Post-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood.

Wright, Laura

Abstract

Taking Bram Stoker's Dracula as its starting point, this essay examines the vegetarian and vegan politics and identities that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon's 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke's 2008 adaptation of it, and Alan Ball's HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris), which first aired in 2008. These texts highlight a shifting cultural discourse of rights, violence, and identity that indicates a moment of profound uncertainty with regard to what it means to be human in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human world.

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I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of living things ... one might indefinitely prolong life.

--R. M. Renfield, in Bram Stoker's Dracula

IT IS, OF COURSE, IMPOSSIBLE TO DISCUSS ANY REPRESENTATION OF VAMPIRES in Western culture without referencing Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. In fact, it is largely--if not wholly--because of Stoker's novel that, according to Mary Y. Hallab, "vampires belong to a modern popular folklore that few will admit to believing but that has become part of a way of thinking about and ordering our vision of the world around us" (9). The veritable cottage industry that is the production of literary criticism about Dracula (1) has provided a vast array of theoretical readings of Stoker's vampire's symbolic significance within the context of Victorian-era England. As Hallab notes, Dracula has been read as "the tyranny of patriarchy, the power of the corrupt aristocracy or the nouveau bourgeois capitalists; he represents decadent foreigners, Slavs or Jews; he is a homosexual, a social outcast, even a mother, and he is dangerously erotic" (2). Critics have read Dracula through every theoretical lens imaginable, from psychoanalytic, to Marxist, to feminist, to queer, to postcolonial, and the continued persistence of scholarship about the novel points to its literary, cultural, and psychological significance.

In this multiplicity of perspectives, there is but one scholarly essay that examines the novel's politics of consumption via a vegetarian critical lens. The humorously titled "Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula," a 1996 piece by J. E. D. Stavick, explores the novel in terms of the ways that the character of Dracula, in that he consumes carnivores, disrupts the food hierarchy present in Western culture, one that "privileges bloody meat, especially beef, over all other food" (24). Stavick's essay draws on the vegetarian critical theories of such foundational scholars as Julia Twigg and Carol J. Adams in order to trace the novel's subversion of a Victorian politics of meat--of which protagonist Jonathan Harker is very much a part, as he chronicles from the very beginning of the novel the kinds of meat he eats as he travels towards and inhabits Dracula's castle. (2) Adams's foundational 1990 text The Sexual Politics of Meat unpacks the linkages between meat eating and patriarchy via an examination of the myths--from fairy tales to cookbooks--that underscore the fact that "the hearty meat eating that characterizes the diet of Americans and of the Western world is not only a symbol of male power, it is an index of racism" (52). Adams is a student of fictions and the various truths that they convey, and the texts that she analyzes in this work range from novels, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (she examines the monster's vegetarianism), to historical documents, to multicultural myths, to television advertisements, all of which demonstrate the mythology of meat and the ways that a meat-based diet is not only cruel to animals but constitutes sexist and racist ideology.

Like Adams, through an analysis of the ways that Dracula consumes those who consume meat, Stavick posits a vegetarian theoretical argument influenced by both Marxist and postcolonial theories: "The threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer 'Other,' Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy" (26). Taking Stoker's Dracula--and Stavick's critical vegetarian theorizing of it--as my starting point, I want to examine the vegetarian and vegan politics and identities that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon's 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke's 2008 adaptation of it, and Alan Ball's HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris), which first aired in 2008. These texts highlight a shifting cultural discourse of rights, violence, and identity that indicates a moment of profound uncertainty with regard to what it means to be human in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human world.

If to be post-human, as Cary Wolfe notes, is to exist in an historical moment that is located both before and after humanism, in a space where "the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv), it is also to exist in a moment of recognition that "eating one another and developing indigestion [is] only one kind of transformative merger practice; living critters form consortia in a baroque medley of inter- and intra-actions" (Haraway 31). The "vegetarian" vampire as I define it is a mythological creature who complicates our understanding of both vegetarianism (the practice of eschewing animal meat from one's diet) and vampires (creatures that subsist on human blood). As Parke and Wilson note of the vampires in Twilight, such creatures are '"post-vampires'--or vampires that re-work traditional conceptions of the supernatural figure" (3). They, like their post-human counterparts, are constituted by their imbrication in technological and economic networks; such situating allows these vampires access to factory farmed and hunted animal blood (in the case of Buff'y and Twilight) and artificial blood formulated originally in Japan (in the case of True Blood).

