How queer can you go? Theory, normality and normativity

Vampirism offers the possibility of transcending the human condition, lycanthropy appears like a step not only backward, but downward on the evolutionary scale, into the dirt and excrement of earthly existence, a world both visible and distant from ordinary human operations. The vampire, in its immortality, can remain the same as it was on the day it became a vampire for potentially all of time, whereas the werewolf’s form changes constantly and unexpectedly, and the promise of immortality is generally not a feature of the lycanthropic life. None of the werewolf portrayals are, emic, and they tend to be therefore examples of the ‘queer as werewolf’ rather than ‘queer werewolves’. One of the most artistic treatments of the medieval sympathetic werewolf is that by Marie de France, Bisclavret, from her mid-to-late twelfth-century collection Lais. In the milieu of feminist and queer perspectives on mainstream culture, werewolves been used as symbols of the uncontrollable and dangerous nature of female sexuality.