Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood ─ Bloodlines

Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood examines the promiscuous circulations of blood in science and philosophy, vampire novels, films and vampire communities to draw a vascular map of the symbolic meanings of blood and its association with questions of identity and the body. Stephanou seeks to explain present-day biotechnologies, global neoliberal biopolitics and capitalism, feminine disease and monstrosity, race, and vampirism by looking to the past and analysing how blood was constituted historically. By tracing the transformations of blood symbols and metaphors, as they bleed from early modernity into the complex arterial networks of global and corporate culture, it is possible to open new veins of signification in the otherwise exhausted and dry landscape of vampire scholarship.

Aspasia Stephanou recently completed her PhD at the University of Stirling, Scotland, where she was also a tutor. She is co-editor of Transgressions and Its Limits (with Matt Foley and Neil McRobert, 2012) and has published on race and the vampire, transgression and blood in contemporary performance art, globalisation and vampire communities, and Black Metal Theory in a range of international journals.