gilda and her family detest the act of killing

as a part of their feeding rituals. They condemn the taking of a mortal’s life
in replenishing their own lifesource. (If they must kill, they are obligated to
memorize the face of the dead, ushering him/her into the realm of the undead
in some form.) Rather than inciting fear, this family of vampires always leaves a
small gift with their “victims.” Most often, they enter the psyche of the victim,
calm any fears that might reside there and replace these fears with dreams,
aspirations, new resolves for greater love and life. These vampires feed on—and
feed—hope, not fear. And, in sucking the blood from mortal’s bodies (an act
that the mortal is never conscious of), they inspire greater hope and resolve
for love in the world.

It is a simple tale, as all vampire stores appear to be. But the cracks and inver-

sions that it works upon a classic genre of narrative in our cultural symbolic
invoke different thinkings and imaginings. Gilda always refers to her close

12 Hypatia

network of fellow vampires as her “family.” And, in opening the possibilities
for others to identify with them, Gomez thereby opens us up to the differences
in kinship systems that the vampire, and particularly these vampires, beckon
us toward.

Mixed Race, Eternal Queers—Strange Fruit

As several white straight male vampire enthusiasts have informed me, there
really is no “origin story” to the genre of vampire narratives.

17

And that lack of

a clear beginning, which haunts this white straight male symbolic (as Irigaray
shows so deftly in Speculum [1985a]) already sets questions of kinship and purity,
and the blood and race and sex that come in their wake, into different patterns.
Gilda’s family is no ordinary family, as Gomez traces out the exciting shifts in
our concepts of kinship that these vampire narratives invoke.

Perhaps exemplary among these shifts is the way that vampires reproduce

themselves. Although a highly erotic act, reproduction does not occur through
any act that we would traditionally signify as sexual. Vampires reproduce them-
selves through the sharing of their blood, through the spilling of the gooey,
messy fl uids that course through our bodies. Whether a mutual sharing, as in
Gomez’s text, or an infecting of another’s blood without their consent, as in
classic vampire narratives, blood is the sole vehicle for the transfer of eternal
life. Transferring immortality through fl uids, this bizarre reproduction without
sex takes us out of that sacred metaphysics of solids that is so dear to this west-
ern, white straight male symbolic. Indeed, there is nothing “solid,” no singular
phallic actor, at play here at all. Reproduction without a phallus? . . . Something
“unnatural” is going on here.

Occurring in a scene drenched with homoeroticism, the climactic act does

not follow the traditional prescriptions of homosexuality. Contrary to the infer-
tility that has banished homosexual acts from the realm of the natural and
damned them from the realm of the (morally) living, the vampiric moment of
transubstantiation ushers in a radical shift in the western ontology of straight
white reproduction (aka “love”

18

). As Case unravels the workings of the queer

here, “queer desire punctures the life/death and generative/destructive bipo-
larities that enclose the heterosexist notion of being” (1991, 4).

19

Giving life to

“unnatural” desires, the vampire—in a quintessentially subliminal homoerotic
act in traditional narratives and often an explicitly homoerotic act in Gomez’s
stories—performs one of the straight white male symbolic’s greatest fears:
immortality has nothing to do with the phallus.

Moreover, it has nothing to do with whiteness or the purity on which it

feeds. Inverting the racist one-drop rule, whereby the sexual act must be vigi-
lantly protected as a purely white act, Gomez locates the gift of immortality in
the intentional mixing of blood. And who better to do this than a descendant

Shannon Winnubst 13

of African-American slaves, whose blood, thanks to the violences of their
white owners, seems always already to have been mixed? Often in interracial
exchanges, Gilda and her family carefully mix their blood with those whom they
love and with whom they wish to live eternally. Playfully mimicking traditional
narratives of motherhood, not penetration, the vampire and the vampire-to-be
suck at a delicate slash just below the breast of her/his beloved, giving birth
to immortality through a deliberate mixing of blood and blurring of “race.” By
the end of the story, tellingly 2050, this realm of the eternally undead, fi lled
with mixed-race queers, has become the singular savior for a technologically
induced apocalypse.

