ABSTRACT
Set in an alternate nineteenth century, Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, imagines a supernatural family with peculiar genealogies'. Carriger's first Parasol Protectorate novel, Soulless, introduces her protagonist Alexia Tarabotti. Alexia is a soulless preternatural'; she has the power to temporarily remove the supernatural abilities of a vampire or werewolf. The complexity of the Parasol Protectorate family goes beyond simply resisting human and supernatural normativity within the novels, and into a wider interaction with social politics. Various normative families surround the central family in the Parasol Protectorate. There are norms for humans, norms for vampires, and norms for werewolves and the Tarabotti-Maccon-Akeldama resist all of them. Another form of conservative familial normativity that is sometimes resisted and sometimes reinforced in the Parasol Protectorate is the gendering of familial roles. The Parasol Protectorate series proposes a very different relationship to longevity, and one which ambivalently interacts with Freeman's and Halberstam's arguments.
