hi!! i hope its okay to message, im a second year student currently working on a piece on queer vampirism, and as tumblr's resident drac expert i was wondering if you would be able to point me towards any articles or resources you know of? thanks so much !!!
Thanks for reaching out. I feel my expertise is--sadly--rather rusty this point now that I've spent several years researching Eliot and Thackeray instead of keeping abreast of cutting edge vampire/Dracula scholarship. However, the essay that often gets cited as one of the big starting points re: queer readings of Dracula is Christopher Craft's "'Kiss Me With Those Blood Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula." I would warn--of course--that it is a starting point and that one can and probably should look beyond Craft's reading in approaching the text. Another place I consider starting is with Talia Schaffer's "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': The Homoerotic History of Dracula." While several of the biographical claims it offers are questionable or obsolete in light of more recent archival evidence (Stoker was certainly formulating key homoerotic scenes of Dracula before the Wilde trial), she's still a significant voice in the criticism that looks to situating Dracula in relation to questions regarding Stoker's own sexuality.
Those are two very basic and oft-cited pieces of secondary criticism, and I am not in full agreement with either. If you want some starting points for primary sources from Stoker's corpus, I can probably be a lot more useful. It might very much be worth your while to look at Stoker's novel The Man, which is not a very good novel but is deeply concerned with bending gender roles before reasserting them in ruthlessly essentialist ways (It also--coincidentally or not--has a lot in common with The Well of Loneliness). His Famous Imposters (or Bram Stoker's Big Book of Cross Dressing He Does or Does Not Approve Of) is also worth a gander. Lastly, if you haven't read it already, please look up Bram Stoker's heartfelt fanmail to Walt Whitman. You will not regret it.
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