Postfeminism and Contemporary Vampire Romance: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television

ISBN-13: 9781350215689 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 288 str.

Lea Gerhards

Opis

In this book, Lea Gerhards traces connections between three recent vampire romance series; the Twilight film series (2008-2012), The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017) and True Blood (2008-2014), exploring their tremendous discursive and ideological power in order to understand the cultural politics of these extremely popular texts. She uses contemporary vampire romance to examine postfeminist ideologies and discuss gender, sexuality, subjectivity, agency and the body. Discussing a range of conflicting meanings contained in the narratives, Gerhards critically looks genre’s engagement with everyday sexism and violence against women, power relations in heterosexual relationships, sexual autonomy and pleasure, (self-) empowerment, and (self-) surveillance. She asks: Why are these genre texts so popular right now, what specific desires, issues and fears are addressed and negotiated by them, and what kinds of pleasures do they offer?

Spis treści

Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Introduction Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Contemporary Vampire Romance 1. More than a Backlash: The Contradictions of Postfeminist Culture 2. Paranormal Romance: A Quintessentially Postfeminist Genre? 3. The Politics of Looking: Female Protagonists between Subject and Object 4. Vampire Transformation as Makeover: The Making of Ideal Postfeminist Subjects 5. Fantasy Solutions to Postfeminist Culture: Vampire Heroes and Postfeminist Masculinity Conclusion: Paradoxical Pleasures Notes Bibliography Index