True Blood

In recent years, shapeshifting characters in literature, film and television have been on the rise. This has followed the increased use of such characters as metaphors, with novelists and critics identifying specific meanings and topics behind them. This book aims to unravel the shapeshifting trope. Rather than pursue a case-based study, the works are grouped around specific themes--adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, disability, addiction, and spirituality--that are explored through the metaphor of shapeshifting. Because of its transformative possibilities and its flexibility, the shapeshifter has the potential to change how we see our world. With coverage of iconic fantasy texts and a focus on current works, this work engages with the shapeshifting figure in popular culture from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its starting point, this essay examines the veg- etarian and vegan politics and identities that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon’s 1997–2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 adaptation of it, and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris), which first aired in 2008. These texts highlight a shifting cultural discourse of rights, violence, and identity that indicates a moment of profound uncertainty with regard to what it means to be human in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human world.

Resumo: O presente artigo propõe uma análise das disputas discursivas em torno do seriado televisivo True Blood, buscando investigar de que forma este produto, contemporâneo, tensiona as formas de se narrar histórias sobre vampiros na TV americana. O referencial teórico-metodológico utilizado é o livro de Jason Mittell intitulado Genre and Television (2004). A análise produzida neste artigo busca colocar em prática os preceitos metodológicos de Mittell, que faz uso dos conceitos de genealogia Foucaultiana, como o próprio autor chama, e de formações discursivas, sempre ancorado em uma abordagem cultural.

Excerpt: Chapter 1. 

The Vegan Studies Project
Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror
Laura Wright
Foreword by Carol J. Adams

The foundational text for the nascent field of vegan studies

Reviews

“Combining personal narratives and gender studies with ecofeminism and pop culture, The Vegan Studies Project offers a brilliant analysis of the impact of vegans and veganism on America’s cultural landscape. Laura Wright’s argument for a new field of vegan studies rings true, and this book will be the foundational text.”
—Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals
“Studies like Wright’s—more than anything else—show how the vegan and vegetarian label and identity are a millstone and a barrier that hinders wider society’s willingness to engage seriously with the rights and wrongs of producing, killing, and eating so many animals. If our strategy is to lessen the harm wreaked on the animals with which humans share this planet, perhaps the strongest lesson we can draw from this work is to step aside from the vegan and vegetarian identity.”
—Tristram Stuart, author of The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times


Description

This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.

Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).

The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.

Often dismissed as superficial, vampire films and television series have been a dominant mode by which Hollywood has negotiated the ever-shifting contours of social difference in the United States since the 1920s and 1930s. Remarkably, critical analysis has paid little attention to the interconnections between racism, sexism, and speciesism—and almost no attention to ways that difference affects nonhuman animals. Drawing on work in animal studies and the posthumanities, this article explores the extent to which HBO’s True Blood (2008–present) can contribute to the ongoing process of decolonizing thinking from the everyday habits defined by anthropocentrism. By featuring supernatural species, it questions unwitting complicity with forms of cinematic and televisual realism in reifying political realism. The series is premised on the political organization of vampires who advocate for the right to the right of citizenship, exploring ongoing asymmetries in social and political power through resurrected Confederate soldiers, ghosts of murdered women and children, and terrorism in the form of rebel vampire groups exploding the factories where synthetic blood is manufactured and multiracial hate-groups of male and female humans wearing rubber “Barack Obama” masks and murdering shapeshifters. If the animal turn follows the postcolonial turn, then this article asks whether True Blood might suggest ways for humans to live ethically with other species and to think interspecies relations in ways that consider what interspecies ethics might also mean to humans still defined in terms of race, sex, nativity, and religion.

LGBT no seriado televisivo True Blood. A análise do presente artigo buscará identificar: a) de que forma os personagens LGBT tem sua sexualidade apresentada e como se desenvolvem seus relacionamentos amorosos; e b) de que forma estes personagens se inserem e contribuem para as tramas do seriado, a despeito da sua sexualidade. O embasamento teórico-metodológico do artigo é formado pelos seguintes autores: Susan Sontag, Denílson Lopes, Renata Pallottini, Patrick Holgan e David Letwin. A análise indica que o seriado possui grande número de personagens LGBT, caracterizados de formas múltiplas, e que estes personagens cumprem papeis ou funções narrativas distintas, não apenas ligadas às questões sexuais e/ou amorosas.

