Show Notes
Welcome, children of the night, to a particularly shameless spooky special all about an eternally queer-coded fan favourite: the vampire. RJ Wade and Sarah Prescott join me to speak about bookish bloodsuckers, raunchy revenants, and sapphic succubi. The dramatic reading of a yet unperformed Carmilla play had me at the very edge of my seat and I also learned a lot about both the cultural and the literary history of vampirism.
References: Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/1085/quite-shameless-cultural-reflections-on-the-vampire RJ Wade’s An Exhibition History of Victorian Leeds (Liverpool UP, 2023) https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802078541 University of Leeds Cultural Collections Bram Stoker’s Dracula Animated Activism: Women Empowered https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/844/animated-activism-women-empowered Hamilton Deane’s Dracula (1924) Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) The Dark Blue Byron Dracula Society https://www.thedraculasociety.org.uk/ Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) Dora Mary Patrick Quincey Morris Van Helsing Stage@Leeds https://stage.leeds.ac.uk/ Christopher Craft’s “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (1984) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560 Chris Latham Revenant Wharram Percy Maurice Beresford Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Josephine Butler @lulgalleries C.E. McGill’s Our Hideous Progeny https://cemcgill.com/our-hideous-progeny/ BorrowBox Libby Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces The Bookish Type https://thebookishtype.co.uk/ Kit Heyam https://kitheyam.com/
Questions you should be able to respond to after listening: What might make a vampire queer? Which literary vampires do we speak about in the episode? When Sarah talks about a ‘pleasing terror’, what kind of experience is described and who is this phrase borrowed from? Have you ever felt a pleasing terror? How is the revenant figure similar to and different from the vampire? What does Wade say about the relevance of the medical humanities lens? Please look up the term medical humanities if you are not familiar. Do you have a favourite vampire? How queer-coded are they?
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