Female Vampire Research Articles

The Femme Fatale in Text and Image: Analyzing Gender, Power, and Representation in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Vampire” and Philip Burne-Jones’s Painting

This paper examines the connection between Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire” (1897) and Philip Burne-Jones’s painting of the same title, focusing on their portrayal of femininity and the interaction between text and image. Kipling’s poem, often viewed as a response to Burne-Jones’s depiction of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, presents a warning about the destructive allure of female beauty, highlighting themes of male disillusionment and betrayal. Burne-Jones’s painting emphasizes the femme fatale figure, portraying a sexually dominant woman overpowering a helpless man. Both works suggest that beauty conceals danger, leading to male ruin. Using Foucauldian and feminist frameworks, the paper critiques the politics of representation, arguing that the portrayal of women often reflects patriarchal anxieties, reducing them to passive objects in male-dominated visual culture. Critics like Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock are cited to challenge these depictions. The paper concludes that the female vampire theme reflects cultural fantasies rather than truths about femininity, contributing to ongoing discussions on how art and literature shape gender perceptions.

“The Subtle Craft of the Devil”: Misogynistic Conspiracy Theories and the Secret Society of Pregnancy Cravings in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Vampirism

This paper analyzes themes of male insecurities and distrust of the exclusive culture of female sexuality and reproduction in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Vampirism, one of the earliest psychologically sophisticated female vampires in Western literature. The doomed heroine, Aurelia, escapes a life of maternal abuse and sexual trauma by marrying the wealthy Count Hippolytus, but his attraction warps into suspicion when she becomes pregnant and loses her appetite for his food. Worried that losing her virginity has activated promiscuity inherited from her late mother, he begins following her and thinks he sees her conspiring with a coven of female ghouls who train her to satisfy her pregnancy cravings by feeding on a male corpse. Real or imagined, this vision confirms his suspicions and leads to their mutual destruction. In my analysis, I explore vampire literature’s early history, its place within Gothic literature, the prominent role of female vampires, their relationship to gender anxieties exacerbated by the Romantic Era’s subversive political movements, and the way in which Hoffmann’s cynical story operates as a misogynistic conspiracy theory aimed at the secret female space of reproduction, symbolized by Aurelia’s cannibalistic pregnancy cravings. As such, it contributes to the destructive folklore of social distrust.

Forbidden Aspect of Erotic Desire Embodied in the Figure of the Vampire in “Carmilla” and “Olalla”

During the Victorian period, there was a dichotomy for women. On the one hand, there was the image of an “Angel of the House”, who was basically the submissive wife within a strongly patriarchal system. On the other hand, women could also be portrayed as monsters/prostitute because they refused to fulfill the role of a perfect wife and preferred to have an uncontrollable sex desire. This research will focus on the analysis of women as “monsters” by using the nineteenth-century vampire stories “Olalla” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “Carmilla” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. These two works will provide an exploration into the forbidden or transgressive aspects of erotic desire embodied in the figure of the vampire, precisely, female vampire. Throughout this study, there are several transgressive elements depicted in the characters of Olalla andCarmilla. Firstly, those monsters are sexually empowered characters, Olalla and Carmilla posses a sex desire that should not be acceptable for a woman. Secondly, the short stories clearly establish a ‘role reversal’ in therelationships with their human partners, that is to say, the female vampires take the active role since their fangs are the elements of penetration (like a phallus) whereas their lovers take the passive role. And thirdly, the sexual orientation is considered transgressive, particularly, in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” that presents a homosexual relationship with a female friend, Laura.