This article analyses the role of blood in the American series True Blood. It opens with a reassessment of sexual readings of vampires that complements previous work on their metaphorical significance for Queer Studies and focuses on the complex AIDS burger sequence in Season One. The article then explores how artificial blood, ‘TruBlood’, may function as a radical attack on vampires that mirrors how commodity culture has adapted to suit the needs of marginal communities. Lastly, the article turns to non-genetic blood ties to show how ‘true’ blood (i.e. personal or individual) is the only substance that actually unites creatures in the series.

Patriotiques, laudatives, acerbes ou résignées, les séries américaines portent un regard critique sur l Amérique contemporaine. Elles en interrogent les fondements, en déconstruisent le mode de vie et mènent par là même une radiographie de l identité américaine. Cet ouvrage analyse ces aspects à travers une sélection de séries récentes : Six Feet Under, True Blood, The Big Bang Theory.

Table des matières

« Purification morale et ode au conformisme : 7th Heaven ou la célébration de l’Amérique »
Aurélie Blot

« Du joggeur au cadavre : critique de l’idéologie du corps sain dans Six Feet Under »
Marie Parent

« Tony Soprano et l’américanité : un trouble identitaire moderne ? »
Yann François

« De JAG À Army Wives : la femme américaine à travers la série militaire »
Bruno Sasson

« La célébration du système politico-médiatique américain : mise en scène des démocrates dans The West Wing »
Eric Gatefin

« Rome, Sweet Rome : l’idée américaine du foyer dans la série Rome »
Vivien Bessières

« Quand la réalité historique rencontre The Grapes of Wrath : la reconstitution d’une époque dans Carnivàle »
Damien Alcade

« Drame et dramatisation : l’écriture de l’histoire américaine dans The Kennedys »
Alexis Pichard

« Battlestar Galactica : mémoire future de l’Amérique »
Mehdi Achouche

« “The Call of the Wild” : le héros de série télévisée dans la wilderness nord-américaine »
Ioanis Deroide

« Le melting-pot est mort : intégration et marginalisation dans la série True Blood »
Victor-Arthur Piégay

« “The Big Geek Theory” ou la revanche de la subculture geek »
Célia Sauvage

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equityeven as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed "quality" diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

Les vampires sont sortis du cercueil. Grâce à l’invention d’un sang synthétique, le Tru Blood, ils se sont libérés de la prédation clandestine. La Ligue Américaine des Vampires lutte dans les médias contre les stigmatisations morales et religieuses, pour la reconnaissance de leurs droits civiques. Mais derrière cette mascarade de l’intégration, ils demeurent inassimilables. La morsure du vampire et la puissance addictive de son sang érotisent les rapports sociaux avec les humains. Après ce premier coming out, une foule bigarrée d’êtres surnaturels sort peu à peu de l’ombre, métamorphes, loups-garous ou fées. Ils se mêlent à la population rurale de Bon Temps, petite ville de Louisiane qui devient soudain le théâtre d’une déconstruction généralisée des identités de genre.

Cet essai montre en quoi la série d’Alan Ball constitue une contribution originale aux études sur le genre et la sexualité. Situant les vampires queer de True Blood dans l’histoire du personnage depuis Stoker, il analyse les rapports complexes entre le sang et le sexe, le pouvoir et les pratiques sexuelles de liberté. En déconstruisant la normalité conjugale et familiale, True Blood apparaît ainsi comme l’anti-Twilight par excellence.

»Gefüge des Zuschauens« ist eine experimentelle medienwissenschaftliche Studie: Mit Collagen und im Dialog mit jungen Erwachsenen untersucht Julia Bee Rezeptionserfahrungen von TV-Serien wie »True Blood« und Filmen wie »The Dark Knight«. Indem Affekte und Perzepte dabei als Politiken der Wahrnehmung, des schöpferischen Begehrens und mannigfaltiger Differenzen betrachtet werden, zeigt die Studie, dass Gefüge, Prozesse und Kräfte ein konzeptuelles Gegengewicht zu einer linear-kausalen Wirkung bilden. Aus prozessphilosophischer Perspektive wird unter Rückgriff auf die Arbeiten von William James, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari und Brian Massumi die Zuschauer_innen-Forschung so als schöpferisches, heterogenes Gefüge entwickelt.

