Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Bite Me: Twilight Stakes Feminism, Lauren Rocha

Undergraduate Review

In my Honors Thesis, Things That Go Bump in the Night: Vampires and Feminism, I develop a feminist critique of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008). I use Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), Sheridan LeFanu’s novella Carmilla (1872), and Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) in order to highlight Twilight’s domestication of female identity against these other vampire texts. I argue that throughout these vampire works there is a shift in the representation of vampires towards a more domesticated, or self-controlled, vampire that is seen in Twilight. This domesticity not only applies to vampires, however, as …