Pontianak Trouble: Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film

Pontianak Trouble:Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film Rosalind Galt (bio) The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cinema: a female vampire who has died as a result of male violence or childbirth and who returns to haunt patriarchy. She first came to cinematic prominence in the late colonial studio cinema of Singapore. This article argues that the pontianak is a complexly expressive figure: a female vampire or ghost who troubles both normativities of gender and presiding narratives of postcolonial and global identity in Malaysia and Singapore. The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cultures and is featured in a number of films, but she does not easily travel the world in the manner of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ghosts. Instead, there's something stickily local about her, and in getting at the specifics of the pontianak, I want to think about how the popular mediates globality in this particular cultural context. Malaysia and Singapore as nations have been distinctively constituted in relation to the global flows of colonialism and capitalism, with highly racialized social structures, and folkloric horror films stage at once a desire for the local and the transnational circuits of its undoing. In the pontianak film, gender becomes the central term with which to negotiate what kinds of identity and social power are possible, and I argue that the pontianak disrupts both traditional and global forms of being. To begin, then, what is a pontianak? In Malay folklore, she is one of many hantu, or ghosts, and is a childbirth spirit. Walter Skeat, the British colonial civil servant who wrote the first major Anglophone account of Malay folklore, writes of [End Page 40] the spirits which are believed to attack both women and children at childbirth. . . . the Langsuir, which takes the form of an owl with long claws, which sits and hoots upon the roof-tree, the pontianak which is also a night-owl and is supposed to be the child of the langsuir. (325) Colonial anthropologists were not always entirely accurate, and the pontianak is more usually viewed as the spirit of a woman who dies in childbirth, rather than the child. Moreover, in transition from folk mythology to cinema, the pontianak has been revised: although she is sometimes still represented as an owl and can often be found in trees, she is more often represented as a beautiful woman with flowing black hair. Andrew Hock Soon Ng complains that characteristics such as fangs and rising from the grave are drawn from Western vampire stories (2009, 217), and we might equally link her to other international figures of female vampirism and undead vengeance, such as the Thai Mae Nak and the Indian churel. The pathways of these generic influences are complex, but as a distinctly Malay figure, the pontianak has become a mainstay of Malaysian popular cinema. We first see the pontianak in a series of hugely popular films in late colonial Singapore. Cathay Keris studio made five pontianak films: Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1957), Dendam Pontianak/Pontianak's Revenge (B. N. Rao, 1957), Sumpah Pontianak/Curse of the Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1958), Pontianak Kembali/Pontianak Returns (Ramon Estella, 1963), and Pontianak Gua Musang (B. N. Rao, 1964). In an effort to copy the success of the series, rival studio Shaw Brothers made their own series, with Anak Pontianak/Son of Pontianak (Ramon A. Estella, 1958), Gergasi (Dhiresh Ghosh, 1958), and Pusaka Pontianak/Pontianak Legacy (1965). After the studio system crashes in the wake of Malaysian and Singaporean independence, there were almost no pontianak films for decades. In 1975, an Australian filmmaker, Roger Sutton, made a low-budget film titled simply Pontianak in Singapore. Twenty-five years later, Djinn's Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak (2001) attempted a modern revision of the genre, more influenced by The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1998) than by Malay hantu films. The pontianak really returns in Malaysia after 2002, when the government relaxed censorship rules that had banned horror films and supernatural themes, and the second horror film to be made was Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam/Fragrant Night Vampire (Shuhaimi Baba, 2004). Since...

Senile Sexuality in Arabella Kenealy's "A Beautiful Vampire"

My article discusses the British doctor and eugenic feminist Arabella Kenealy’s fin-de-siècle story “A Beautiful Vampire” (1896) through the lens of gender and aging. Specifically, I examine the Victorian perception of female aging and menopause, read Kenealy’s eugenic feminist response to the issues, and see how her short story enables the elderly female vampire to justify her bodily agency in her fight against the conventional paradigm of the time, within which women are expected to age naturally and gracefully only into wives and mothers. I ultimately suggest that Kenealy’s depiction of the old lady vampire’s unnatural and ungraceful aging―or anti-aging―makes us rediscover the powerfulness of the elderly female sexuality, which is intrinsically non-reproductive and thus non-normative, and that her other literary works about female aging need to be further explored in this light.

Mouldy Matriarchs and Dangerous Daughters

Mouldy Matriarchs and Dangerous Daughters

Social foraging in vampire bats is predicted by long-term cooperative relationships.

