ABSTRACT
Blood pathologies or prion viruses, pathogen contamination or radiation disease, STDs or biotoxins – cultural imaginaries abound with vampiric folklore, and the narratives significantly vary in their presentation of symptoms, causes, virulence, or mechanisms of infection. This chapter reads retellings of the Vampire myths since Bram Stoker as a pharmakon that encapsulates the poison, remedy as well as the scapegoat of the societies producing them. Therefore, Tripp-Bodola investigates how narratives of vampirism and vampiric lore shifted in attitude both towards the vampire as an agent and towards concepts of contagion. Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005) as endpoints of a trajectory, she uses Derrida’s and Girard’s pharmakon to delineate that shift. Sketching the narratives throughout the long twentieth century, she draws our attention to how “every generation has its own vampire that mirrors their biopolitical threat at the time,” echoing Nina Auerbach, thus reminding us of the emergence of new vampiric accounts, paralleling the spread of HIV in the 1980s and the rising appeal of the cyborg in the 1990s. For Tripp-Bodola, the shift from stigmatisation to pathology as “embedded and embodied, relational situatedness” brought about a posthumanist difference in understanding the vampire. This chapter concludes by suggesting a shift towards the posthumanities in medical practice and medical humanities and presenting an edifying purpose for the vampire narratives of contagion, noting that they could serve as a framework “for a post-disciplinary posthumanism debate in medical education.”
