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132 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
manipulations of organic life by genetic engineers, a shift which is
reflected in Haraway’s more recent interest in the cultural politics of
transgenesis.
The celebration of monstrosity within theoretical circles has been
echoed in popular culture; as David Skal notes of vampires, ‘By the
mid-1980s, more people were reading about vampires than at any
time in history, and for the first time, they were identifying with them
positively.’ 6 A similar change of attitude was taking place with regard
to the werewolf; while sympathetically portrayed ‘gentle werewolves’
had been featured in the genre of fantasy since the 1930s, and relatively
humanized werewolf heroes were not unprecedented, horror stories of
werewolves in the 1980s frequently solicited readers’ identification with
the more ‘abhuman’ aspects of lycanthropy. J.C. Conaway’s Quarrel
with the Moon (1982), for example, follows Josh Holman’s attempts to
discover the truth behind a series of grizzly events in his home town
in West Virginia, only to conclude with his triumphant transformation
into a wolf and assumption of leadership in the community of delinquent
werewolves he has infiltrated. 7 Jeffrey Goddin’s Blood of the Wolf
(1987) and Nancy Collins’s Wild Blood (1994) depict similar scenarios,
in which protagonists who are initially resistant to their potential for
lycanthropy are gradually seduced by its pleasures and powers. 8
In feminist contexts, celebrations of the werewolf’s bloodlust have
also been inflected by the logic of revenge. Despite the apparent debt
to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, Pam
Keesey’s anthology Women Who Run with the Werewolves: Tales of
Blood, Lust and Metamorphosis (1996) contains many stories that
privilege the more ‘abhuman’ aspects of lycanthropy, rather than
idealizing the female connection to nature. 9 Most of the stories in the
book depict the persecution or oppression of wolf-women in some form
or another, through the expectations of their families, institutionalization
on the grounds of insanity, objectification by men, mistreatment
by doctors, or even through their own habits of self-regulation. But
none of the female werewolves in Keesey’s anthology succumbs to the
tragic death of the Wolf Man; rather, lycanthropy is an opportunity
for revenge and survival.