Stable social bonds in group-living animals can provide greater access to food. A striking example is that female vampire bats often regurgitate blood to socially bonded kin and nonkin that failed in their nightly hunt. Food-sharing relationships form via preferred associations and social grooming within roosts. However, it remains unclear whether these cooperative relationships extend beyond the roost. To evaluate if long-term cooperative relationships in vampire bats play a role in foraging, we tested if foraging encounters measured by proximity sensors could be explained by wild roosting proximity, kinship, or rates of co-feeding, social grooming, and food sharing during 21 months in captivity. We assessed evidence for 6 hypothetical scenarios of social foraging, ranging from individual to collective hunting. We found that closely bonded female vampire bats departed their roost separately, but often reunited far outside the roost. Repeating foraging encounters were predicted by within-roost association and histories of cooperation in captivity, even when accounting for kinship. Foraging bats demonstrated both affiliative and competitive interactions with different social calls linked to each interaction type. We suggest that social foraging could have implications for social evolution if "local" within-roost cooperation and "global" outside-roost competition enhances fitness interdependence between frequent roostmates.

"Carmilla" fandom as a lesbian community of feeling

The fandom of the contemporary lesbian web series, Carmilla (2014–16), is an affective community built on a set of inclusions and exclusions. Carmilla, a 121-episode web series shot in vlog format, follows the relationship between a human girl and a female vampire, and it has an active online lesbian fandom. Affective bonds are created between Carmilla fans through various kinds of online fan practices, and these flows of affect are influenced by the race and location of fans.

Social dominance and cooperation in female vampire bats.

When group-living animals develop individualized social relationships, they often regulate cooperation and conflict through a dominance hierarchy. Female common vampire bats have been an experimental system for studying cooperative relationships, yet surprisingly little is known about female conflict. Here, we recorded the outcomes of 1023 competitive interactions over food provided ad libitum in a captive colony of 33 vampire bats (24 adult females and their young). We found a weakly linear dominance hierarchy using three common metrics (Landau's h’ measure of linearity, triangle transitivity and directional consistency). However, patterns of female dominance were less structured than in many other group-living mammals. Female social rank was not clearly predicted by body size, age, nor reproductive status, and competitive interactions were not correlated with kinship, grooming nor food sharing. We therefore found no evidence that females groomed or shared food up a hierarchy or that differences in rank explained asymmetries in grooming or food sharing. A possible explanation for such apparently egalitarian relationships among female vampire bats is the scale of competition. Female vampire bats that are frequent roostmates might not often directly compete for food in the wild.

Le mythe du vampire féminin dans Mademoiselle Christina

"The Myth of the Female Vampire in Miss Christina. Mythologist, novelist and religious historian, Mircea Eliade grants a considerable place to the Fantastic as a way of reclaiming the Sacred in a deeply desecrated modern world. In his short story Mademoiselle Christina, he features a female vampire embodying the archetype of the nymphomaniac and demonic woman who returns to haunt the Mosco house and who manages to seduce Egor, a young painter visiting the castle. The prose writer creates a dreamlike story, mixing dream and reality, the natural and the supernatural while propelling the reader into a strange and captivating scenario. In this sense, it would be interesting to first study the poetics of the fantastic tale as well as its different mechanisms which contribute to creating a feeling of disturbing strangeness, ""the unheimlich"". Then we will analyze the erotic dynamics of the female vampire as well as its various symbolisms in order to finally offer a hermeneutical and mythical-symbolic approach to the work, where the reader will be led to decrypt the symbols and signs of the Sacred, camouflaged in reality. Keywords: fantastic, vampire, sacred, profane, hermeneutics "

B is for Baempaieo: the rise of K-vampires

ABSTRACT This article discusses the construction of K-vampires in popular Korean television dramas, focusing on three series that feature central vampire characters: Vampire Prosecutor, a crime procedural running for two seasons in 2011 and 2012, its spin-off, Vampire Detective and a medical drama Blood. The main protagonists in these series are all simultaneously vampires and members of professions designed to help humans: a lawyer, a detective and a surgeon. Constructed as parallel to humans, the vampires are portrayed as free-willed individuals striving to overcome their condition. The article argues that the humanization of K-vampires can be seen as a hybridization strategy blending the characterization of the ‘reluctant’ vampires known from Western post-millennial fiction with some features of the Korean kumiho, a supernatural shape-shifting fox creature that desires to become human. The article also proposes to read the series in the Neo-Confucian context, particularly in relation to its social and gender norms. It argues that while the male vampires in the series function chiefly to deliver critique of Korean neoliberal society, with the heroes modelled on the virtuous seonbi scholars and the villains described as sociopathic capitalists, the female vampires are mostly portrayed as tragic heroines, vilified for their moral transgressions and redeemed through selfless sacrifice.

