True Blood and Philosophy

Like much of Western society, Bon Temps discriminates against anyone who differs from the norm. The value placed on being “normal” appears in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Thankfully, philosophical inquiry into the perception of disability has made us more aware of these forms of discrimination. In particular, disability theory has added physical difference to the categories of identity used to define both individual experience and society as a whole. Disability scholars Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson note that while “disability tends to be figured in cultural representations as an absolute state of otherness that is opposed to a standard, normative body,” physical variation and challenges are normal parts of the human experience.¹ The 2000 Census counted nearly 50 million disabled U.S. residents—almost one in five people over age five—and hardly anybody has the flawless physical symmetry we see in the retouched photographs so common in mass media. To close the gap between the reality of human experience and the ideals we tend to internalize, disability theorists believe that “disability can and should be interwoven . . . into the critical matrix” we use to study our culture.² Along these lines, disability theory examines the cultural meanings that attach to physical difference and teases out ways that difference and disability are stigmatized in law, social practice, art, film, and literature. Disability theory also demands respect for those whose bodies or cognitive strengths do not fit society’s norms, while highlighting their abilities and insights—in faerie-language, their “light.”

Deadly Differences and Being Differently Dead

True Blood and Philosophy brings to light the complexity of the politics surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in Ball’s television series and Harris’s novels. On True Blood and in the Southern Vampire Mysteries, the entrance of supernatural beings into the human world tests the tolerance of a community already saddled with many other forms of bigotry. The anti-vampire slogans and laws echo those targeted at homosexuals and ethnic minorities, while Harris’s description of werewolves as a large secret subculture within the U.S. military alludes to the controversy that surrounded “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Reimagining these familiar struggles in the genre of magical realism, Ball and Harris hold up a mirror to our own society.

True Blood presents competing cultures living side by side. Although human beings, vamps, and Weres interact daily, individual members of each of these groups often consider members of other groups inferior. Stake-wielding extremists like the Fellowship of the Sun make it clear that the “unnatural” vampires do not meet their standards for personhood. Meanwhile, vampire extremists such as Russell Edgington feel superior to human beings and Weres, and Nan Flanagan hypocritically promotes the Vampire Rights Amendment while continuing to feed on human beings. Vampires don’t discount human beings as unnatural, but human beings may be regarded as prey and are excluded from the basic rights and protections granted to the undead under vampire law. Werewolves, in turn, are generally hostile to vampires. Addicts such as Debbie Pelt are willing to work for vamps, but they see their employers merely as sources of V, not as persons entitled to respect—as Debbie and her boyfriend Cooter demonstrate when they drink from a tortured Bill Compton. Across the spectrum, only the most enlightened members of each species manage to see past their differences and embrace members of the other species as equals.

Yet True Blood also avoids oversimplifying the experience of physical difference, as it draws attention to the basic dynamic at work behind most discriminatory attitudes: we tend to privilege whatever qualities the majority of society deems normal and to attack or objectify those who don’t conform on the grounds that they’re subhuman or unnatural. Disability and deviation from the physical norm are among the differences that have made people into targets, despite the fact that what constitutes the norm varies widely across time and place, reflecting the priorities and biases of a particular cultural moment. For example, the full-figured models in Baroque paintings looked ideal to Rubens, grossly overweight in the 1980s, and fairly normal today. Like changing ideals of beauty, the definition of disability also depends not only on physical reality, but on culture as well.

On True Blood and in the Southern Vampire Mysteries, not all bodies are equally accepted, even within a single species. Real physical problems are difficult to overcome, as the inbred werepanthers of Hot Shot understand in Harris’s novels. Some are unable to complete the change from human to panther, others have eyes that don’t return to human form, and many Hot Shot women are unable to bear children. Consequently, their leader, Calvin Norris—who’s a far more sympathetic character in the novels than he is on television—seeks new blood to increase the community’s genetic variety. Harris’s vampire Bubba, né Elvis, is permanently saddled with cognitive disabilities after being transformed in a state of drugged degeneracy. Even individuals without disability find that their value is determined by whether their bodies conform to certain ideal standards of height, weight, complexion, and symmetry. These standards of physical beauty torment characters such as Eddie Gauthier, who sought vampirism as the path to glamour and attractiveness, only to find himself transformed into a below-average vampire still exiled to the social periphery.

