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more thoughts navigating TVL as a lover of the books and the show. thinking about rice's female vampires and the post-gender umbrella.

in the vampire chronicles, rice incorporates female play incognito, mediated through powerful male protagonists. even though the vampires are considered post-gender, the vampires who were female when mortal still tend to carry an external weight more than the males. gabrielle pushes past most of the suffering and takes a shorter internal journey to discover what she wants (and that’s why I love her).

the male vampires’ experiences are easily female coded in content because rice has said many times in so many words that she infuses the characters with her own experience. the books focus heavily on rejecting societal norms. the male vampires however are afforded the privilege to do what men have always had more time to do which is fall apart, and then find enlightenment, or end it on their own terms. simultaneously, rice illustrates the bad things actual men do and the catastrophic violence of men, before they find enlightenment or decide on death.

the female vampires tend to carry the burden of eternity but also keep it together for the most part. both are tragic burdens but they show up differently in the mortally defined genders even after turning. I tried to name one developed female vampire character who ended it themselves and couldn’t think of one. maybe it happened and someone on here remembers it. the old world vampire throws herself into the fire in the show but that doesn't happen in the book.

there is space for more show watchers to engage with the books further and explore the commentary that is present. we know anne rice wrote from total instinct and did extensive historical research. she was unapologetic about her work, even if there were times that it might have been appropriate for her to be apologetic. the show just seems to be apologizing for a lot of the wrong things.

i want to add that all of this isn't to negate the queer theory/activism reading which aligns academically with the post-gender context. the exception being some schools of thought position post-gender as being originally born to post-gender society whereas most of rice's vampires hold on to their mortal history. rather, in this particular literary context, it forces a larger umbrella where more progressive contemporary feminist theory and overarching gender theory are fused with queer theory. it represents post-gender as the ultimate transcendent state after a mortal life lived within norms. for rice's vampires, the ones that shed their human constraints and move toward post-gender, tend to have a longer shelf life.

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the post above expanded on the post below

food for thought as a lover of the books and the show.

i love analyzing anne rice's chronicles so much. one angle i most often come from is, while she writes the dominant characters of this series as "male," we get this rich speculative post-gender narrative that incorporates beauty, aesthetics, and maximalism through radically free thinking coming from a female author who is searching to define herself and major structures through her characters. everything is female coded and there are so many interpretations. listen, i watch the show. i enjoy the show. but damn, do you think i have my female narrative analysis brain switched on while watching it? no, i'd go nuts. then i think about it later and this major blind spot in the show breaks my heart. the lack of this lens has been present since the first season. i mean, i probably built some of my framework around being a woman reading anne rice as a teenager. rice was radical about the female body, femininity, and female interiority through her writing for her time. for any time really. the show isn't thinking on that level or through those lenses from anything i've seen. a lot of groups are represented, which i love about the show. however, i notice that the show isn't engaging in rice's female narrative lens that makes her work so radical.