This reminds me of how the pop culture perception of Dracula the book is that it's this torrid story of a decadent vampire going to London seducing and metaphorically fucking repressed maidens who crave an orgasm and liberty from their impotent husbands with sexy sexy biting as he cradles their white-clad bodies in his arms vs actually reading the book and seeing that This Is Not Quite True Actually. Along with the "the problematic elements in it render it of NO artistic merit and is thus IREEDEEMABLE MEDIA" Like no I don't think so lol
Yes! It's definitely another book where the pop culture perception is extremely different from what's actually in the text, but not enough people read it and find that out. Also, goodness, do some people claim that Dracula is irredeemable media? I've never seen that myself, but to be fair, I wouldn't be surprised
What I've actually seen a lot of, and I've talked with other people who do work on horror scholarship about this, so I know it's not a minority opinion, is that the entire field of vampire studies is affected by it. Like, not necessarily because of the sexism/racism/antisemitism/etc. etc. etc. of the OG or the pop culture perception of the OG, but because there's this idea of vampires and horror media as being schlocky, tawdry, and bloody, the sort of thing meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And it doesn't matter what level you're looking at this at, if you're into vampire media, academically, you're essentially wasting your life on the equivalent of fast food as opposed to ~real~ subjects worth your academic interest. Unless you are specifically doing work FOR a conference or publication around horror media/monstrosity/vampires, if your work involves vampires at all (folklore studies. literary studies. literally any media studies at all, including historical media ie medieval texts), there is a significantly higher chance of it being dismissed as less serious than if it were on another subject.
And like..as the resident Dracula Adaptations Defender, do I fully BLAME them for it? Not really, but I do think this idea of vampires = Dracula = cheap bodice rippers = SEX AND VIOLENCE NO is a solid part of it.
I would not be surprised if vampire studies have been a female dominated field for quite a while to render this reaction
Oh, absolutely -- like, the professor who got me into it was a woman. One of the books I hold as most influential to how I think about vampires (Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves) was written by a woman. When I meet other people who do this kind of work at conferences...women or nonbinary scholars, overwhelmingly. It doesn't mean that there aren't men AT ALL doing this kind of work, but when I think of vampire media, specifically, I think of women. And, honestly, horror media in general -- again, plenty of men in the field, but I feel like, in general, I see relatively few straight men doing work, proportionately, as opposed to women, nonbinary people, and queer men (again, this is potentially also where my own biases come in, I'm not an objective source, we're basing this on vibes, but when I think of the horror-based scholarship I consume...those are the authors I think of/who I'm speaking to at conferences.) Women have always had a particular draw to the gothic, even going back to the origins of the Gothic novel, with Walpole and Radcliffe, and it's continued into the present with horror media, potentially because it provides an outlet towards anxieties they already have. And, subsequently, why I think there can be this negative tint towards it.
