Vampires and Superheroines

During most of my day yesterday I learned about two cultural representations that have been used to imagine various scenarios that could fundamentally alter the fabric of our society. I spent my morning and afternoon at an academic symposium about the figure of the vampire at Goldsmiths College and my evening at a screening of a documentary about the superheroine figure. While these two creations seem to be entirely different, I noticed that both served as a means for representing what is considered unusual and strange, such as an unexplained series of deaths or a strong female, in a manner that allowed for the exploration of both societal anxieties and desires. 

Bela Lugosi's Dracula
Source: https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/
news.aspx?s=74135

Vampires, despite their recent romanticization, were originally figures in folklore that were meant to explain the effects of decomposition on the body and any sudden mass deaths. Not understanding that bodies bloat after death or that rigor mortis will eventually wear off, people would look at bodies in various states of decomposition and think that the physical changes that occurred to the body after death meant that the person must still be alive in some form. If a large number of deaths had occurred recently, people would look at this corpse that seemed too alive, conclude that he or she was a vampire, and explain away the deaths after using various means to dispose of the offending vampire. In a society without the explanations of modern medicine, vampires became a way to explain grave illnesses like tuberculosis and the plague. But as modern medicine developed, the cultural figure of the vampire had to change. As vampires left the realm of spoken folklore and entered into literature and later into film and television, science suddenly became more and more tied with the fanged figures. The new social anxieties that science brought with it worked their way into the vampire story. The threat of nuclear and biological warfare brought with it the idea that vampires were humans who had been infected with a contagion released by an enemy or who had been mutated by the aftereffects of a bomb. The anxieties about genetic manipulation were played upon with the idea that vampires could be created by changing human DNA. In the modern vampire stories that don't involve one hundred year olds going back to high school, there is a constant emphasis on trying and failing to find a cure for vampirism, playing on the societal fear of an incurable, destructive disease. The modern vampire thus serves as an imagined, inhuman figure on whom authors and film makers can play out societal anxieties while using the vampire's otherness to keep the implications of such imaginings divorced from human experience. 

Wonder Woman as she originally appeared in 1941
Source: http://www.comicvine.com/forums/
gen-discussion-1/why-is-wonder-woman
-so-awesome-1517108/

In contrast to representing societal anxieties, the figure of the superheroine represented the societal desires of at least half of the population. In a genre dominated by hyper masculine superheroes, the creation of Wonder Woman in the 1940s suddenly introduced concepts of both a strong female character capable of saving lives and a matriarchal society on Paradise Island. While Wonder Woman appeared and continues to appear highly sexualized in her cleavage bearing leotard, the fact that she could fight off the bad guys herself makes her into an empowering figure. She became a greater symbol of female empowerment when Gloria Steinem and the other women working at Ms. Magazine put her on the cover of their first issue and proceeded to demand that DC Comics make her character, which took a hit in the 1950s when women returned to the home after WWII, back into the butt-kicking woman she was at her creation. From Wonder Woman came other strong female characters, both in other comics and in other media forms. The two parts of my day intersected when the film claimed that the precedent set up by Wonder Woman influenced the creation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shown on the screen confidently stabbing a vampire with a stake. Interviews with women off the streets reflected a desire to be as strong as the superheroines on the page or the screen. Thus, these strong female characters become reflections of the desire for greater female empowerment, inspiring girls and women to be their own superheroines. 

On the surface, vampires and superheroines don't seem connected at all, unless a superheroine is killing a vampire. But if we look at the purpose of their creation, we can see that they're actually quite similar. Both are superhuman creations meant to play out cultural scenarios within the imaginative space of media. They allow humans to examine their anxieties and desires from a safe distance, in the hopes that such examination can either help attain or avoid the ends that such figures reach.