Perhaps no popular cultural vampire phenomenon has gained the kind of scholarly following that can be attributed to Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) series, which aired on WB from 1997-2001 and on UPN from 2001-2003. In addition to the Whedon Study Association's online scholarly journal Slayage (3) and biennial conference, there exist numerous edited collections and monograph studies that theorize the so-called Buffyverse from a plethora of scholarly perspectives. (4) BtVS is particularly noteworthy for the way that it disrupts the more traditional narrative of dangerous vampiric masculinity and female victimization. In BtVS, the "television series is premised on the novelty of a California valley girl who kicks ass, literally" (Owen 25), a girl, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), whose "social and political powers ... are matrilineal" (24). Slayers are always female and, despite the fact that the show never overtly articulates it, according to A. Susan Owen, "the narrative implies that the slayers are initiated at menarche" (25), a point that, in an affront to more traditional vampire mythology, allows the flow of blood from the female body to empower rather than drain. Furthermore, the show engages with a postfeminist politics of ambiguity that complicates simple binary readings of the characters as either one thing or another.

As Elana Levine notes: Buffy is simultaneously a fierce, fearless (feminist?) vampire slayer and an insecurity-ridden (conventionally feminine) young woman ... [The show] extends its conceptions of femininity beyond gender-specific terms by considering the multiple identity positions occupied by nearly all of its characters. Thus ... the character of Angel is both a bloodthirsty vampire and a heroic, loving protector of humanity. (174)

In many ways, with the exception of two characters, Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters), vampires and vampirism function in BtVS more as a uniform and persistent background menace over which Buffy consistently triumphs rather than as a kind of "other" suitable for psychological and social engagement.

Historically, vampiric consumption of non-human animals has signified both weakness as well as empathy; for example, in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), Lestat chastises Louis calling him a "whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats" (50) instead of humans. In the case of both Angel and Spike, drinking the blood of an animal and not a human is indicative of impotence: Angel, the "most sexualized and eroticized of all the characters" (Owen 27), cannot have sex or he will become Angelus. Spike's microchip keeps him from being able to kill humans and causes Giles to refer to him as an "impotent" "helpless creature" ("Something Blue"). Furthermore, as an act of self-denial, drinking animal blood is never fully satisfying for the vampires who are forced, either by morality or technology, to consume other non-human beings that, at least in the context of both BtVS and Angel, it is ethically acceptable to consume. The blood as masculine virility metaphor that is characteristic of this narrative reflects the way that human consumption of meat, at least in the West, is heavily coded as a masculine endeavor; (5) to not eat meat, to be vegetarian, therefore, feminizes real (human) men even as eating meat emasculates male vampires. While the show never engages directly with the rhetoric of animal rights or uses the terms "vegetarian" or "vegan" to describe either vampires or humans, there are two episodes where these discourses are tacitly invoked: season three's ninth episode "The Wish" and season six's twelfth episode "Doublemeat Palace."

In "The Wish," popular Sunnydale High School fashionista and "it girl" Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale. When the wish is granted by a vengeance demon named Anyanka (Emma Caufield), Cordelia finds herself in an alternative Sunnydale. It is a world where vampires rule--including Cordelia's ex-boyfriend Xander (Nicholas Brendan) and Buffy's best friend Willow--Angel is the victim of Willow's torture, (6) and humans live in abject fear. The final battle scene in the episode takes place in the Master's abattoir, a facility into which humans are herded, stunned with a cattle prod, and drained of their blood via metal implements that are inserted into their bodies at various points. While watching the inaugural run of this mechanized harvesting, Xander observes, "we really are living in a golden age," in response to the Master's claim that "humans have brought us a truly demonic concept, mass production." In "The Wish," the treatment of human beings as cattle is immediately apparent: the captured victims stand in pens, looking out from behind wooden fencing; a cattle prod is used to subdue any resistance, and bodies are processed along a conveyor belt.

The fact that the initial victim is female and that her body is penetrated at various points by metal implements alludes to the reality of what Adams refers to as "the exploitation of the reproductive processes of female animals" (21), which oppresses female animals in two ways. First, female animals are exploited via human consumption of milk and eggs, or what Adams refers to as "feminized protein," and, second, "the majority of animals eaten are adult females and children" (21). In "The Wish," the implements that pierce the flesh of this first female victim evoke the electronic machinery used in the industrial milking of cows and highlight the connection of vampiric blood drinking and human consumption of factory farmed cow's milk. That these phallic implements also ultimately drain this woman to death so that the Master can drink her blood from a wine glass, establishes a distance between the consumer and the object of consumption: in this narrative as in the mechanized factory farm process for which it stands, the vampire and human are removed, via the introduction of the intermediary machinery of mass production, from the act of killing and from any face-to-face interaction with the subject rendered consumable by the process.

