“In its fixation on marriage and the family, Twilight clearly speaks to many contemporary anxieties about the ever-increasing destabilization of gendered, raced, and sexed hierarchies; but it also does much more than that: it authorizes and naturalizes those raced and gendered investments in the problematic institution of marriage, a miniaturized version of the social and political world in which the numerous grievances so central to the crises in masculinity and whiteness are condensed and played out. That is, Twilight celebrates and extends legacies of prejudice and oppression under the guise of everlasting romance, love, and marriage. In this sense, it also makes clear the monstrous longings at the heart of the vampire’s contemporary popularity.

If, as I am suggesting, Twilight’s popularity represented a metaphorized cultural desire for the return of the now ostensibly marginalized white patriarch to his “rightful” place at the center of society, the January 6 insurrection animated those desires in astonishingly public fashion.” (184-185)

“Figuring a fantastic immortality and a decidedly queer life / time, the vampire confounds assumptions about the worthy life predicated on dominant ideologies of temporality and invites a consideration of other ways of living, other ways of being.” (3-4)

“… the vampire is forever defined by an open secret, by the genre’s characteristic disjuncture between what the audience always already knows and what the characters fail to see. For those characters and readers / viewers in the know, this open secret also resonates with and condenses questions, codes, and acts of queer recognition across the textual divide. Both the open secret and the cultural recognition of an identity otherwise invisible to dominant society thus also extend the radical potential of the genre’s formal repetition.” (4)

“Amid the vast intertextual richness of her work, [Angela] Carter returns most frequently to the sleeping beauties, the female vampires, and the living dolls, alluring somnambulists who make their way through both her fiction and criticism and who lay bare the fantasy of necrophilia that drives the dominant cultural investment in women’s passivity so perfectly exemplified by the Grimms’ ‘Little Brier Rose’ (see, e.g., Sage 2001, 72, 76; Sceats 2001; Mikkonen 2001; Wisker 1997; Peng 2004). Carter’s enduring interest in living dolls and female vampires anticipates Sue Ellen Case’s well-known theorization of the female vampire’s powerful ability to disrupt hegemonic gender ontologies. Case sees in the figure of the vampire an ”identification with the insult, the taking on of the transgressive” constitutive of a queer theory and a queer desire, “which seeks the living dead, producing a slippage at the ontological base and seducing through a gender inversion above” (1991, 2, 3). Carter’s fascination with the feminine living dead likewise celebrates the potential for slippage at the center of cultural constructions of gender, a slippage she exploits through her fiction.” (125)