What’s a Bloodsucking Feminist?
If you believe some creeps, it’s every woman who dares to have an opinion, but in this particular context, Bloodsucking Feminists is the latest venture from Catherine and Ceilidh, the editors of Bibliodaze. After many months of talking about doing a podcast, we decided to launch one with a focus on analysing vampire pop culture through a feminist lens, covering everything from the classic books that pioneered the genre to cult video games, from trashy teen movies to Austrian musicals, and everything in between.
How did this start?
This is mostly Ceilidh’s fault, as are most things in life. After reading an article on The Dissolve by Genevieve Valentine on how the vampire became film’s most feminist monster, Ceilidh began to think about that hypothesis and how that applied to the myriad of vampire stories she’d indulged in over the years. After a long Twitter conversation with some friends about Twilight, she asked if anyone would be interested in a podcast dedicated to the topic of feminism and vampires, and after receiving a resoundingly enthusiastic response, she twisted Catherine’s arm into doing it. She was a very willing participant, in fairness.
Why vampires?
A friend of ours once said that every woman had a vampire novel inside of her waiting to be written, which was true for the pair of us, and epitomised our fascination with these favoured creatures of horror films and pulpy romances. Vampirism is a surprisingly flexible metaphor, a potential stand-in for any theme you can think of, from sex and death to infection, xenophobia, politics, religion, capitalism and beyond. We’ve yet to uncover them all ourselves. We’re in the middle of another vampire pop culture resurgence thanks to films like Only Lovers Left Alive, What We Do In The Shadows & A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and TV shows like FX’s The Strain. Only a couple of years ago, we suffered through a glut of articles on the death of the vampire fad, although true connoisseurs of the genre know never really goes away; everything comes in cycles. So all of that combined means that we have a seemingly limitless amount of ground to cover.
Why feminism?
That whole liberation from the patriarchy thing is pretty important, you know.
How often will you be releasing episodes?
Right now, our schedule is to release one episode at the end of each month, but there are plans to expand that to once a fortnight if there is listener demand, so it’s up to you!
Will there be guests/Can I be a guest?
We may have guests in the future. We’re certainly hoping that some will be interested, particularly when it comes to topics we’re less knowledgeable on, and cultures we’re ignorant of. If you would like to be a guest, please get in touch.
Will you be covering [insert random vampire thing here?]
There are so many things to cover and we would love to get round to them all but it’ll take time. Right now, we have a schedule in place until the end of 2015, but if there’s something you think we absolutely must cover then please submit it to us and we’ll take it into consideration. The only stipulation we have for covering a particular topic is that the material either be in English or come with English subtitles.
Who is Drew Sarich?
Since our Bibliodaze mascot Hugh Dancy has never been in a vampire film (he has been in a werewolf one though, and there’s a case to be made that Hannibal is a vampire story without the fangs), we had to find a new aesthetically pleasing representative for our new venture. Drew Sarich is an American actor who primarily does German musical theatre and has appeared in no less than three vampire musicals. He can hit amazing high notes and has played Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar enough times that us calling him our lord and saviour isn’t too sacrilegious!