Three seasons later, BtVS engages again with the politics of meat in "Doublemeat Palace," (7) an episode that teases the audience with the possibility that the Doublemeat Medley--the product of "what happens when a cow and a chicken get together"--served at the fast food restaurant Doublemeat Palace, Buffy's place of employment, may be made of murdered humans. The fast food restaurant is rendered as a place of mechanized horror; the workers depicted as identically dressed zombies functioning mindlessly at repetitive tasks that never vary. The mood is ominous, and Spike notes, "this place'11 kill you," even before employees start to go missing. When Buffy is first hired, she must watch a video that offers insight into the "harvesting" of the meat, and she tries to downplay the horror of what she sees, noting her amazement at "how the cow and the chicken come together even though they've never met. It's like Sleepless in Seattle if Meg and Tom were, like, minced." But the video that she sees is, as Buffy notes, so "graphic with the slaughter" that she visibly recoils when the manager presents her with a Doublemeat Medley. Buffy notes that, when her co-workers start to disappear--a scenario that her boss claims is "whatever always happens," thus normalizing the regular turnover of fast food employees--"maybe it's just the video that's creeping me out, with the cow and the chicken all swirly together."

In a moment that pays homage to Richard Fleischer's 1973 film Soylent Green, a narrative about high energy vegetable based food that turns out to be made of human flesh, Buffy, convinced that her co-workers are being killed, processed as meat, and served to customers, runs through the restaurant yelling, "it's not meat! It's people!" As it turns out, however, Willow deduces that the "meat" is actually "something called processed vegetables." The secret ingredient--something repeatedly referred to as the "process"--is in fact meat: when Buffy confronts Loraine, the new manager, about her discovery, Loraine admits that the "meat" in question is processed vegetable protein flavored with "beef fat." She cautions Buffy, warning her that "the Doublemeat reputation is built on a foundation of meat. You can't spread this around."

The Doublemeat lie--that the meat in the sandwich is, in fact, meat--underscores the show's engagement with if not the complete unmaking of standard and accepted human and non-human identity categories, at least an undermining of them. Meat turns out not to be meat, and at least some vampires do not drink human blood. And different species (in this case, vampires and humans) transgress the dietary boundaries that traditionally define their relationships with one another; Buffy and Spike sleep together, and this intimacy occurs, like the Doublemeat secret, as a clandestine encounter. Furthermore, despite the episode's reputation as one of the worst of BtVS, it is possible to read "Doublemeat Palace" as subversive in its engagement with the politics of the human consumption of meat; in fact, in an interview in the New York Times, when asked if there was anything that he had wanted to do on the show but could not because the budget or network TV standards would not allow it, Joss Whedon stated, "the only thing that we've ever actually been stopped or asked to stop doing was the fast food run. When Buffy worked at the fast food joint it made the advertisers very twitchy. So apparently the most controversial thing we ever had on Buffy was a hamburger and chicken sandwich" ("10 Questions"). In the Buffyverse, Buffy must keep the "valuable secret" of the medley's ingredients from the general public just as she must keep secret her relationship with Spike. To do otherwise would disrupt the hierarchy of who eats who--and who or what constitutes ethical consideration--in the "real" world.

In the introduction to her edited collection Bringing Light to Twilight, Giselle Liza Anatol discusses the runaway popularity of Meyer's Twilight saga: Of the myriad books, television programs, and films about vampires that have flooded U.S. culture at the start of the twenty-first century, the most commercially successful to date is the Twilight series ... Between the publication of the first novel Twilight (2005), and June 2010 ... the four-volume saga had sold more than 100 million copies. (1)

The four-volume saga, narrated in the first-person by the protagonist Bella Swan and set in the real location of Forks, Washington, chronicles the relationship between human high school student (and later vampire) Bella and her vampire boyfriend (and later husband) Edward Cullen. The Cullen clan, consisting of "parents" Carlisle and Esme, and "children," Alice, Emmett, Rosalie, and Jasper, live in harmony with the human population of Forks, the majority of whom do not know that the Cullens are vampires. These vampires are assimilationist in their motives, and unlike their literary predecessors who sleep during the day and stalk at night, these vampires are unharmed by sunlight, a quality that allows them to do things like hold regular jobs and attend high school. (8) Whereas on BtVS, Angel and Spike are initially forced, via a curse and a microchip, to be "good," non-human killing vampires, the Cullens consciously decide not only not to feed on and kill humans but also to live among and help them.

According to Leonard Sax, "the allure of Twilight lies in its combination of modern sensibility and ambience with traditional ideas about gender," and the franchise, both in terms of Meyer's novels and their film adaptations, has been a source of much debate with regard to the gendered and seemingly conservative politics that they present. Of the film version of the first volume of the series, Dana Stevens notes, "Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is the anti-Buffy; she's a mortal high-school girl committed not to slaying vampires but to being slain by them." Sax notes that "Bella is regularly threatened with violence ... and in every instance she is rescued by Edward or Jacob." In addition to the fact that Bella is rescued by Edward repeatedly, she is put in harm's way by him repeatedly as well--and he even leaves her in the second volume, New Moon, as a way of "protecting" her from himself. During his absence, Bella's voice vanishes from the novel, which presents Bella's state of mind as a series of blank pages; Bella cannot speak without Edward, as Edward is all that she is able to speak about. To get him back, she does all manner of reckless things--riding and wrecking a motorcycle, jumping off of a cliff--hoping to force him to materialize when he senses, as he is able to do, that she is in danger. It is such circumstances that have led some to contend that Twilight advocates a narrative of abuse, one dependent upon the withholding of male affection, dependence upon male protection, abandonment, physical and mental manipulation, and subsequent apologies for harmful male behavior, only for such behavior to be repeated ad nauseam over the course of hundreds of pages of narrative. (9)

I tend to concur with the sentiment that Twilight's gender politics are problematic at best and decidedly anti-feminist at worst, but my analysis is based on the way that the narrative engages in a kind of double-speak with regard to its treatment of various discourses of both power and consumption. For example, even as Meyer's novels attempt to portray Bella as someone tough and independent who is not "used to being taken care of' (Twilight 55), her very consistent need to be taken care of by Edward undermines such a depiction. And unlike BtVS's minimal and tacit engagement with the politics of meat, in the context of the Twilight saga, the morality of the Cullen vampire clan is designated by its members' "vegetarian" status. In the context of Twilight, "vegetarian" means to eat animals--the very antithesis of its actual meaning--instead of humans. Edward explains that eating animals is like "living on tofu and soymilk; we call ourselves vegetarians, our own little inside joke. It doesn't completely satiate the hunger--or rather thirst. But it keeps us strong enough to resist. Most of the time" (Twilight 188). While Edward acknowledges that the use of the term "vegetarian" constitutes a kind of joke, the comparison indicates that such a diet is inherently unfulfilling; tofu and soymilk may sustain vegetarian humans, but they--like the blood of animals on which the Cullens subsist--are poor substitutes for the "real thing." Such a position situates human vegetarianism as an inferior and unsatisfying dietary option dependent upon privation, a diet that leaves the vegetarian with an insatiable craving for what has been omitted: bloody meat.

Meyer's rewriting of vampire mythology strips vampires of their characteristic darkness and countercultural natures; these vampires like humans and want to be like them, so much so that they ascribe to a human dietary code and consume what most humans (at least humans in the United States) consume, a diet centered around the bodies of animals. If Meyer's novels provide us with a vampiric discourse that undermines both vampires and vegetarians, as Jean Kazez notes that "the movie version of Twilight ... puts Edward's vampire vegetarianism in an interesting light, since Bella is vegetarian too--the regular kind" (26). Within the context of the film, directed by Hardwicke, although she never explicitly claims to be a vegetarian, Bella (Kristen Stewart) eats a vegetarian diet, although this is not the case in the novels. Hardwicke's decision to portray Bella as vegetarian significantly impacts and in some ways subverts the problematic vegetarian discourse of Meyers's novels. Hardwicke's film draws consistent attention to what Bella eats; in a cafe with her father, the server shoos away a former acquaintance of Bella's, saying "let the girl eat her garden burger," and later, during Bella and Edward's (Robert Pattinson) first date, another server sets a plate of food before Bella and announces "one mushroom ravioli." Meyer appears in a cameo as another restaurant patron in the scene during which Bella receives her garden burger; Meyer is served a veggie plate.

In the extremely secular world of BtVS, Angel and Spike are nonetheless given souls, something generally denied to vampires heretofore. But in the world of Twilight, Edward claims that he is going to Hell and consistently denies that he possesses a soul. He even tells Bella that he "will not destroy" her soul (New Moon 518) by granting her wish and turning her into a vampire. If vampires constitute our shadow selves, then what of the soulless Cullens and their adherence to a system of human ethics? In this case, the vampire as shadow self becomes a member of a kind of undead moral majority, repressed and socially excommunicated traditionalists who call for a return to a sense of "values" most of us seem to have lost. Such a vampire is the antithesis of most of his literary precursors who operate both outside of and in direct opposition with such an ethical position. In the context of Twilight, then, to be a human vegetarian would constitute alignment with such "liberal" vices as sexual promiscuity, feminism, and secularism, and Meyer's narrative asks that we consider that which we have, as a culture, chosen to dismantle: a presumed more traditional approach to sexuality, to faith, and, ultimately, to diet. And given the success of the franchise, casting such values in shadow has had an undeniable and overwhelming allure.