Edgar Allan Poe’da “Yeniden Canlandırmanın Korkunç Dramı”: Dişi Vampirlerde Anneyi Canlandırma

This paper aims to analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and poems from a psychoanalytic perspective. The Romantic writer’s short tragic life was governed by his Oedipus complex and a strong death drive as the result of his traumatic experiences at an early age. He witnessed his mother’s battle with tuberculosis, which was followed by her death. Throughout his entire life, he has searched for a mother figure. In his works, Poe revives his mother in his portrayals of female characters in the forms of vampires. These characters and all their experiences in his writings appear as uncanny reflections from his unconscious, which he had a strong grasp on long before Sigmund Freud researched and theorized these terms. Resulting from a strong death wish, Poe’s narrators, who are mere reflections of himself, create dark, tomb-like settings where they isolate themselves from reality or consciousness, focusing on the female vampire figures who they admire. However, these figures also horrify Poe as they are the embodiments of death itself. In creating these undead women, Poe expresses his strong desire to reunite with his dead mother and endeavors to uncover the link between life and death, a secret that the female holds. This research focuses on Poe’s short stories “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in addition to various of his poems.

Tracking sickness effects on social encounters via continuous proximity sensing in wild vampire bats

Abstract Sickness behaviors can slow the spread of pathogens across a social network. We conducted a field experiment to investigate how sickness behavior affects individual connectedness over time using a dynamic social network created from high-resolution proximity data. After capturing adult female vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) from a roost, we created “sick” bats by injecting a random half of bats with the immune-challenging substance, lipopolysaccharide, while the control group received saline injections. Over the next 3 days, we used proximity sensors to continuously track dyadic associations between 16 “sick” bats and 15 control bats under natural conditions. Compared to control bats, “sick” bats associated with fewer bats, spent less time near others, and were less socially connected to more well-connected individuals (sick bats had on average a lower degree, strength, and eigenvector centrality). High-resolution proximity data allow researchers to flexibly define network connections (association rates) based on how a particular pathogen is transmitted (e.g., contact duration of >1 vs. >60 min, contact proximity of <1 vs. <10 m). Therefore, we inspected how different ways of measuring association rates changed the observed effect of LPS. How researchers define association rates influences the magnitude and detectability of sickness effects on network centrality. When animals are sick, they often encounter fewer individuals. We tracked this unintentional “social distancing” effect hour-by-hour in a wild colony of vampire bats. Using bat-borne proximity sensors, we compared changes in the social network connectedness of immune-challenged “sick” bats versus “control” bats over time. “Sick” bats had fewer encounters with others and spent less time near others. Associations changed dramatically by time of day, and different measures of association influenced the sickness effect estimates.

Kuntilanak

Abstract Kuntilanak is an icon of pop culture well known in several nations in Southeast Asia. While the female vampire is the subject of horror films and novels, people in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, claim that the city was founded by evicting Kuntilanak, who inhabited the confluence of the Kapuas and Landak rivers before the city was built. This article examines narratives on Kuntilanak, comparing it with other spirit perceptions found among Dayak in West Kalimantan. It suggests that the horror of that terrifying ghost is the price people had to pay for conceptualizing nature in accordance with Islamic Malay modernity. Referring to Critical Theory approaches, it is argued that the hostility and horror of Kuntilanak are expressions of a specific mode of enlightenment in the widest sense of the term, that is, an effort to conceptualize nature in order to rule over it. Nature thus emerges in opposition to the civilized, Muslim societies (masyarakat madani) of Malay coastal towns.

