characters, the text’s poetics and aesthetics or metaphoric configurations (Krass quoted in Simbürger 53). Doty adds that queer readings are not wishful or wilful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular cultural texts and their audiences all along.” In the case of horror films [...] this “complex range of queerness” circulates through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/her relation to normality. (Doty quoted in Benshoff 99)

Crucially, rather than explicit or overt queerness this research will investigate manifestations of queerness as literary tropes, analogies, allegories, metaphorisations, metonymies …show more content…
Harry M. Benshoff’s useful “The Monster and the Homosexual” (1997) focuses on the heterosexuals’ fright of queers and its metaphorisation in the form of monstrosity. Additonally, William Hughes’ ““The Taste of Blood Meant the End of Aloneness”: Vampires and Gay Men in Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls” (2009) discusses the vampirism trope as manifested in Brite’s novel. In addition, George E. Haggerty’s Queer Gothic (2006) discusses appearances of queerness in more traditional Gothic texts. Ken Gelder, on the other hand, focuses specifically on vampire fiction in his Reading the Vampire (1994), where he provides a useful description of vampirism in Rice’s work. Moreover, the antology Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (1997) covers many interesting perspectives beyond queerness on the vampirism trope. However, one of the most useful sources for this research has been Manuel Simbürger’s Queer Reading: Dekonstruktion von Heteronormativität in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010), in which he carries out an outstanding and thorough research of the different metaphors used in the