No phallus, no purity, no death—strange kinships, strange loves. Strange

fruit.

20

Transforming Concepts of Kinship

Running with these transformed and transformative dynamics of vampiric kin-
ship, Haraway offers ways around apocalyptic prophesies of twenty-fi rst century
technoscience. She develops these vampiric kinship dynamics as dynamics of
affections and affi nities, not of substance (1997, 214–16). No longer a matter
of nature or biology, kinship becomes a particular mode of reading the many
fl owing affections, affi nities, connections, and intensities that circulate amidst
bodies in the world. Removing us from romanticism’s last vestiges in the neo-
Darwinian valorizing of organic bonds (whether read through hematology or
genetics)

21

towards the technoscientifi c, cyborg connections of affi nities, intensi-

ties, and energies, Haraway asks us to follow the vampire through its mazes of
connections and disconnections—not just to continue to indulge it in some
unexamined voyeuristic fantasy. Just as Gomez beckons us, so too Haraway asks
us—all of us, including we who are not straight white males—to identify with
the vampire, not with the victims. She beckons us to follow her down different
lines and regions of “kinship”—lines opened already in our cultural fascina-
tion with vampires and further accentuated and fractured in the twenty-fi rst
century of technoscience.

Begging us to pay attention to kinship, Haraway asks, in the world of early

twenty-fi rst century technoscience, “Who are my kin in this odd world of prom-
ising monsters, vampires, surrogates, living tools, and aliens? How are natural
kinds identifi ed in the realms of technoscience? What kinds of crossings and
offspring count as legitimate and illegitimate, to whom and at what cost? Who
are my familiars, my siblings, and what kind of livable world are we trying to
build?” (1997, 52). In this world of twenty-fi rst century technoscience,

22

where

computers and chips and screens and wires and databases and units of infor-
mation forge the bases—or, at least, the conditions of possibility—of many of
our relations, the traditional criterion of blood to determine who is “related”

14 Hypatia

to whom no longer functions. As vampires teach us, blood is not what we,
trapped in a metaphysics of solids, might like to think it is. No longer can we
draw neat boundaries between what is organic and not organic, what is natural
and unnatural, what resembles us and what does not resemble us.

But rather than read this as apocalyptic, Haraway encourages us to see the

liberatory effects here. Leaving behind the natural/unnatural dichotomy, and
all of the (sexual, racial, religious, national) violences it has brought upon us,
can we not at last engage kinship, as Haraway encourages, as “a technology
for producing the material and semiotic effect of natural relationship, of shared
kind” (1997, 53; italics added)? Can we not at last rethink relation as a set of
open-ended affections, affi nities, and possibilities, rather than a predetermined,
closed set of (often incompatible) organic bonds?

In echoes of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), Haraway’s vampiric

retooling of kinship categories and concepts turns things upside down just a bit.
No longer is kinship—that is, that joining of race and sex in the reproduction of
a pure, unsullied, white, straight bloodline—a matter of discovering pre-made,
biological, organic identities. Rather, in good late-twentieth-century form, iden-
tity itself is turned inside out. Identity is no longer the precious stronghold of
all things private, internal, “natural,” and sacred; rather, it is the fabrication of
nodes of connection via affi nities, affections, tastes, distastes, labors, pleasures,
technical wirings, attractions, repulsions, and chemical responses. Identity
changes and shifts and cracks open as these dynamics change and shift and
crack open. Stability or fi xity becomes a matter of effects—historical, material,
semiotic, chemical, etc.

23

Radically open-ended, radically temporary.

