Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / U. Melissa Anyiwo -- Introduction / Amanda Hobson -- Dark Seductress / Amanda Hobson -- Hybrid Heroines and the Naturalization of Women’s Violence in Urban Fantasy Fiction / Kristina Deffenbacher -- Men That Suck / Kristina Durocher -- “There Will Never Be More Than Two of Us” / Amanda Firestone -- Sex, Blood, and Death / Benita Blessing -- Beautifully Broken / U. Melissa Anyiwo -- A Feminist Bloodletting / Ryan D. Fong -- Vampiras and Vampiresas / Lisa A. Nevárez -- “You Were Such a Good Girl When You Were Human” / Rhonda Nicol -- Performative Femininity and Female Invalidism in John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel / Ana G. Gal -- The Female Vampire in Popular Culture / U. Melissa Anyiwo -- About the Contributors / Patricia Leavy.

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Gender in the Vampire Narrative addresses issues of masculinity and femininity, unpacking cultural norms of gender. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender in the vampire narrative traverse a large scope of expectations and tropes. The text offers classroom ready original essays that outline contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms using the lens of the vampire in order to examine the ways those roles are undone and reinforced through popular culture through a specific emphasis on cultural fears and anxieties about gender roles. The essays explore the presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources including novels, films, graphic novels and more, focusing on wildly popular examples, such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and Twilight , and also lesser known works, for instance, Byzantium and The Blood of the Vampire . The authors work to unravel the ties that bind gender to the body and the sociocultural institutions that shape our views of gendered norms and invite students of all levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender.