from Hypatia Volume 18, Number 3

Excerpt from

Vampires, Anxieties, and Dreams: Race and Sex in the Contemporary United States

Shannon Winnubst

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Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals--of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

"philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism"

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

There is a recurring dream, a nightmare, in the unconscious of these white United States. It is a dream of passion, violence, transgression, invasion--and all the perverse titillation that these bring. It is also a dream of power, violation and purity, of strict and rigid and obsessive fascination with boundaries. It frightens, infuriates, traps or protects us according to the bodies and subject positions we inhabit within this cultural symbolic. Stirring the worst anxieties of some of the nastiest parts of U.S. history, it is a nightmare rarely mentioned but always circulating, rarely noticed but always present. It boils and bubbles just below the surface, silently but perpetually, shaping that surface without itself surfacing.

The nightmare is the scene of the black rapist, particularly of the black male raping a white girl. It is the nightmare that convicts Bigger Thomas, the alleged black rapist of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), in our national psyche, and innocent black men in our federal and state penal systems. It is a nightmare in both its ideal and real senses--as a fantasy that structures and ensures the hegemony of a phallicized whiteness and as a horrifying material reality that, despite its ontological status as a fantasy, traps and kills black and brown men in the contemporary United States With no foothold in actual statistics on interracial violence or rape, it nonetheless functions as a myth that structures race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States. Both real and unreal, it is a collective nightmare that structures power in U.S. culture. But who is doing the dreaming?

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