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In 1999, Teresa Goddu, Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, published an article titled "Vampire Gothic" in which she made a compelling assertion about the role of gothic conventions in works by African-American writers. According to Goddu,
The gothic [...] needs to be examined as a locale for intervening into the often imprisoning narratives of racial discourse. [...] The lengthy tradition of the gothic's deployment by African-American authors [...] is one place to begin such an intervention. From Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass to Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, the gothic has served as a useful mode for African-American authors to resurrect and resist America's racial history. As the producers of terror instead of its text, African-American writers use the gothic to haunt back, re-working the gothic's conventions to intervene in discourses that would demonize them. (137-38)
Within the realm of this tradition of vampire fiction, one of the most intriguing attempts at this type of "haunt[ing] back" may be found in The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez.(1) Aside from being one of the relatively few vampire novels to establish a female vampire as the protagonist, The Glida Stories further complicates issues of race, gender, and sexuality by presenting a worldview from the perspective of a primary character who is not only a woman, but who is Black and lesbian as well.(2) Through her creation of Gilda, Gomez acknowledges how those whom the dominant society has marginalized are often labeled monstrous in the iconography of popular discourse. She also places her character in a position to challenge that label, thereby "reappropriat[ing] the cultural space of genre fiction from the subject rather than the object position" (Jones 152).
From the beginning, the Girl (later renamed "Gilda") possesses a highly complex identity in which every facet of her being has been labeled Other by the dominant culture even before she becomes a vampire. Miriam Jones also notes this concept in her essay titled "The Gilda Stories: Revealing the Monsters at the Margins," where she states that "Gilda's outcast status is situated within a nexus of exploitation" (154). Vampirism, then, represents merely one element of an inextricably intertwined set of identity signifiers that set her...