But the film very cleverly casts vegetarian vampires in a very different light. The film opens with Bella's voiceover stating that she had never given much thought to how she would die, "but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go," just prior to a clip of a deer fleeing through a forest only to be caught by Edward. We do not see the vampire drink the animal's blood; the scene ends in a flash just as the vampire catches the deer. Given the so-called vegetarian nature of Edward's vampirism, the scene requires a bit of scrutiny. Bella's statement about self-sacrifice to save someone else is situated at the beginning of the film, before the audience sees Bella onscreen, and before the audience even knows definitively that the voice is Bella's. The screen is black when the voice says, "I'd never given much thought to how I would die;" the forest then emerges from the darkness, and the camera focuses on a deer drinking from a stream. Bella's voice returns as we watch the deer: "but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go." The camera suddenly moves closer, and the startled deer looks up and runs. The audience watches the deer's vain attempt to escape, and the scene ends with Edward catching the deer in an embrace as the screen goes white. The tacit implication is that the voice that we hear is the voice of the animal, "dying in place" of someone else, in this case Bella or some other human being. As Katie Kapurch notes, "Bella's voiceover ... suggests that her female voice corresponds with the deer, who, sensing an intruder, begins to flee" (187). This opening scene situates animal sacrifice at the fore of the narrative, positioning the death of the animal as a central focus of the film, even as it is not a central focus of the novels. That Bella is depicted as a real vegetarian thereafter--and that Hardwicke essentially has Meyer eat her words by having her eat a veggie plate--serves as an affront to the narrative's primary and very Judeo-Christian assertion that anything or anyone must die in place of anything else.

In Meyer's creation of so-called vegetarian vampires that are actually carnivores, the natures of both vampirism and vegetarianism become muddled and contradictory to the point that neither signifier actually means what it means. Not being a cannibal does not make one a "vegetarian," just as simply being pale and cold should not make one a "vampire." Whereas Buffy and Spike's sexual relationship allows them to transgress the species divide, they still do so in secret because they remain conscious and respectful of the definitional constraints of their metaphorical categorizations, but in the context of Twilight, definitional categorization is completely ignored without analysis. Twilight's unself-conscious disregard of a preceding vampire literary history indicates its creation during a cultural milieu captivated by the present and willfully uninformed by history. Nonetheless, Meyer's revisionist vampire story presents us with a kind of salvation narrative, one that is completely dependent upon the politics of diet; such salvation--if we buy it--also requires that we question the nature of the seemingly inherent evil that has historically characterized vampires. While such a moment might constitute the instant when new definitions are created, particularly with regard to a reconceptualization of the nature of good and evil, it is more likely to generate only superficial meaning.

Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire novels, which serve as the basis for Ball's HBO series True Blood, begin with the 2001 Dead Until Dark. The narrator and protagonist of the series, Sookie Stackhouse, notes at the beginning of the novel: Ever since vampires came out of the coffin (as they laughingly put it) four years ago, I'd hoped one would come to Bon Temps. We had all other minorities in our little town--why not the newest, the legally recognized undead? But rural Louisiana wasn't too tempting to vampires, apparently; on the other hand, New Orleans was a real center for them--the whole Anne Rice thing, right? (1)

Within the realm of such self-aware fiction, Harris establishes a space in which to engage a discourse of legal recognition and minority rights, specifically gay rights, as is made manifest in the notion that vampires have come "out of the coffin." (10) In the context of Harris's novels, vampirism becomes an identity category subject to the rhetoric of politically correct-speak; vampirism is no longer the condition of being the shadow "other," but is instead a viral condition that leaves the victim "apparently dead for a couple of days and thereafter allergic to sunlight, silver, and garlic" (2). This narrative of apparent vampire normalization is entirely dependent on the Japanese creation of synthetic blood, which, according to Sookie, "kept the vampires up to par in terms of nutrition, but didn't really satisfy their hunger, which is why there were 'Unfortunate Incidents' from time to time," with such "incidents" being "vampire speak for the bloody slaying of a human" (4). Unlike BtVS and Twilight, the acceptance of Harris's and Ball's vampires within mainstream society is dependent upon their being vegan, drinking synthetic--neither human nor animal--blood; veganism, an identity category that functions to render human beings outsiders (in that veganism alienates human vegans from mainstream dietary choices), functions in an opposite way within vampire culture to allow vampires access to and acceptance by the same human community.

Ball's HBO adaptation of Harris's work, True Blood, has provided, via the lens of melodramatic camp, a sustained if uneven examination of the politics of assimilation and exclusion of specific contemporary U.S. communities based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and species. Dale Hudson asks "whether HBO's True Blood ... might suggest ways for humans to live ethically with other species and to think interspecies relations in ways that consider what interspecies ethics might mean to humans still defined in terms of race, sex, nativity, and religion"(661). J. M. Tyree notes that the horror of True Blood becomes fully apparent late in season one, "when Sookie's brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten) and his sociopathic vegan girlfriend Amy Burley (Lizzy Caplan), kidnap, and finally kill a kindly older vampire, Eddie Gauthier (Stephen Root)"(34). In its first season, via a sustained critique of the supposed non-exploitative nature of veganism, the series subverts the traditional vampire/human dynamic in that it examines violence that is "inflicted on and not by vampires" (Tyree 34). These episodes, unlike the other texts examined in this essay, engage in an overt way with the concept of veganism as they situate veganism within a discourse of unstable and paradoxical assimilationist identity categories based on sexuality, species, and the politics of consumption. According to Bruce A. McClelland, "True Blood does not redefine the vampire's habits or needs, but instead refocuses the vampire community and the politics of its interaction with the human community" (81).

