Dark Ecology and Queer, Amphibious Vampires

Abstract

This paper argues that early vampire narratives can be reread as queer ecological fictions, darkly re-imagining the human as a liminal, amphibious entity. I highlight the importance of the amphibian—a slippery, ambiguous creature—to contemporary eco-deconstructive accounts that seek to disrupt and queer species categorizations, focusing in particular on Timothy Morton’s notion of “dark ecology” (2007). Early vampire literature, I argue, similarly deconstructs the distinction between different species through its erotic depictions of enmeshed ecologies. Analyzing the new blood-relations established in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the figure of the queer female vampire described as “amphibious” in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), I suggest that vampire narratives depict dark new ecologies, establishing an “in-betweeness” shared by the living and the undead. The final part of this paper considers the importance of loss to current theorizations of queer ecology: Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (2010) has recently advocated a state of suspended mourning for what has been destroyed by anthropocentric and homophobic violence. I posit the haunting figure of the vampire as one example of literature’s “non-normalizing relationship to the past” (Mortimer-Sandilands)—a relation of return that might form an important part of queer, ecological resistance to current practices of unmarked destruction.