Blood has many contexts. It creates an affinity to others. It can be worshipped in a reliquary. It can instil horror when copious amounts are outside of the body. Blood represents life and the idea of it being taken without consent strikes a particular fear, worse than the loss of any other bodily fluid. The Christian Bible states in Leviticus 17:11 "the life of a creature is in the blood." In worldwide mythologies, there is only one creature known for its consistent conquest of blood. Vampires prey on the vulnerable, the weak and the criminal; having to coerce, entrance or outright kill in order to slake their thirst. Some vampires hunt indiscriminately; others prefer a targeted approach. Some always kill their victims; others devise a way to leave their prey alive.
Across several vampiric themes in movies and television, there are underlying different motivations when it comes to be pursuit of blood. In the traditional horror genre, blood is taken by any means necessary with no regard for whether the human victim survives the encounter. The hunt for blood is akin to a predator stalking prey. The main objective is to instil fear.
In the more romantic genre, blood is given freely by a human to a vampire or exchanged blood between two vampires as an act of love, trust and commitment. A relationship, romantic or plutonic, must be formed and this requires some social skills on the part of the vampire to persuade humans to give what is in their nature not to share.
This paper will analyse a number of differing faiths’ attitude towards blood, the methodology and effects of vampires drinking blood, its benefits or detriments and how the very act of taking or being given blood provides different contexts. This paper will also explore the consequences of vampires not drinking blood; what happens to the demons who refuse to partake in their natural instinct.
The drinking of blood can increase power and strength, it can quell an immense thirst and it can be deadly, to vampire and human. As Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer professes ‘It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead’.

http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/blood/

Cosa rende alcuni di noi – abitatori di ecosistemi narrativi sempre più densi e complessi – compulsivi spettatori dell'orrore? Cosa decreta la vivacità di tropi horror dotati di una storia già lunga alle spalle e il loro corrente, inesausto riuso catodico?

La proposta critica che avanziamo in questa sede è un invito a contemperare nell'analisi delle produzioni televisive seriali contemporanee, aspetti narratologici e produttivi, fattori (intra- e inter)testuali e sociologici, a partire dalla convinzione che le ragioni della fortuna di una serie (non solo) horror vadano ricercate precipuamente nei territori dove questi aspetti si intrecciano.

Proponiamo come caso di studio il successo di pubblico e di critica di una delle serie d'autore per eccellenza degli ultimi anni: True Blood, creata da Alan Ball per il network HBO nel 2008 e giunta nel 2014 alla settima e finale stagione. Da situare entro il contesto di un più ampio fenomeno di proliferazione del genere horror nella serialità televisiva contemporanea, True Blood offre un ottimo esempio dei nuovi meccanismi di distinzione tramite i quali la serialità televisiva odierna sta differenziando in maniera crescente segmenti di pubblico.

En la literatura y el cine góticos clásicos, el vampiro se concebía como un monstruo al que cabía eliminar. Sin embargo, en los últimos cuarenta años, novelas, películas y series revelan una voluntad de asimilarlo a la sociedad humana, un proceso conocido como domesticación o regeneración. Como metáfora de la diferencia sexual, racial, de género o de clase, tal asimilación representa, de acuerdo con los postulados de Foucault, una operación que lleva a cabo el poder para someterlas, integrándolas en el orden social y cultural establecido. La serie estadounidense True Blood (2008-2014) refleja a la perfección este proceso dual de regeneración que implica, a su vez, sometimiento. Relacionado con los supuestos de la corrección política, el nuevo monstruo ya no simboliza al «perverso» sino al «diferente» que se debe proteger y aceptar en el seno de la sociedad, pese al riesgo de cohesión social y amenaza para la familia que comporta.

Gothic became a self-parodying genre very quickly: Jane Austen wrote the self-reflexive 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798, though it did not see publication for nearly twenty years after that. Two hundred years later, the Gothic has expanded and adapted, and a mocking inter-textual awareness is a key quality for the popularity of the genre. The audience for this fiction has long been perceived as skewing feminine, as is recognized and critiqued in Austen’s work. The modern southern gothic of True Blood (2007-2014), and American gothic Supernatural (2005-ongoing), also recognize a majority female fanbase. Despite the very different eras of their generation, these fictions have much in common in their engagement with their audience and with their historical antecedents as Gothic genre fictions. Though the genre has always been self-reflexive and its heroes and heroines highly self-aware, the analytic capacity of the female audience is still denied and denigrated.