Just as veganism within contemporary U.S. culture challenges the human/ animal species binary, the positioning of the show's living and undead characters within shifting and uncertain political and social communities works to generate a third space of signification and articulation that is at once a product of the status quo even as it challenges and reveals the contradictory and often dishonest nature of a supposed human and vampire norm. If the vampires on True Blood seek integration into the human community, they do so as vampires, a community with a distinct social and political order. (11) The presence of three types of blood, "human (with its various blood groups), vampire (V), and synthetic (TruBlood)" (McClelland 84), disrupts the heretofore oppositional human/vampire species binary, a relationship dependent upon the destruction of one species for the preservation of the other. The synthetic vegan option, TruBlood, is a destabilizing factor, and McClelland notes the post-human turn, commenting, "The commercial availability of a nutritional and palliative substance, TruBlood ... which quells the animalistic hunger for human blood sufficiently to allow vampires to enter human social situations without issue, is at base also a means of obtaining control through technology" (83). In McClelland's reading, TruBlood functions as a "bribe" made by humans to vampires and, ultimately, the substance is a trap: "it draws the vampire out from his place of opposition shifting a natural need away from its original object and towards dependency on the illusory benefit of consumption-based communion with human beings" (87).

While I see the logic of such a reading, I do not agree with it. My sense is that the vampires on True Blood make a mockery of such communion, drinking TruBlood in public and human blood from willing (and sometimes unwilling) human donors behind closed doors. If vampires succumb to the bribe offered by human beings, TruBlood becomes a tool utilized by vampires to construct a veneer of appropriate humanity, and drinking it allows vampires to bribe humans, to make proper appearances that allow them to circulate--often dangerously--within the purview of human institutions. In this context "veganism" is synonymous with mainstream human practice--but only in the case of vampires. TruBlood, the vegan alternative to human blood, is a surface gesture that works, by and large, within a culture that pays more attention to appearances than to substance, a culture filled with humans who posture, perform, and deny specific identity positions in public only to adopt those positions in private.

Vampires understand this aspect of human nature; after all, they were once human as well, and their intimate knowledge of human behavior allows them to capitalize on the very human tendency to live divergent private and public lives. Vampires may keep TruBlood in the fridge just as, like the duplicitous Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck)--whose public appearance evokes Hillary Clinton while her private wardrobe consists of leather and spikes--they may be members of the mainstream American Vampire League, but more often than not, they feed on human beings as well, betraying their seeming ethical vampire veganism. And certain "fang banging" humans offer themselves as willing participants in the vampiric feeding, which is tantamount to sexual climax for both parties. Just as vegetarianism in Twilight signifies its complete opposite, the death of animals, veganism in True Blood is a meticulously deconstructed performance, a visual screen that offers a veneer of peace and, for the human character of Amy Burley, functions as a mask for violent and murderous consumption. Furthermore, while vampires are ostensibly vegan, humans, even vegan humans like Amy Burley, are drinking the blood of vampires. Veganism, then, becomes, in the context of True Blood, as performative as any other identity category, a position that masks the true nature of the so-called "vegan."

In essence, the vampires on True Blood do what vampires have always done: they behave immorally with regard to a human code of ethics, (12) but for the first time in vampire history, they employ the rhetoric of those ethics to appear sympathetic to humans. Unlike Angel, Spike, and Edward, who drink "vegetarian" animal blood out of some desire to "do the right thing," for the most part, the vampires on True Blood perform vegan identity to gain access to and the trust of the humans on which they feed. As Ariane Blayde and George A. Dunn note, "if the rest of us can be persuaded that vampires are really just an exotic variety of human being--or at least close enough to be granted honorary human status--then we'll be more inclined to extend to them human rights" (34). Bill Compton may not drink anything other than TruBlood when we first meet him, but his vegan act of "mainstreaming" allows him access to a choice blood option, the fairy blood of Sookie (who functions as a kind of pet to Bill) not much later in the season.

