Vampire Temptation: On The Transmutation Of Gender Consciousness In Vampire Popular Culture

As a virtual image, vampire was created from the western society for over two hundred years ago. Along with the fast changing times and mediums, literatures, films and other television works themed at vampire have experienced three climaxes, penetrating deeply into a world-wide cultural field as an unignorable popular cultural phenomenon. If gothic horror literature, which rises since the eighteen century can be seen as the source of vampire’s evil image, after the thoughts of feminism in the nineteen century as well as the American sexual liberation during the late twentieth century, vampire as a virtual image has been added profound, complicated human characteristics that can reflect multi-dimensional changes of this real society’s emotional needs, modern cultures, aesthetical requires, and etc.Theoretical perspectives about vampire works are being made up numerously, just as how many vampire poems, novels, paintings and films emerge every year. Especially in western academic field, researchers have made serious discussions in terms of this topic. However in the Chinese academia, researches about vampire works still step at a beginning stage. Because of their undead body, vampire becomes a creature that doom to be tortured between the real society and the gender-variant identity, no wonder why discussions about vampire "sex, gender, and lust" become a crucial part that should be clearly analyzed. This paper, accordingly, select gender awareness of the vampire popular culture as its main point and spread out as follows:Based on the summary of the used vampire popular culture researches, chapter one will puts more emphases on thesis purpose, research status among domestic and overseas academia will also be covered in this part. Chapter two uses text analysis to elaborate the three obvious gender-identity changing periods since the eighteen century when vampire was first created to the late twenty-first century, which respectively are: the male dominant perspective and the sense of the Victorian women, the female dominant perspective and the1970s American sexual liberation, as well as the trend of returning to old traditional gender roles and the new sexism. It is hard to deny that each role changing process of the vampire image reflects the real human life that hides behind the virtual vampire world. Chapter three will focuses on four critical topics that do not get covered above:vampire homosexuality/bisexuality, vampire resurrection and the fear of AIDS disease, abstinence and sensuality, and the reconsideration of feminism. The conclusion is that people actually expressed their real feelings, such as anger, sorrow, and perplexity via constructing various vampire images, and showed concerns toward people who come from socially marginalized backgrounds. In short, this thesis tries to dig the vampire’s inner contradictions, especially the living and mental conditions of ’the other’ through analyzing gender awareness among those vampire works.