Vampires, Body Snatchers, and Galen
Cyndy Hendershot’s article Vampire and Replicant: The One-Sex Body in a Two-Sex World attempts to discuss the one-sex theory in the context of film noir and Victorian works. She specifically uses Bram Stoker’s Dracula and two film versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Don Siegel and Philip Kaufman. The article looks at the role androgyny plays in undermining heterosexuality, and thereby, normality in these horror works.
However, though the article bases itself in ancient Greek theory, and, like Laqueur, draws together Galen and Freud specifically in the first few pages, it does not ever describe how these works relate the female and male bodies as one, or view the female body as an inversion/less perfect version of the male’s. Rather, it uses the terms “one-sex model” and “two-sex model” to refer to portrayals of bodies challenging and adhering to sexual norms, respectively.
The article uses the phrase “one-sex model” to refer to androgynous bodies, lying outside the male-female sex binary. Vampiric bodies in Dracula, for example, are androgynous as well as inhuman. Specifically, the article discusses Mina and Lucy, two girls who are turned into vampires. While they keep the same body they had when they were alive, they are referred to in the book as “it,” and their sex organs are overshadowed by their bloodsucking mouths. (This idea is both Freudian and Galenic, invoking the symmetry between the upper and lower mouths in ancient Greek medicine.) In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, too, the monstrous bodies are “blank,” and reproduce asexually. Hendershot notes the discomfort created by this semblance of humanity — it “troubles traditional two-sex notions of the body.” She then furthers that the “one-sex body” in an environment where the two-sex model is the standard is creepy and unnatural.
The presence of androgynous, monstrous bodies distort the “normal” reality of the horror films and books. The article equates normality with heterosexual masculinity, and then describes the various ways these horror works undermine this normality. Heterosexual sex, for example, is impossible in Dracula, which is demonstrated in the frightened newlywed main characters. Furthermore, in Kaufman’s version of the Body Snatchers, Geoffrey, the first victim, presents an exaggerated display of masculinity. His transformation into a “pod person” sets his masculinity in the context of thwarted normality/heterosexuality. This idea of distorting reality seems completely foreign to Galen’s ideas, though. Heterosexual sex is completely possible in the ancient Greek notion of the one-sex model.
One way in which the piece does strongly invoke ancient Greek and Roman ideas is through the ambiguity of fluids. This mirrors the ancient model of the body where blood, semen, breast milk, etc. are all combined. In the Body Snatchers, the plant pods ooze an ambiguous white fluid when they open. And in Dracula, Mina drinks blood from a cut on Dracula’s chest. Stoker associates this fluid with semen and menstrual blood, and though Hendershot does not mention this, I would also include breast milk.
Hendershot bases her ideas of the “one-sex model” in Freudian and Galenic theory, but throughout the piece, she seems to broaden her definition of what the one-sex body is. She operates through Laqueur to get to ancient Greek theories, rather than analyzing them in direct conversation with the modern works, which I think would have been a lot more interesting. However, the article does provide a view into how this formerly prominent model causes conflict in the ways sexed bodies are viewed today.
Furthermore, while Hendershot explores the way in which these horror works queer normality and gender, the way in which they equate gender non-conformity with unnatural monstrosity seems, to me, to enforce cultural norms. Whether the young couple in Dracula or the heavily gendered individuals in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the protagonists and victims in all three works adhere to heteronormative expectations. The horror works, then, seem to portray the androgynous monsters corrupting their “normalcy.”