But if humans have risen from the status of livestock animal to pet in vampire ideology, alternately vampires have become consumable to humans who drain them and sell their blood, a practice Blayde and Dunn compare to the fur trade in terms of its ethical implications (37). Nan Flannagan asks, on network television, "who is draining whom in America tonight?" ("Plaisir D'Amour"); as often as vampires drink consenting humans, humans abduct, torture, and drain unwilling vampires of their blood, which functions as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen to the human consumer. In the show's first season's sustained and often overt disruption of the animal/human binary (Sam can be both human and animal; humans constitute "cattle" for vampires; and dehumanized and othered vampires are engaged in a constant battle for human rights), several episodes explicitly challenge the human mistreatment of nonhuman beings. On the one hand, the show reveals that "the allegedly evil actions of vampires differ not one scintilla from what we ourselves do all the time to our fellow creatures who suffer the misfortune of not being human" (Blayde and Dunn 42). But the episodes that feature Amy Burley, a woman who says to her vampire captive Eddie in "I Don't Wanna Know," "I'm an organic vegan and my carbon footprint is miniscule," also present human treatment of vampires as "not much different from the way millions of animals are treated everyday on factory farms" (Blayde and Dunn 37). Amy's vegan identity is no accident, and, like the vegan identity of the vampires in Bon Temps, is performative, contradictory, and qualified.

In terms of its sustained deconstruction of the animal/human divide, True Blood examines the nature of what constitutes humanity and monstrosity: Eddie is rendered far more human than Amy, and Amy, in her torturous quest for his blood, if far more vampiric than Eddie. In essence, the show's focus on vegan vampirism as a self-aware performative screen demonstrates the nature of a particular and contemporary post-human moment during which the human practice of veganism is scrutinized as both an unnatural practice (for a species that often posited as naturally omnivorous) and an impossible ideal. A member of Bill's former nest tells him in "Burning House of Love," "mainstreaming's for pussies," and Amy's vegan assertion in this same episode that "plants give us all the chemicals we need," point to the actual truth behind the claim that mainstreaming for vampires and veganism for humans--getting "all the chemicals" one needs--do not necessarily equate to getting all that one wants. The human vegan Amy, like her mainstreaming vampire counterparts, drinks blood (in her case, blood from a vampire that she tortures and keeps chained in Jason's basement) in order to fulfill a desire that is not quelled by a plant-based diet. Amy Burley's centrality to the narrative arc of the show's first season and her character's continual references to her veganism in the face of her sadistic treatment and murder of Eddie stand in contrast to Bill Compton's "vegan" diet, which he supplements with the blood of his willing lover Sookie. Yet both scenarios posit relationships dependent upon the relegation of one member of the duality to the status of inhuman animal. Sookie may avoid being treated as cattle by Bill, but she is still his pet. And Eddie, a kindly vegan vampire, is rendered a factory farmed animal by the ostensibly vegan Amy.

The contradictory nature of Amy's veganism is apparent in "The Fourth Man in the Fire" when her claim that "I only eat organic" is countered by her consumption of vampire blood, a practice that she justifies to Jason, telling him that their captive Eddie "isn't a person" ("Plaisir D'Amour"). For Amy, evidence of Eddie's suffering does not inspire her to grant him the same ethical consideration that she extends to living human and non-human creatures; she is able to justify her treatment of Eddie because she views him as a thing--a dead thing--and not a person worthy of rights. Her vegan diet, made up of "raw food, nothing processed" ("Plaisir D'Amour"), allows Amy to access the full potency of V. Therefore, veganism functions for Amy exactly as it functions for vampires, by providing access to non-vegan blood. By her logic, Amy can be a vegan and drink Eddie's blood because Eddie is not a living creature and because his blood is, therefore, not sustaining his life. Eddie calls her a "psychopath" and tells Jason, "she is far more dangerous than I could ever be" ("Plaisir D'Amour") because she does not recognize his suffering, and it becomes apparent that her goal in kidnapping Eddie has more to do with the slow "true death" she hopes to inflict upon him than with consuming his blood. Despite her persistence in asserting that Eddie is not a person and is already dead, it is his very human suffering that gives her pleasure.

The various realities represented on True Blood--vegan vampires who drink but do not kill willing human "donors," human vegans who torture and kill vampires, and vampires, like those from Bill's former nest who do what vampires have always done, drink and kill humans--all circulate within the discourse of what constitutes rights and who (and what) should be granted rights. Through the often explicit and sometimes tacit connections it makes between human veganism and vampiric consumption of synthetic blood, the first season of True Blood engages explicitly with a discourse of rights--animal, human, and queer---that reflect a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human moment in contemporary U.S. culture in a way that posits self-proclaimed identity categories as performative acts that function as lip service to a political agenda that would have us believe that equal rights have been achieved despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (13) For mainstreaming vampires, that agenda is about self-preservation, companionship, and the cultivation of willing human donors. The explicit consumption of the vegan option, TruBlood, allows vampires access to human champions and human protections, even as these same vampires still remain subject to a code of ethics inaccessible to humans and often in direct conflict with human morality. For Amy, veganism functions as both the means by which she accesses the full potency of V and as the justification for her denial of rights to vampires: if Amy is a vegan who only eats plants, vampires, in that they are neither human nor animal, for Amy, constitute no further moral consideration than she would grant to a soybean or tomato.