Triple X porn parodies have become increasingly common in recent years, with the release of (amongst others) The Sex Files: A XXX Parody; Tru: A XXX Parody; The Dark Knight Rises XXX; Man of Steel XXX: An Axel Braun Parody; and The Avengers XXX: A Porn Parody. Science fiction and fantasy has been prevalent in porn for much longer, however: 1961's Nude on the Moon showed humans having sex on the moon some eight years before we landed there, and 1968's Barbarella is perhaps one of the best known cult softcore films. Science fiction has long examined aspects of human existence, even while being derided as a poor cousin to its more literary genres and this fascination with sex - both within SFF itself and in SFF porn parodies - further speaks to the examination of human experience.

In a similar way to which the rise of SFF resulted in literary criticism of the genre, the prevalence of porn parodies has seen a rise in mainstream critiques of porn. The release of the Fifty Shades trilogy in 2012 resulted in over 1000 articles in the UK press discussing erotic literature and female sexuality, and recent UK legislation such as the rape revenge bill and the porn filter implemented in 2013 have further cemented the idea that porn is dangerous, immoral and a corrupting force on the youth of today. Critical analysis of porn, however, has sought to examine the ways in which porn has ______. In this way, porn and science fiction mirror each other - providing lenses through which contemporary society can be critiqued and alternative methods of living can be examined.

In this paper I examine three speculative fiction porn parodies: Lord of the G Strings: The Femaleship of The Ring, Twinklight and Tru: A XXX Parody. Each of these are interesting for different reasons: Lord of the G Strings replaces the almost exclusively male cast of The Lord of The Rings with an almost exclusively female cast; Twinklight depicts a healthy gay relationship between Edward and Bill instead of an abusive heterosexual relationship between Edward and Bella; and Tru was written and co-directed by female porn star Ashlynn Brooke. Each of these texts, then, undermines the arguments about porn as dangerous, abusive and corrupting, which are predominantly found in mainstream analysis. I examine the ways that each of these adapts and appropriates the source text, and the way in which gender and sexuality are articulated. I suggest that, far from porn being a heteronormative expression of sexuality, it can be - and when combined with speculative fiction is - a means through which heterosexual power relations are contested and reconstructed.

Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar como as extensões transmídia das séries televisivas Game of Thrones e True Blood, presentes nas páginas oficiais dos programas no Facebook, abrem espaço para interações sociais entre os telespectadores, criando um ambiente online propício para a emergência de determinadas práticas sociais. Nosso corpus de análise consiste em 5 aplicativos vinculados às respectivas páginas das séries no Facebook. Tomando como base as noções de Interação Social, convergência midiática e narrativas transmídia, o trabalho busca verificar as estratégias empregadas pelas extensões transmídia no que concerce à interação e troca social, à imersão no mundo ficcional e ao incentivo ao compartilhamento de conteúdos. Partimos do pressuposto de que estas séries representam a atual reconfiguração nos modos de assistir televisão, que implica em alterações nas lógicas de produção, circulação e consumo de conteúdos televisivos.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a imagem do vampiro na
contemporaneidade através da série televisiva True Blood. Habitando nosso imaginário desde folclores do medievo, este ser alcança sua potência na entrada na literatura gótica e difusão pelo cinema. Atualmente, o vampiro pode ser considerado uma tendência, sendo um produto de alta rentabilidade. Mas como é a imagem que possuímos de um ser tão camaleônico atualmente? Drácula, o grande representante parece não dar mais conta de nos mostrar o vampiro contemporâneo; Crepúsculo é um produto muito voltado para adolescentes românticas; resta à série da HBO nos mostrar uma visão mais interessante deste ser.

... to autonomous fan sites, some organized around the series, stars and characters, some around ... For its architects, the strategy sought to engage with perceived audience demand for complexity ... However, this agency needs to be examined in the context of the shaping influence ...

The American TV series True Blood uses vampires allegorically to represent disenfranchised minorities. This paper aims at accounting for discursive patterns of discrimination in it through a critical discourse-semantic analysis of its illocutionary subjects' speech acts. To achieve this, we integrate a theory of semantic modality and a dimensional theory of meaning to the general framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. The method of dimensional analysis of meaning, aided by an analysis of context and of discourse strategies, allows us to identify 13 discursive patterns of discrimination, which are general enough to carry over to the analysis of both fictional and factual discourse.

