Breathers and Suckers: Sources of Queerness in True Blood
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Aleš Rumpel Breathers and Suckers: Sources of Queerness in True Blood Bachelor‘s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A. 2011 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the thesis supervisor Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A., and Mgr. Kateřina Kolářová, PhD., for support and inspiration, and also to my friend Zuzana Bednářová and my husband Josef Rabara for introducing me to the world of True Blood. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Queer Reading ant the Heteronormative Text ....................................................................... 4 Contextualising True Blood ....................................................................................................... 8 Strangers to prime-time ......................................................................................................... 8 Erecting and penetrating: vampire as a metaphor for queer sexuality ........................ 17 ―We are not monsters. We are Americans‖ .......................................................................... 28 Deviant lifestyle ..................................................................................................................... 30 God hates fangs .................................................................................................................... 32 Artery is the grave ................................................................................................................ 35 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 41 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 44 Summary .................................................................................................................................... 51 Anotace ...................................................................................................................................... 52 Introduction ―I am Sookie Stackhouse and I‘m just a waitress,‖ the main character of True Blood keeps telling creatures that are hundreds and thousands years older than herself and – know better. Sookie lives in a small Louisiana town and is a bit of a local freak, as she has telepathic skills and cannot always contain herself when she hears the local people‘s thoughts. As an outsider often feeling to be the only one of her kind, she greatly anticipates meeting vampires, who had recently announced their existence to the human race in an act called ―The Great Revelation,‖ assuring human race that with the invention of synthetic blood substitute ―Tru Blood,‖ humans and vampires can coexist. When Sookie meets Bill Compton, the first vampire in Bon Temp, she realizes that she cannot hear vampires‘ thoughts and can finally relax. With Bill, Sookie starts her very first relationship, looses virginity and sets on a journey of many discoveries, including discoveries of her own body. Dangerous situations that her acquaintance with vampires bring about eventually and increasingly trigger Sookie‘s spontaneous self-defence powers no less supernatural that her telepathy. In the third season of the series, Sookie finds out the reason why so many vampires (and other creatures) were puzzled by her and drawn to her. She is a fairy, a race long considered wiped out of existence by vampires centuries ago, as these find fairy blood intoxicating and irresistible. 1 Association with vampires introduces Sookie to a world of many supernatural beings, most of which, unlike vampires, do not wish to be known to the mainstream society. The diegetic world of True Blood is populated by shape-shifters, werewolves, werepanthers, maenads and witches, with their individual hidden subcultures and codes. Sookie transgresses the rules of her culture, enters a new one and experiences human prejudice and hate for participating in it. True Blood is a self-reflexive postmodern text, which crosses several genres. It also creates a strong fictional universe, based on The Sookie Stackhouse Novels by Charlaine Harris. HBO devised a complex marketing strategy for its prime-time product and the campaign includes viral videos and alternative reality games, encouraging fandom and strong identification with the characters and plots. Individual characters have their own blogs and twitter accounts, fictional political parties, churches and lobby groups have their websites. Fans are encouraged to invest into the alternative reality of True Blood, a reality that mirrors contemporary American debate on human rights and identity politics. This thesis investigates a gay man‘s investment into the story of a straight woman. After all, it is a story of a fairy, which is a slang term for an effeminate gay man. The fairy learns to understand herself, discovers sexuality, infiltrates orthodox religious communities and leather-biker bars, faces prejudice and violence for who she chooses to love, and importantly, extremely attractive men find the fairy irresistible and intoxicating. True Blood features a great number of characters that are not straight, a number that is higher than 2 the average of contemporary American prime-time television, and some of its language alludes to gay and lesbian issues and experiences. However, True Blood is queer beyond explicit representations and narratives. Areas of inquiry into the queerness of True Blood will include contextual as well as textual discussion, informed by reader activated reception theory referred to as queer reading. 3 Queer Reading ant the Heteronormative Text The author has been dead since the mid nineteen-sixties when post- structuralism hit the ground. Further developments in critical theory witnessed a certain departure from the text as the sole site of meaning towards considerations of how actual spectators/readers interact with film/texts. Janet Steiger, one of the most influential scholars in film receptions studies, author of Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema and Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception says that all audiences are „perverse― as they make uncontrollable meanings of their own. Queer theorists have proposed various approached to queer reading, a reader activated theory of how heterogeneous audiences take up varied positions towards texts. Queer theory is a relatively new branch of critical theory, heavily influenced by Michel Foucault‘s writings. In contrast to gay and lesbian studies, queer theory moves the study of sexuality ―from explaining the modern homosexual to questions of the operation of the hetero/homosexual binary, from an exclusive preoccupation with homosexuality to a focus on heterosexuality as a social and political organizing principle, and from a politics of minority interest to a politics of knowledge and difference‖ (Seidman, 9). Queer reading is a practice of re-reading and re-labelling texts with explicit heterosexual narrative, which destabilises heterosexual readings, often utilising narrative silence concerning characters‘ sexuality, and/or homosocial environments and relationships. Queer reading is sometimes understood as a strategy historically employed by non-straight audiences in times of next-to- 4 none LBGT visibility and explicit LGBT articulations in the arts and media, and also as a strategy of reading historical texts (Benshoff, Dyer). Queer reading strategies are used to explain cult followings of certain stars or films, fandom and slash fictions. Some theorists discuss queer reading positions as opposed to gay and lesbian ones, suggesting lack of interest in ―legitimis(ing) homosexuality as a sexual minority by positioning it within the binary construction of homosexuality versus heterosexuality‖ (Dhaenens, Van Bauwel, Biltereyst), while others use it along with ―gay‖ and ―lesbian‖ to trace a wider range of audience positions. Alexander Doty, author of Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, is among scholars that also use the categories of gay and lesbian. Doty is critical of strategies of queer reading that use the rhetoric of subtext or connotations or of ―queering‖ texts as these are ―deniable or ‗insubstantial‘ as long as we keep thinking within conventional heterocentrist paradigms, which always already have decided that expressions of queerness are sub-textual, sub-cultural, alternative readings, or pathetic and delusional attempts to see something that isn‘t there‖ (Making, xii). Doty also campaigns for not using the term ―queering‖ as ―it implies taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it‖ (Flaming, 2). Instead, Doty claims a position that is equal to that attributed to straight reading. All takes on queer reading share a common preoccupation with the concept of heteronormativity, a term coined by Michael Warner in 1991. Heteronormativity ―refers to pervasive and invisible norms of heterosexuality (…) embedded as a normative principle in social institutions and theory‖ 5 (―Heteronormativity‖) and ―the importance of the concept is that it centres on the operation of the norm.