Summary: Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Laura Jane Maher <a name="laura-jane-maher" id="laura-jane-maher"><strong>Having it both ways: the queering of heteronormative romance</strong></a> The simultaneous desire for and repugnance with Otherness serves to inform its status as erotic. Within the realm of supernatural fictions, Vampires encapsulate this heightened sexualisation by traversing the dangerous in-betweens of twilight and dawn, the undead and the demonic-human. The Vampire character provides a human reader with an identifiable and containable image of desire corporealised. However in doing so these characters actively defy the conventions of heteronormativity by flouting the social constructs relating to gender as power and role descriptive. In this paper I will address the means by which vampire romances catering to a young adult readership interrogate the morality of queered sexuality and contrast this with adult romances which provide a queered space for erotic motif to develop without the need for ethical interrogation of sexuality within the narrative. Laura-Jane Maher is an Honours student with the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies at Monash University, having graduated from a combined bachelors’ degree in Law and Performing Arts in 2006. Her current research focuses on the story telling process within the legal system, both the stories told within the legal system and the means by which narrative tradition underwrites legal structure. She has previously presented “Passionate Trousers: An exploration of erotic motif and sexual pedagogy in the Harry Potter novels” (2007) and is beginning to see a theme here…
