‘Race as Biology Is Fiction’: The Bad Blood of the Vampire

Abstract

While in vampire narratives the monstrous consumer was gendered, it was also defined in terms of race and ethnicity. If medical discourse has historically demonised certain nationalities with theories of degeneration and race, vampire tales have demonised the racial other as vampiric and all-consuming. In this chapter I am concerned with blood as a symbol of race and the ways vampirism, like foreign-ness and race, is believed to be something ingrained in the body, and which taxonomises bodies as human/animal and normal/abnormal. Nineteenth-century vampire narratives insist on the chromatics of skin and a ‘racial epidermal schema’¹ to define the monster. In twentieth-and twenty-first-century vampire stories, however, the ‘racial’ body is penetrated and made visible through a biopolitics that plunges deep into the soma to uncover and reshape the individual’s identity at the molecular level. If skin and blood were the primary referents of racial discourse, now racial difference is relocated and imprinted by new technologies deep into the recesses of the body. However, vampire narratives retain at their heart the blood for its rich symbolism. Its dangerous circulation underneath the skin is, like blackness and vampirism, hidden but threatening. With its capacity to spill outside the body and pollute white society’s categories, blood remains associated with race and the colour black.