All three of the vampire texts examined herein situate vampirism devoid of human blood as inherently unsatisfying and posit that vampires have to work very hard and are often unsuccessful at fighting their desire to drink human blood, or "Unfortunate Instances" (Harris 4) occur. But these narratives' engagement with the vampire other as a being not only worthy of consideration with regard to rights but also capable of granting rights to human beings, the species on which they feed, generates a productive lens through which to view the ethical consideration we grant other species. While Stoker's vampire kills and feeds without remorse on human beings, his late twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts--Angel, Edward Cullen, and Bill Compton--to varying degrees refuse this seemingly essential component of vampiric existence. If the figure of the vampire changes over time to accommodate whatever "our society shuns, but secretly demands" (Thorne 4), then vampires that eschew both murder and the consumption of human blood--and in the case of True Blood's Bill Compton, animal blood as well--point, perhaps, to "our age's fantasies of non-exploitative tolerance" (Tyree 32).

Such a trajectory indicates a cultural moment during which violence and cruelty constitute overt human characteristics that are no longer cast onto the shadow self of the vampire. In turn, the more humanized, humane, and often disingenuous figure of the vegetarian vampire situates pacifism and inclusivity--of other species and minority positions--as that which we have lost. A chronological examination of these three texts demonstrates how the vegan/ vegetarian vampire trope shifts over time as well as how, with regard to this trinity of vampire narratives, the terms "vegan" and "vegetarian" initially signify weakness, asexuality, or asceticism. But even as they become further and further removed from their original meanings, by the time we get to True Blood, vegan vampirism constitutes a fraught, powerful, and manipulative political position that challenges and disrupts the hegemonic matrix of carnivorous, homophobic sexism prevalent in both True Blood's fictional Bon Temps--where human beings reverse the discourse and consume vampires--and in the very real United States.

Notes

(1.) An MLA search for Dracula on June 8, 2011, pulls 677 articles.

(2.) Stavick notes Harker's notations about what he eats. For example, on the first page of the novel, Harker comments that he eats "a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good" (11), and later he consumes "egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish" (12).

(3.) Slayage is edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery.

(4.) To name a few such works: Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (Eds. David Lavery and Rhonda V. Wilcox, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Phibsophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (Eds. James B. South and William Irwin, Open Court, 2003); and Buffy Meets the Academy: Essays on the Episodes and Scripts as Texts (Ed. Kevin K. Durand, McFarland, 2009).

(5.) See, for example, Richard A. Rogers's "Beasts, Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements," Paul Rozin, et. al.'s "Is Meat Male? A Quantitative Multimethod Framework to Establish Metaphoric Relationships," and Matthew B. Ruby and Steven J. Heine's "Meat, Morals, and Masculinity."

(6.) Willow repeatedly refers to Angel as a "puppy" throughout the episode.

(7.) "Doublemeat Palace" is consistently listed as one of the worst BtVS episode of all time on several review sites, including one by Keith McDuffy on Huffpost TV.

(8.) One might be inclined to wonder why one would want to hold a regular job and attend high school, if one did not have to do so.

(9.) A particularly apt analysis of this abuse narrative can be found in John Scott Lewinski's "Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight." Lesson four reads as follows: "If a boy tells you to stay away from him because he is dangerous and may even kill you, he must be the love of your life. You should stay with him since he will keep you safe forever"; Lesson 14 states, "If the boy you are in love with causes you (even indirectly) to be so badly beaten you end up in the hospital, you should tell the doctors and your family that you 'fell down the steps' because you are such a silly, clumsy girl. That false explanation always works well for abused women."

(10.) Ball's adaptation furthers this discourse, even in its opening montage that features a church sign emblazoned with the statement "God hates fangs."

(11.) While ostensibly participating in mainstream politics via their activism in the American Vampire League (AVL), vampires also ascribe to a feudal order that recognizes kings and queens of individual states, sheriffs of specific areas, and magistrates who dole out vampire specific justice that operates well outside of human convention.

(12.) In "Let's Get out of Here," the ninth episode of season four, in a dream, Sookie propositions both Eric and Bill, who refuse her offer. She says, "first of all, you guys are vampires. What's with all the morality?" Even Sookie, the character with the most to lose if her vampire lovers cease to behave in a "moral" manner, notes the ludicrous possibility of moral vampires.

(13.) Women still earn less than men; gay marriage remains a contentious and, in many states, illegal issue; and voting rights debates highlight issues of continued racial disparity.

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