Pangs of Pleasure, Pangs of Guilt: Girls, Sexuality and Desire

Abstract

This chapter focuses on sexuality and carnal desire in contemporary vampire fiction for adolescent women. Turning to the tropes of female virginity, blood consumption and sexual awakening in the vampire series by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast, and Richelle Mead, it explores the questions of girl sexual agency, pleasure and autonomy, transpiring through the accounts of the young heroines’ sexual debuts. The larger discourses on the social regulation of female sexual expression and the complex negotiations between the sexually knowing and the respectable girl are further articulated through the juxtaposition of human, dhampir and vampire sexual mores and politics of desire, and explored through the power plays embedded in slut shaming.