{"id":13306,"date":"2011-04-17T02:32:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T02:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13306"},"modified":"2015-03-20T00:36:34","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T00:36:34","slug":"true-blood-the-vampire-as-a-multiracial-critique-on-post-race-ideology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13306","title":{"rendered":"True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology"},"content":{"rendered":"

True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Dracula Studies
\n<\/a>Number 12 (2010)
\n19 pages<\/p>\n

Nicole Myoshi Rabin<\/a><\/strong>, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
\nEmerson College, Boston. Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.\u00a0 According to Celia R. Daileader<\/a>, in her Introduction to Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee<\/a><\/em>, \u201cBefore black men were lynched for alleged sex with white women, white women were burned alive for alleged sex with a devil described as black\u201d.\u00a0 Daileader calls attention to the historical relationship between blackness, sex, and evil that predates the literal transmission of this discourse into \u201crace relations.\u201d Over time this relationship has found its way into many racist fantasies, particularly those manifested within the stories of the horror genre\u2014including vampire tales.\u00a0 Although race has only begun to be theorized in relation to Dracula<\/em>, one of the most well known vampire novels published in 1897, there has been some important recent work theorizing the Count within Homi Bhabha\u2019s<\/a> category of the \u201cnot quite\/not white\u201d (Daileader 97).\u00a0 As John Allen Stevenson<\/a> notes, \u201cthe novel [Dracula<\/em>] insistently\u2014indeed, obsessively\u2014defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider\u201d (139).\u00a0 Dracula, the Romanian Count, is seen\u00a0in opposition to the rest of the British characters\u2014including the main object of his desire, Mina.\u00a0 The predatory sexual threat of Dracula is a common racist fantasy where racialized men exude \u201cpredatory sexual desire\u201d that \u201cendangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white [American] society\u201d (Hamako).\u00a0 In most instances, this threat to racial purity manifests itself in the fear of clear racial miscegenation and a necessary drive to eradicate the one attempting to perform this racial contamination\u2014the vampire.<\/p>\n

Over the past two years there has been a resurgence of vampire stories in U.S. popular culture. These new vampire stories conveyed on-screen \u2014True Blood<\/em>, The Vampire Diaries<\/em>, and Twilight<\/em>\u2014promote specific ideologies about race, class, and gender that are specific to our cultural moment. In \u201cColor Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?\u201d Charles A. Gallagher<\/a> states that: \u201csince the mid-1990s there has been a change in the way race, race relations, and racial hierarchy have been depicted in the mass media\u2026the media now provides Americans with an almost endless supply of overt and coded depictions of a multiracial, multicultural society that has finally transcended the problem of race\u201d (109).\u00a0 As examples of contemporary media, these new vampire shows also promote a society \u201cbeyond\u201d race; so, with the historical tradition between race and vampires, what happens when the victims of vampires\u2014in these new vampire tales\u2014are no longer racially homogenous?\u00a0 Can the vampire still be read as racially other?\u00a0 I argue that the vampire of these contemporary stories actually becomes a symbol of multiracial identity as it is seen within the multicultural discourse that pervades American popular consciousness.\u00a0 For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing specifically on issues of race and sexuality (only as they are concerned with racial purity) in the first season of HBO\u2019s series True Blood<\/em>\u2014encapsulated within the first two episodes, \u201cStrange Love\u201d and \u201cThe First Taste.\u201d\u00a0 While the series deals with a greater range of issues\u2014gay rights, American slavery, terrorism, war, religion, etc.\u2014these issues remain outside the scope of this particular paper.\u00a0 I hope that these issues will be theorized in subsequent work on the series, but for this paper I will have to limit my consideration to the ways in which these beginning episodes of True Blood<\/em> portrays a multicultural society on screen that undercuts the reality of still pervasive racist currents in our own society; how the show creates a multiracial identity that is at once feared and championed within the American society; and, how the show while depicting multiculturalism actually works to subtly critique this ideology…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>. (Rich Text Format)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology Journal of Dracula Studies Number 12 (2010) 19 pages Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.\u00a0 According to Celia R. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[184,1243,6056,6055,3726,3727],"class_list":["post-13306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-charles-a-gallagher","tag-charles-gallagher","tag-journal-of-dracula-studies","tag-nicole-m-rabin","tag-nicole-myoshi-rabin","tag-nicole-rabin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}