Vampires and the Orient in Goethe's “Die Braut von Corinth”

In his poem “Die Braut von Corinth” (1797), Goethe introduces the figure of the vampire as an early agent of his concept of “Weltliteratur.” As such, his female vampire challenges critical assumptions of a cultural divide between Christian and “pagan” religions, vampire believers and non‐believers, and finally Western and Eastern literatures. Instead, Goethe's “Braut” offers herself as a specimen of literary and cultural hybridity in a textual format entertained by Goethe for its liminality and heterogeneity—that of the “Ballade.” As a genre of originality without origin, the “Ballade” features a, in Homi Bhabha's sense of the term, “traumatic” encounter with the unfathomable—the living dead, monstrous affection, and transcultural alterity—that can not be reconciled with one's own world view, but only endured. Once endured, however, the disparate starts to form alliances across boundaries that Goethe will later refer to as “Weltliteratur.”

Villains and Vixens: The Representation of Female Vampires in Videogames

Vampires populate our culture and have become a recurrent presence in fiction and the media. In all cases the inclusion of the vampire has given voice to “socio-culture issues faced in particular times and places; issues that may otherwise remain repressed” (Dillon and Lundberg 2017, 47). This socio-cultural subtext is complicated when the vampire is female, for she is now doubly othered by her gender. Her monstrosity is seen as twofold: as a vampire and as a transgressive woman. While many studies address female vampires in popular culture, their portrayal in videogames has been recurrently overlooked. Games potentially help shape gender attitudes in thousands of players; therefore, it is particularly relevant to examine the varied representations of these monstrous or othered female figures and to understand how they adhere to or challenge misogynistic readings of women and their bodies. In light of this, and interpreting videogames as a narrative medium, this article provides an analysis of significant vampiric videogames and discusses the female vampire in relation to violence against women and postfeminist agendas, following a narrative rather than ludology approach.

Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra R. Parker

Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra R. Parker

Vampire bats.

Gerald Wilkinson introduces the blood-drinking vampire bats.

Vampire Bats that Cooperate in the Lab Maintain Their Social Networks in the Wild.

Social bonds, maintained by mutual investments of time and energy, have greatly influenced the evolution of social cognition and cooperation in many species [e.g., 1-8]. However, there are two pitfalls regarding "social bonds" as an explanation for social structure and cooperation [1, 9-11]. First, studies often incorrectly assume that frequent association implies partner fidelity based on mutual social preference, but even seemingly complex nonrandom interaction networks can emerge solely from habitat or spatial structure [12-16]. Second, the false appearance of partner fidelity can result from stable options in the "partner market" [1, 9-11, 17]. For instance, individuals might preferentially groom the same partner, even if the decision depends entirely on the immediate costs and benefits rather than relationship history. Given these issues, a key challenge has been testing the extent to which social structure is driven by the intrinsic relationship history versus the extrinsic physical and social environment. If stable bonds exist, they should persist even if the individuals are moved to a dramatically different physical and social environment. We tested this prediction by tracking social relationships among common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) moved from the lab to the wild. We show that allogrooming and food sharing among female vampire bats induced in captivity over 22months predicted their assortativity and association rates when we subsequently tracked them in the wild with custom-made high-resolution proximity sensors. The persistence of many relationships across different physical and social environments suggests that social structure is caused by both extrinsic constraints and intrinsic partner fidelity.

The laugh of the pontianak: darkness and feminism in Malay folk horror

ABSTRACT The laughing woman represents a special kind of excess and cautionary reminder of social and moral decay. With her head cast back, the open laugh of a woman is disparaged as a sign of provocation, disorder, and immorality. In many instances a woman’s open and hearty laugh is “grotesque” regardless of the multiple genres of laughter. This essay has two main aims. First, to interpret the meaning of the laughter of the pontianak, the female vampire, in Malay-language horror film and folk culture. And second, to rehabilitate the grotesque femininity of the pontianak by foregrounding the significance of women’s laughter as feminist resistance. With reference to scenes from Malay-language horror cinema from three different eras, an argument is advanced that the darker shade of laughter can mobilize resistance. “Dark” laughter is not only gendered but also linguistic and behaves in a range of specific speech acts. Moreover, the dark laughter in popular representations of the pontianak is part of a repertoire of her sonic subjectivity that stages the collapse of desire and patriarchal order, opening up potentialities for feminist affective knowledge.