What is it about?
What does the story of Sookie Stackhouse tell us about the popular representations of female sexuality? How do the gendered scripts of sexual freedom and constraint transform when the heroine migrates from the novels onto the TV screen? This article compares the imageries of female agency and desire conjured in the horror-paranormal romance series The Southern Vampire Mysteries (Charlaine Harris, 2001-2013) and HBO TV show True Blood (Allan Ball, 2008–2014).
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Why is it important?
As international best-sellers with an extensive fan base and strong transmedia presence, the Sookie Stackhouse stories raise important questions about popular perceptions of women and desire. Cultural imageries of sexuality, agency and power are inseparably linked with the larger social and political discourses, and can work to subvert or perpetuate the narratives of social inequities in times when movements like #MeToo signal yet again the urgency of interrogating oppressive patterns of sexuality and the body.
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This page is a summary of: Lustful ladies, she-demons and good little girls: female agency and desire in the universes of Sookie Stackhouse, Continuum, January 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2019.1569393.
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