Welcome, children of the night, to a particularly shameless spooky special all about an eternally queer-coded fan favourite: the vampire. RJ Wade and Sarah Prescott join me to speak about bookish bloodsuckers, raunchy revenants, and sapphic succubi. The dramatic reading of a yet unperformed Carmilla play had me at the very edge of my seat and I also learned a lot about both the cultural and the literary history of vampirism.   References: Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/1085/quite-shameless-cultural-reflections-on-the-vampire  RJ Wade’s An Exhibition History of Victorian Leeds (Liverpool UP, 2023) https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802078541 University of Leeds Cultural Collections Bram Stoker’s Dracula Animated Activism: Women Empowered https://library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event/1900/galleries/844/animated-activism-women-empowered Hamilton Deane’s Dracula (1924) Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) The Dark Blue Byron Dracula Society https://www.thedraculasociety.org.uk/ Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) Dora Mary Patrick Quincey Morris  Van Helsing Stage@Leeds https://stage.leeds.ac.uk/ Christopher Craft’s “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (1984) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560 Chris Latham Revenant Wharram Percy Maurice Beresford Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Josephine Butler @lulgalleries C.E. McGill’s Our Hideous Progeny https://cemcgill.com/our-hideous-progeny/ BorrowBox Libby Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces The Bookish Type https://thebookishtype.co.uk/ Kit Heyam https://kitheyam.com/   Questions you should be able to respond to after listening: -      What might make a vampire queer? Which literary vampires do we speak about in the episode? -      When Sarah talks about a ‘pleasing terror’, what kind of experience is described and who is this phrase borrowed from? Have you ever felt a pleasing terror? -      How is the revenant figure similar to and different from the vampire? -      What does Wade say about the relevance of the medical humanities lens? Please look up the term medical humanities if you are not familiar. -      Do you have a favourite vampire? How queer-coded are they?

TikTok video by Queen of Swords Press

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