Summary: Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Odette Kelada <a name="odette-kelada" id="odette-kelada"><strong><em>Carmilla:</em> corporeal integrity and reviving romantic bodies</strong></a> This paper discusses the iconic lesbian vampire story of <em>Carmilla</em>, written in 1872 and explores how a positive reading of the text as paranormal romance may render it both an empowering and subversive queer romance narrative. While vampire mythology may be portrayed as horror, there is often a strong romantic narrative running in tandem with the terror. In classic gothic literature, the romance is often struck moreover between the romantic heroine and the 'monster'. This close positioning of the horror narrative and the romance narrative in the myth creates a provocative tension where the erotic potential of abject love and demonic seduction, gives voice to a generative and liberating space of desire and resistance. While in Carmilla, such potential may ultimately be contained in traditional frameworks, the reading of Carmilla as a ‘love story’, indicates the potency of reviving the romantic in subjugated bodies and transgressive sexualities. Odette Kelada has completed a PhD from Charles Sturt University on Australian women writers. She is currently working at Monash University as a Research Associate for Prof. Rachel Fensham on a three-year ARC Discovery grant project on ‘Transnational and cross-cultural choreographies’. She also teaches in various literature subjects at Monash and has taught and guest lectured in politics at Melbourne University. Her areas of interest include feminism, post-colonial theory, literature, critical whiteness studies and cultural history.