Virtually all boundaries are crossed here—human/non-human, organic/

inorganic, biological/chemical, chemical/mechanical and, yes, alive/undead,
male/female, white/black, straight/queer. In Haraway’s rendering of the world
of technoscience, a world that echoes the worlds of vampires, “any interesting
being, . . . such as textbook, molecule, equation, mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus,
technician, agitator, or scientist, can—and often should—be teased open to
show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic,
and textual threads that make up its tissues” (1997, 68). In teasing open such
threads, the structures and slippery dynamics of both racism and sexism often
surface. That which appeared as solid and unmovable—even as “natural”and
eternal—may now appear as a radically temporary and contingent effect, sedi-
mented by repetition into a pattern that appeared as solid. To be more explicit,
race, which continues to haunt us in its biological appearances and patterns
despite all our talk of social construction,

24

may fi nally begin to appear as the

subtle effect of investments in nineteenth-century concepts of the organic, the
“natural,” the rational, the unmovable, and eternally true. Investments by that
absent body, the body-in-control, the straight white male body. But investments
that we need not continue to treat as unmovable or eternal.

Shannon Winnubst 15

These multiple vectors of kinship that cross so many precious boundaries are

already circulating in our bodies, our bodies that are far from purely organic, in
the early twenty-fi rst century. And the dramas of relations and kin no longer
move down the linear paths of identities and reproductions and weighty mor-
alistic questions about who shall marry whom. They no longer circulate around
“family values”—the family itself, that bastion protecting racism, sexism and
heterosexism, has been retooled.

Spilling Blood

I return us again to my opening dream sequence—the nightmare of the black
rapist. As a nightmare, it has no pattern in waking life to which it might attach
itself: this perverse “fantasy” has no foothold in any historical or physical reality.
Rather, it is a fantasy of the straight white male body, that same straight white
male body that raped black slaves in the kitchen, mixing with their blood as
their white wives slept in their conjugal bed upstairs, that same straight white
male body that has raped black and white and brown and red “bodies”—both
physically and psychically—for years and years and years. It is a fantasy that
both protects and constitutes this reality, the reality of the violent and violating
straight white male body. It protects it from exposure, allowing it to appear as
a detached, pure, rational body-in-control—a “subject.”

But vampires haunt this body, this white phallic symbolic that saturates our

cultural scenes. We see it in our continuing fear of infected blood. Whether
through laws and morés of miscegenation or the raced and sexed cultural anxi-
eties around AIDS, the spilling and mixing of fl uids continues to be one of our
culture’s greatest fears—projected time and time again all over the racialized
and sexualized body of the Other. Perhaps we should follow the retooling of
identity opened by these nineteenth-century vampiric festivals of blood. Perhaps
we should pick at and irritate the anxieties that linger in their narratives. We
need not read these anxieties as some deep and abiding structure intrinsic to
white rational identity. We could, rather, read them as the word “projection”
suggests—as so many intensities, attractions, repulsions, disavowals, and denials
projected across the surfaces of young girls’ bodies, of black male bodies, of any
body other than that body in which the anxiety originates. Projecting outward
from the hollowness at the core of whiteness, at the core of maleness—a holo-
gram of fear, posing as an unmoving substance of control.

Rereading these myths of blood and purity with Gomez and Haraway, we

might fi nd more and more tools to undo and re-do the myths of kinship, the
myths of race and sex, the myths of purity and control that continue to circulate
through our cultural bodies. We might fi nd more tools to read the slippery ways
that both race and sex continue to be signifi ed as “biological,” immediately
erasing the birthing power of signifi cation—and concealing the whiteness and

16 Hypatia

maleness and straightness that such signifying practices benefi t. We might fi nd
ways to live out the practices that Gomez and Haraway envision and long for.
To give Haraway the fi nal words here, “I believe that there will be no racial or
sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through
something more and less than kinship. I think I am on the side of the vampires,
or at least some of them” (1997, 265).

Notes

I am grateful to many voices for the writing of this essay. First of all, I thank Cynthia Wil-
lett for inviting me to join her panel at the 2000 International Association of Philosophy
and Literature (IAPL) and her openness to this crazy topic. Secondly, I thank my many
astute readers for questions, additions, and corrections: Walt Herbert, Kathleen Juhl,
Tom Blackburn, and the anonymous reviewers of Hypatia. And, fi nally, I am grateful
for many lively conversations, wonderful ideas, and unending vampiric entertainment
with Eric Selbin and Jennifer Suchland throughout the writing of this essay.