Like physical differences among ordinary human beings, supernatural differences are easily framed as forms of disability or internalized as a sense of inferiority. Harris’s Sookie, although affectionate and nurturing, assumes that she should not have children. When she meets the werewolf Alcide Herveaux in Club Dead, she discovers that he, too, is hesitant to have children who would struggle to fit into the human world. Alcide’s reluctance ended his relationship with his fiancée, Debbie. When Sookie and Alcide assume that it would be irresponsible for someone with a genetic tendency toward difference to pass along their genes, their attitude mirrors that of the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Desiring to use selective reproduction to improve the human race, the eugenics movement provided justification for the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities in many nations and even for the Nazi Party’s T4 Program, which euthanized disabled children and adults.

Immersion in the supernatural world seems to encourage self-acceptance: exposure to diversity and new value systems breaks down internalized judgments like those that trouble Sookie and Alcide. Sookie gains new appreciation for her talents when she realizes that vampires and Weres value her telepathy. Her introduction to these cultures shows her that there’s more than one way to view her difference—that some see her as having an added ability, rather than a disability. Under Bill’s guidance, she stops simply trying to block her telepathy and instead focuses on controlling it and using it for good. Her telepathic skills can earn her a much better living than waitressing does, and she can even solve crimes and protect her friends and acquaintances. Although still childless herself, she steps in as a protector for her cousin Hadley’s son and even uses her ability to save the life of a missing child in Definitely Dead, uncovering an accident that left him unconscious in a school garbage can. Discovering valuable new applications for her telepathy, Sookie learns that she’s not only useful but downright irreplaceable.

Valuing Difference—Dead or Alive

Sookie’s growth toward self-acceptance is heartwarming, but True Blood shows a risk that comes with valuing difference when that value isn’t accompanied by respect or a sense of equality. Sookie must resist the attempts of vampires to treat her valuable ability as something to be bought and sold and to consider her precious blood something to be consumed. In the first two seasons of True Blood and in Harris’s novels, Sookie discovers that those who appreciate her ability also tend to regard her as an object to be possessed. At different times, Eric Northman and Queen Sophie-Anne Leclerq—and, in the novels, Andy Bellefleur and even the FBI—try to monopolize her services. Treating Sookie as a prize, rather than as a person, they deploy money, seduction, coercion, and physical force to secure her cooperation. Sookie even discovers that Bill’s return to Bon Temps was in the service of Sophie-Anne’s curiosity and greed: he was sent to investigate Sookie as a potential asset for his vampire queen.

Although in the novels she’s sought primarily for her telepathy, Sookie finds that her faerie blood places her at even greater risk in True Blood. Bill accidentally discovers that a large dose of Sookie’s blood provides him with temporary protection from the sun. Sookie and Bill’s talk with Claudine in the faerie world confirms that Sookie has a faerie ancestor. They also learn that faeries were nearly rendered extinct because vampires desired their blood so avidly. Sookie’s cousin Hadley underscores the risk associated with having faerie blood. Hadley first alerted Sophie-Anne to Sookie’s existence, but it turns out that Hunter, Hadley’s son, also shares Sookie’s faerie heritage. As soon as Sookie confirms Hunter’s ability, Hadley takes him and flees, urging Sookie to go into hiding, too. In the final episodes of season 3, the pursuit of Sookie as a valuable possession becomes a matter of life and death for her when Eric uses the protective properties of her blood in a plot to destroy Russell Edgington. Burned but now aware of Sookie’s unique qualities, Russell hoped to use her blood to resurrect his lover, Talbot. Bill’s subsequent attempt to immobilize both Russell and Eric in cement is motivated, he says, by his fear that Sookie will never be safe as long as any vampire knows about her heritage.

