Bloodsucking Feminists

On the morning of June 02, 2013, a young mother woke up from a dream and began to write. Just over two years later, that book was published and soon became a phenomenon.

It’s been ten years since Twilight was published, so take a trip back in time to 2005 and see what we remember, what do we have to say now and most of all find out was Twilight really as terrible as we thought it was?

(Answer: Yes. No. Maybe.)

Title: Pretentious Dishevelment

In 2013, director Jim Jarmusch released a film that looked like the Bloodsucking Feminists’ – not to mention fangirls everywhere – dreams come true: a Tom Hiddleston vampire movie. With a stellar cast and beautiful visuals, it’s a veritable feast of a film. But look a little deeper, beyond the big hair and big drama, and you’ll find cultural appropriation, the rarity of a romantic relationship where the woman is much older partner, and a very, very white Detroit.

(But also naked vampire Tom Hiddleston.)

Title: Blood Is The Drug

Get ready as we throw so much shade on Lord Byron even a vampire would curse the night as we touch on the last of our “big three”: The Vampyre by John William Polidori. A short episode for a short story, we’ll discuss syphilis, the pains of being Lord Byron’s doctor, that night in Geneva in the year without a summer and the role of women as victims and plot devices.

Title: Isn’t It Byronic?

After seven years of research (and one nightmare caused by too much crab meat covered in mayonnaise), Bram Stoker wrote and published the seminal work Dracula. An epistolary novel, Dracula tells the story of the titular vampire’s attempted move to England from the point of view of his lawyer, his victims and their friends.

Join us as we discuss the Sisters, syphilis and other fun diseases, Lucy and her men, unintentional comedy, Mina being the perfect woman for being like a man, Dracula as an abuser and Jonathan his triggered victim, Gary Stu van Helsing, and Dracula as Count Not-Really-Appearing-In-This-Book.

Title: Undead, Oversexed and Over Here

In 1871, a serial work by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was published in The Dark Blue. Titled Carmilla, it told the story of Laura, a lonely teenage girl whose life is forever changed when a beautiful but strange girl is invited to stay at her family’s schloss.

Carmilla either created or helped set in stone a number of vampire tropes still in existance today: ethereal beauty, hypnotic ability and, of course, the “lesbian” vampire.

Join us as we talk about Carmilla as a woman, a monster, a con-artist, an archetype, a web-series and, of course, a novella that changed a genre.

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The very first episode of The Bloodsucking Feminists is live!

Once upon a time there lived two young women, half a world apart. One day one of them said, “I want to do a podcast about vampires.” And the other, who also liked vampires, replied, “Can we call ourselves The Bloodsucking Feminists?”

And so, a podcast was born.

In this minisode find out more about the podcast’s origins and schedule, how we got sucked into vamires, our favourites – as well as the answer to the ultimate question: would we take the bite?

Read more on the episode page