1. I am grateful to one of my anonymous reviewers at Hypatia for insisting

that I clarify the idealized status of my characterization of whiteness, maleness, and
heterosexuality in this essay. I am diagnosing a cultural symbolic, which I refer to as
a phallicized whiteness. Following this psychoanalytic language, I am attempting to
diagnose whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality in their idealized state, a state that
I argue structures our lived experiences of them in the United States. It follows that no
living white straight man embodies this ideal: they either attempt to embody it but fail
and only approach it asymptotically, which implies there is no “pure” racist or sexist or
homophobe; or they counteract it, which implies there are possibly feminist and anti-
racist and antiheterosexist white straight men. Either way, the philosophical question
at stake here is the question of history for idealized systems, whether Immanuel Kant’s
(1963, 1996) or Jacques Lacan’s (1977), and the idealized political subject positions that
they spawn—for example, phallicized whiteness, as we fi nd in the contemporary U.S.

2. The language of whiteness/non-whiteness problematically reinforces the (phal-

lic) binary wherein whiteness remains the centralized term that structures all signifi -
cations and relations. I thus prefer to use the terms “raced/white” to attempt both to
disrupt this binary and to mark the centralized, unmarked term, “whiteness.”

3. Homi Bhabha (1990) offers one of many possible avenues away from this

scene of self-imprisonment and other-directed violence in his discussion of the ways that
positions of “otherness” can resignify their “otherness” so that it will be unrecognizable
to the law of the Same. Luce Irigaray (see 1993 and 1996) and her call for two sexed
subjects offers another.

4. As I will develop, whiteness and maleness are both rich concepts that can

be signifi ed in many ways—for example, maleness also works through heterosexuality
and whiteness can be signifi ed through both race and religion.

5. Contemporary U.S. culture is fi lled with easy, recent examples of this. I cite

only two: 1) Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty (Dream Works, 1999), a fi lm
that enjoyed huge popularity in the United States, is tormented by his desire for the

Shannon Winnubst 17

young girl but ultimately transcends it and thus emerges as the (tragic?) hero; and 2)
the infamous sex scandals of Bill Clinton’s presidency, which were largely displaced
onto the shoulders of Monica Lewinsky. Simple stereotypes also convey this sense of
disembodiment: the epithets against women for sexual promiscuity are too numerous
to list; there are comparatively few for men, who are rarely judged for promiscuity or for
any of its effects. (If judged, men are rarely judged on the basis of their maleness; judg-
ments against men as “lechers” are made on the basis of their age, not their maleness.)
I appreciate the comments of Walt Herbert to push me to elaborate this point.

6. See Grosz 1989, “Sexed Bodies” and Irigaray 1985b, “Fluids of Mechanics.”
7. It is particularly telling here to note that blood does not signify this frighten-

ing threat to the self in all cultures. For example, several ancient cultures, such as the
Incas, the Aztecs, and the Egyptians, viewed blood as a purifying substance and the
essence of life. I am grateful to Eric Selbin for bringing this historical connection to
my attention.

8. Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1971) draws easily on these popularized ideologies to

construct Jews as a threat to the national body because of their intrinsic links to pros-
titutes and the spread of syphilis—that is, their (alleged) links to the polluting of the
national blood. For a fuller discussion of this, see Sander L. Gilman (1990, 163–64).

9. As this essay should clarify, the fi gure of the vampire in traditional narratives

must be male. Moreover, as Nina Auerbach tells us, female vampires do not emerge in
Victorian literature until the 1890s and, in fi lm, do not really emerge until the 1970s,
tellingly along with the genre of “Blacula” (1995, 3–6).

10. As Gomez tells us in “Recasting Mythology,” prior to the 1990s people of color

and lesbians were rarely in vampire fi ction or movies (1997, 88).

11. As Gomez further explains her choice of genre, “the vampire fi gure’s identifi ca-

tion with both sensuality and power proved to be an ideal way to re-examine a black
lesbian feminist relationship to those two issues which are at the center of our liberation”
(1997, 92).

