Summary: Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Melanie Burns <a name="melanie-burns" id="melanie-burns"><strong>Possessing and Consuming Desire: Vampire as Metaphor</strong></a> Traditionally a taboo topic, sexuality is surrounded with euphemisms. Mainstream romance novels are rife with metaphorical references to the sexual act which may act as a powerful conduit of ideological impact, structuring reality in certain ways and making it difficult to view the world in other ways (Fairclough, 1992: 195, 208). For example, George Lakoff (1987: 409-412) notes that metaphorical categories of lust - lust is a game, lust is hunger, a lustful person is an animal - overlap with those of anger, leading him to suggest that “sex and violence may be linked in the mind via these metaphors” (p. 412). In a similar manner, vampirism and sexuality evoke common metaphors: consumption, possession, compulsion and so on. Comparing vampire literature with more mainstream romantic fiction, I will argue that the two genres both use similar metaphorical constructions of sexuality, most notably ‘sex as possession’ and ‘sex as joining’. Indeed, the use of the paranormal as a narrative device may itself be viewed as a metaphor for human desire. The impact of such linguistic structuring is discussed with reference to dominance/submission, activity/reactivity, and female agency, and the potential effect on broader constructions of sexuality is broached. Melanie Burns (BLitt (Hons), BBNSc) is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at Monash University. Her research interests include taboo, offensive language and swearing, gender and language, discourse analysis, the psychology of language, and the language of the media. Her doctoral research centres on the discursive construction of sexuality in media texts.
