Megan Lee L&S Arts & Humanities
I Hunger for Your Blood: Vampiric Cinema and the Liquidity of Pleasure
From the brooding Edward Cullen of the Twilight saga to the alluring Mary of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, vampires have long captivated the American imaginary. Their thirst for blood is often marked by their drooling mouths, associating their existence with the horrific, but also with insatiable desire. When we also map race onto the vampiric body, this further disrupts the ethics of pleasure, revealing anxieties and fantasies in the construction of the American sexual identity. Leaning on the disciplines of gender, race, and film studies, as well as concepts of racial capitalism and folklore, this project aims to cement the role vampires–and their spittal–serve within the American zeitgeist, utilizing vampiric films across various decades as the method of analysis. It will also reconsider why the sight of sexuality is contained within blood and spit, and why bodily fluids that sustain the human form are one of the most powerful communications of pleasure, sexuality, and desire. This project will ultimately consider why the most sexual thing about the American body is not the body itself, but rather, what is contained inside of it, asking why must American pleasure be liquidated.
Message To Sponsor
To the Adam Z. Rice Foundation, I can only say thank you a million times over for the opportunity to intellectualize and pursue this research topic. As I pursue this work, I can only hope to continue to honor Adam's legacy with the same love, care, and passion as all the other Rice scholars before me have done. American Studies has revealed to me the gift of limitless curiosity, and a gift that this foundation directly supports. For that, I am endlessly thankful!