12. I am grateful to Tom Blackburn for bringing this analogy with penetration to

my attention.

13. The enthusiastic response among white straight men to work on vampires has

been both amusing and instructive. Beginning at the IAPL, where I gave an initial
version of this paper, and continuing throughout the writing of this essay, several men
have approached me to share their favorite vampire details: early movies involving
the sucking of blood from the toes; adolescent connections of vampires to “necking”;
bizarre details about the kinds and sizes of coffi ns used; and many others. They all
recalled vampire stories with amazingly vivid detail; sadly, none of them had read The
Gilda Stories. Moreover, as Auerbach notes, “The most sophisticated and best-known
experts on American popular horror insist that it is and always has been a boy’s game”
(1995, 3). See her citations for further bibliographic references. (I thank Kathleen Juhl
for pushing me to consider these anecdotal experiences further.)

14. bell hooks offers one of the most insightful and incisive formulations of this

argument in “Refl ections on Race and Sex” (1990).

15. As chronicled by Michael Newton and Judy Ann Newton in Racial and Reli-

gious Violence in America: A Chronology, the vast majority of lynchings in the United
States between 1882 (the fi rst year records were kept) and 1947 were performed against

18 Hypatia

black bodies by white—specifi cally, Protestant—bodies (see 1991, 688–705). Other
racial/ethnic bodies also recorded as lynched by white bodies include Chinese, (North
American) Indians, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and Mormons. The white male Protestant
body is never recorded as having been lynched.

16. Gomez herself asks this question, “Who are the real monsters, then? Racists,

rapists and pimps . . . the Hunters” (Gomez 1997, 166–67).

17. As Auerbach again tells us, “There is no such creature as ‘The Vampire’; there

are only vampires” (1995, 5).

18. The interruptions in traditional romance narratives and in Christian notions

of love/agape are certainly other provocative cracks in the straight white male symbolic
that could be traced out. To begin, I suggest that Georges Bataille’s notions of excess
(see 1985 and 1989) could illuminate the ways that a metaphysics of lack—and, yes,
neediness—haunt this white straight male symbolic.

19. Case (1991) develops this argument by explaining how “the right to life was

a slogan not only for the unborn, but for those whose sexual practices could produce
them. In contrast, homosexual sex was mandated as sterile—an unlive practice that
was consequently unnatural, or queer, and, as that which was unlive, without the right
to life” (1991, 4).

20. “Strange Fruit,” the haunting song about lynching fi rst performed in 1939 by

Billie Holiday, brought out racial and sexual tensions in audiences and provoked anti-
racist political movements for many. As an intriguing performance of the mixings of
race and sex, the authorship of the song has often been contested and omitted: it was
written by a Jew, Abe Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name “Lewis Allan.” For a
fascinating genealogy of this song, its many incarnations, performances, and impacts,
see David Margolick (2000).

21. As Haraway (1997) notes, the OED credits the origins of “miscengenation” to the

United States in 1864–-the beginning of romanticism and of postbellum racism, often
supported by neo-Darwinian science, in the States (see Haraway 1997, 314, n.31).

22. Here I must reemphasize that I am speaking specifi cally from a perspective within

the United States, where technoscience, despite our direct or indirect participation in
it, has saturated all our lives. Its retooling of kinship in this cultural symbolic, and the
violences around race and sex that come in its wake, is my focus here.

23. I follow one of my favorite passages from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1989)

here. Musing on the embarrassed and exasperated “etc.” that often occurs at the end
of a list of predicates to identity (for example, “race, sex, gender, class, nationality,
able-bodiedness, etc.”), Butler argues that “this illimitable et cetera . . . offers itself as
a new departure for feminist political theorizing” (1989, 143). Gomez’s and Haraway’s
vampires usher us into the exciting feminist possibilities of the illimitable. For further
philosophical undertakings of the possibility of the limitless, see also Bataille (1985 and
particularly 1989).

Shannon Winnubst 19

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