Ladies Of Desire/Fear:|bFantasy & The Politics Of Sapphic Vampires

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3422559

This thesis provides a feminist analysis of the “lesbian vampire films” as well as the titular figure of this subgenre. The lesbian vampire film rose to popularity in the 1970s and gave rise to much debate between feminist scholars who argued that the lesbian vampire was either a feminist figure or a misogynistic and homophobic representation through linking the production of these films to the rise of the second-wave feminist movement around the same time. The present analysis attempts to find a way out of this debate through utilizing the notion of “fantasy” based on Lacanian subjectivity and its relation to ideology as articulated in the texts of Slavoj Zizek. When the lesbian vampire is considered through the lens of ideological fantasy, the lesbian vampire films come to expose the contradictory nature of patriarchal ideology, and thus destabilize it, providing the possibility of a queer/ feminist revision of meaning against the intentions behind their production.