The risk of exploitation Sookie faces is characteristic of periods in human history when difference has been valued but not respected. The nineteenth-century freak show, for instance, created employment opportunities for individuals who often had few other options, but at the cost of their dignity. In her study of Victorian freak performances, Nadja Durbach takes a new look at Joseph Merrick, immortalized in story and film as the so-called Elephant Man. Merrick used his sensational differences to escape the workhouse after his condition left him unable to hold factory employment. Like Sookie, he found that his difference could be profitable.³ At the same time, however, profit can encourage exploitation, and the differences between the viewing audience and a freak performer allow many audience members to enjoy the show without acknowledging the humanity of the individual on stage. For instance, the bodies of both Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus who performed throughout Europe in the early years of the nineteenth century, and Julia Pastrana, a bearded woman who performed in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, were preserved after death for continued exhibition at fairs and museums, as if they were nothing more than exotic objects and not the remains of human beings.⁴ Although Sookie’s differences lie in her blood, rather than in her bodily structure, she’s also at risk of being valued in a way that’s indifferent to whether she’s dead or alive.

Sookie, however, has an advantage those Victorian performers lacked: with luck and effort, she can hide her difference from the world. In fact, True Blood’s portrayal of difference often illustrates the value of anonymity. “Playing normal” is an important skill if one faces rejection by human beings or exploitation by vampires, a lesson that Hadley seems desperate to impress on her cousin and son. The best protection against abuse or exploitation for those who are different is to create the illusion of normality. Yet although the series doesn’t gloss over social biases against difference, it does suggest that what we consider to be “abnormal” may be more prevalent than we realize. Think of Tara Thornton’s alarmed exit when she learns that Sam Merlotte is a shifter. Her reaction doesn’t seem to come from any particular fear of Sam or his kind, but from her frightening realization that most things are not as they seem, even in areas of her life that she considered safe and familiar. The success of many True Blood characters at hiding their identities, along with the ongoing introduction of new forms of supernatural difference, shows us that judging by appearances alone is naive. In Bon Temps, the differences we easily perceive are far less provocative than those that lie beneath the surface.

A Treasure to Be Protected

Despite the threats Sookie faces, her discovery of her faerie heritage brings her an increased sense of empowerment. She receives the first hint of her new power in one of her face-offs with Maryann Forrester, but she experiences it in an even more robust way in her confrontation with Russell’s henchmen. Her newfound ability to defend herself by shooting beams of light from her hands reveals that her role goes beyond listening to and reflecting on the thoughts of others. She can also exert real force on the world. When Sookie visits the faerie world in a vision, Claudine urges her not to let the vampires “steal her light.” Within this new faerie culture, the trait that Sookie once viewed as a disability to overcome is recast as a treasure to protect. Sookie takes this message to heart. She rethinks her relationship with the vampire community and decides that safety and self-respect must be her first priorities. In the final minutes of season 3, Eric confirms that Bill’s arrival in Bon Temps was triggered by the vampire culture’s desire to possess and exploit Sookie. Infuriated, Sookie rescinds Bill’s access to her home. Until she’s sure the vampires care for her as a person and not merely as an exotic prize, she wants nothing to do with them. Her journey toward empowerment is far from smooth, however, and her connection to the vampire world is far from over. Still, as new perceptions of difference undercut Sookie’s childhood insecurities, she’s sure to become stronger, braver, and more powerful.

While True Blood recognizes the varied ways society privileges what it takes to be normal, it also celebrates a diversity that challenges us to rethink the line that separates humanity and monstrosity. As supernatural and human cultures continue to intermingle in Bon Temps, ingrained attitudes about difference come under scrutiny, and new perspectives challenge old prejudices. Sookie may continue to hide her light, if only for self-preservation, but she knows its value and refuses to allow it to be snuffed out.

4 Baartman’s body was dissected and parts were displayed at La Musée de l’Homme well into the twentieth century. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–17,” in Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed., Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 66–95. Pastrana’s body was preserved whole and displayed at European fairs before falling out of the public eye and eventually reappeared at a museum in Norway. See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana,” in J. Cohen and G. Weiss, eds., Thinking the Limits of the Body (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 195–218.

Deadly Differences and Being Differently Dead

Valuing Difference—Dead or Alive

A Treasure to Be Protected

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