Scholarship on public relations in popular culture presents an uncritical and unproblematic understanding of the representation of public relations. The aim of this study is to offer an alternative reading by examining a television series, which foregrounds publicrelations techniques and irony, and by situating this study within postfeminist scholarship and the vampire genre. It analyses the representation of public relations in HBO’s television series, True Blood, focusing on the campaign to pass the Vampire Rights Amendment run by American Vampire League. The findings reveal there is no single reality of public relations. Instead, multiple discourses of public relations invite the audience to engage critically with public relations concepts and meaning-making. The representation of a powerful, female practitioner highlights the paradoxes of postfeminism and does not resolve gender issues. Public relations scholars must begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of representation in popular culture, including the subversive use of humour and irony to encourage critique of normative ideals, and the significance for popular understandings of, and engagement with, public relations.

Described by critics as '[a]udaciously sex-filled' [Goodman 2008: online], full of 'glorious excess' wherein 'sex is rampant' [Owen 2008: online] and the focus is 'more about [. . . ] having sex than [. . .] about vampires killing people' [Stasi 2009: online] HBO's True Blood (2008 – present) seems an unlikely source text for a porn parody. Yet whileTrue Blood's male lead Stephen Moyer asserts '[w]hat's great about the sex on the show is that it's real. We don't shy away. We show you what's not been seen before' [Moyer in Haynes 2009: online] New Sensations' Tru: A XXX Parody truly raises the 'stakes'.

This paper examines Tru: A XXX Parody in its industrial context, situating the hardcore pornographic adaptation within the bodies of work of director Lee Roy Myer, (now retired) star and writer Ashlynne (a.k.a Ashley) Brooke, and the increasing popular co-star James Deen all of whom have had a high level of involvement with porn parodies of popular programming. Further, by position the porn parody as a contemporary mode of adaptation worthy of study and critique, this paper asks whether porn parodies can be considered paratext, and if so, what effect this might have upon the canon.

En l'espace d'une décennie, le statut des séries télévisées américaines a radicalement changé en France. D'abord considérées comme des sous-produits issus d'un médium mésestimé, la télévision américaine, elles sont devenues des programmes fédérateurs et démocratiques, réunissant aussi bien les classes populaires que les élites intellectuelles. Il faut dire que les séries américaines ont connu un véritable essor qualitatif dont on trouve déjà les prémices dans les années 1980. Intelligentes et audacieuses, elles atteignent aujourd'hui un tel niveau d'excellence que l'on peut considérer les années 2000 comme le nouvel âge d'or des séries américaines.

... True Blood, serie prodotta dalla HBO tra 2008 e 2014, sotto la direzione creativa di Alan Ball fino alla quinta delle sue sette stagioni, ci propone un riuso spudorato dell'immaginario – anche il più stereotipo – legato ai vampiri, al contempo richiamando la nostra attenzione sulle modalità auto-consapevoli, ironiche, culturalmente engagé con cui l'operazione viene svolta ... Il risultato è una serie che offre al suo spettatore almeno due tipologie di gratificazione: quella più immediata e generalista del sesso, del sangue, del mostruoso, e quella, ulteriore, del gioco ironico e citazionistico, dell'horror come veicolo per la discussione di problematiche storiche e sociali di ampia portata.
Stiamo guardando Escape from Dragon House, quarto episodio della prima stagione.... Nel caldo umido e soffocante del profondo sud americano i personaggi fanno sesso e si trovano invischiati in torbide vicende di droga e violenza; mentre le rivendicazioni dei vampiri richiamano in modo esplicito e ammiccante le battaglie civili degli afro-americani e delle minoranze sessuali.

Dalla versatilità metaforica del tropo vampiresco, alle sue derive post-femministe; dal rapporto della serie televisiva con le opere letterarie di Harris alla agency della produzione e del marketing: testi, contesti, sottotesti di True Blood.

Lire en ligne : http://www.revue-eclipses.com/only-lovers-left-alive/revoir/le-rock-des-vampires-125.html

Pourquoi Jarmusch a-t-il eu besoin de faire un film de vampires ? Qu’a-t-il de nouveau et d’original à dire sur ce vieux thème ? Je montre dans cet article la manière dont Jarmusch marie son amour du rock « alternatif » avec le thème vampirique, et la manière dont l’un renouvelle l’autre.