As compendiums of society's cultural dreads, monsters, especially vampires, can mean anything. The female vampire has functioned in particularly threatening and fascinating ways over the last two centuries. The depiction of female vampires in literature (by men) are almost verbatim reiterations of female degeneracy found in sexology, criminology and evolutionary scientific treatises from the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. The female vampire is man's sexual nightmare and sexual obsession. The medical, juridical, religious and mythological discourses circulating around female sexuality in the nineteenth-century explicitly take on vampiric terminology and imagery, reflecting this primal fear and loathing of the sexual instinct in women (women were seen as the central culprits in the degeneration of civilization--their blood and biology inherently marked them as closer to children and animals than to men). In a world where the "ideal" woman as sex object is one with a big mouth and no teeth, the female vampire is an uber-threat in a myriad of ways.

This paper works toward a cultural history of blood and women, sexuality and monstrousness. The paper first examines the nineteenth-century medical and juridical productions of (monstrous) female sexuality/degeneration, touching upon Dracula and the Van Helsing crew's desire to protect the Victorian racial gene pool, effecting the consolidation of science, empire and masculinity. Then, I begin to examine Drusilla in light of the multitude of 19th and 20th century discourses producing female sexuality--(scientific, psychoanalytic, etc) discourses that fe(e)d the male literary imagination and its writing of monstrous female sexuality. Drusilla rehearses, subverts and parodies these discourses and representations.

Finally, I will compare Buffy's sexuality with Drusilla's. Dru's monstrousness and sexual omnivorousness become a source of malignant power but also attractiveness, especially for those viewers for whom Buffy's sexual shame becomes tiresome. There is no guilt, no shame, no masochistic self-hatred for Dru. Maybe a woman has to be 200 or more years old before she can experience a playful, unpathologized sexuality, or maybe she has to be psychotic. After all, Lacan argued that the subject is predicated upon and constituted by lack--it is the ontological structure motoring subjectivity. If you lack lack then you're either dead or psychotic. And Dru's both.