Gender and Vampires Essays Sought

Gender in the Vampire Narrative: Seduced by the Night to be edited by Amanda Hobson hobson@ohio.edu and U. Melissa Anyiwo manyiwo@curry.edu seek proposals for this collection. They are due by  by Friday, October 4th 2013.

Vampires have become male romantic heroes, with tales often reproducing and reinforcing typical gender, class, and racial expectations.  Given that the vampire traditionally stood as a representation of our fears of gender and ethnicity why is it that vampires remain largely white, heterosexual, and male?  Where are the women in these tales?  From vamp to vixen to hapless victim to savior of the soul to vampire slayers, the construction of womanhood and gender is often an underlying and keenly powerful narrative within the vampire trope.

Gender in the Vampire Narrative, is under contract with Sense Publishers as part of their Race & Ethnicity Series, seeks classroom ready original essays from scholars with PhDs, which explicitly connect the vampire narrative to studies in gender and sexuality. The volume aims to emphasize the constructions of gender within the icon of the vampire and the manner in which these interpretations reify our images of human beings and the ways in which we identify and manufacture the gendered and sexualized Other. We hope to open doorways to discussions about Otherness at the college level, serving as an alternative way to explore marginality  through a framework that welcomes all students into the conversation.

Proposals (350-500 words) are due by Friday, October 25th 2013, with  first drafts (5,000 to 7,000 words)  be due Friday April 11, 2014 and final edits due Friday, July 31, 2014.