Abstract
Laurell Hamilton in her “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series” portrays a large community of monstrous creatures that populate a violent near-future American landscape. A number of critics have already explored the forms in which Anita, the leading heroine, emerges in the 1990s literary scene as a strong figure who challenges traditional narratives of female subordination and alters predictable romantic entanglements with the male protagonists (Crawford 2014; Veldman-Genz 2011; Siegel 2007; Holland-Toll 2004). Moving beyond this approach that centres on Anita, this paper explores the forms in which the author designs her male companions and lovers. Her choice of lovers suggests that there are multiple desires at play inHamilton’s popular fiction in relation to masculinity in the context of a heterosexual erotica. Following a methodological approach of cultural studies (Saukko 2003), this study seeks to illustrate how conflicting desires, emblemized by her plurality of lovers, represent a literary effect of paradoxical yearnings at play in contemporary white, middle-class American women’s lives.
Highlights
Masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to each other, as a social demarcation and a cultural opposition
The purpose of my argument, I will focus primarily on the ways in which desirable and undesirable men are presented and represented in cultural artefacts; un/desirable types of masculinity could function simultaneously as reminders of what is socially acceptable or promote anti-hegemonic discourse on masculinity, picturing alternative forms of being a male (Horlacher 2011). According to this dialogical understanding of gender roles and expectations, an exploration of the ways in which Hamilton depicts her male characters will reveal how the character of Anita Blake came to life while at the same time disclosing how the series —through this heroine engaged with a variety of supernatural creatures—
Lets look at Richard —the werewolf— as an example of a literary man dangerously shifting towards a violent traditional form of white masculinity
Summary
Masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to each other, as a social demarcation and a cultural opposition. The purpose of my argument, I will focus primarily on the ways in which desirable and undesirable men are presented and represented in cultural artefacts; un/desirable types of masculinity could function simultaneously as reminders of what is (currently) socially acceptable or promote anti-hegemonic discourse on masculinity, picturing alternative forms of being a male (Horlacher 2011) According to this dialogical understanding of gender roles and expectations, an exploration of the ways in which Hamilton depicts her male characters will reveal how the character of Anita Blake came to life while at the same time disclosing how the series —through this heroine engaged with a variety of supernatural creatures—. These authors have sought to account for the challenges posed by feminism and socioeconomic mutations to a traditional ‘ideal man’ that had historically colonized the middle-class white imaginary in the Anglo-Saxon world and has dominated both women and men in real life
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