Chris Banyas

Editor-in-Chief

Vampire!

The term conjures images of a gaunt, gnarled-fingered Graf Orlok from the 1922 film “Nosferatu,” shadow slowly and steadily climbing the wall. Or perhaps the images rendered might be those of a more sparkly version of the undying ala “Twilight.”

Either way, DJ Williams, associate professor of social work at ISU, and expert on self-identified vampires, has been working for years to promote understanding of this subset of human identity, and to promote awareness within the field of social work, with the ultimate goal of treating all human beings, irrespective of any personal tendency or preference, as human beings. 

“I’m really kind of a critical social scientist,” said Williams.

Williams holds a master’s degree in exercise science, a master’s degree in social work, along with a Ph.D. and a post-doc in leisure science. In his words, “I’ve been in school a long time. I can’t get out of school.”

In addition to teaching at ISU, Williams spends time in California at the Center for Positive Sexuality, and will be visiting UCLA in October to share his work.

Initially Williams started out by examining consensual sadomasochism, a psychological tendency or sexual practice characterized by both sadism, or the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others, and  masochism, or the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification from one’s own pain or humiliation.

“[Consensual sadomasochism] is often assumed to be problematic and dangerous, psychopathological, and the research which continues to accumulate says, no, that’s really not what’s going on here,” said Williams. “So these people, they may prefer different kinds of activities and different kinds of things, but they’re psychologically healthy, well-adjusted, no problem.”

Within the realm of leisure studies, Williams looks at what is known as deviant leisure.

“If people are doing something for leisure purposes, and it’s unusual, then I’m curious about it,” said Williams. “When we talk about deviance, and we look at the psych literature, deviance is assumed to be pathological, so there’s a whole discourse from the psych sciences about that. Then you’ve got sociology that says this is just a difference in norms, so we have to look at different social spaces, so it’s a whole different literature. Then if we look at anthropology, it broadens even still.”

The prospect of human identities, and in this case self-identified vampires, thus exist at the confluence of several major scientific disciplines, which makes attempting to tackle the idea a daunting one.

The concept of a lifestyle being labelled as deviant might seem, on the surface, an overly subjective label, but according to Williams, it is looked at objectively.

“With my research, I look more at ethics,” said Williams. “So I may see some practices that seem really strange to me, but is it consensual, are people informed, are people being blatantly harmed, are people caring about each other, respectful, are there safety concerns, those kinds of things are much more the issue than saying ‘this is really weird’ or ‘this is crazy.’”

Williams, along with his research assistant Emily Prior, started a journal entitled “Journal of Positive Sexuality,” which saw its first volume published in June 2015.

The goal of the journal is to offer a resource to academics as well as non-academics that is more readily available, and presented in language that is more accessible to any interested party than that of the majority of academic journals.

Williams and Prior have also co-written a paper about social workers working with clients who practice BDSM.

“That paper has been rejected numerous times now. The problem we have with that is that the reviewers and the editors assume that this is pathological, even though our lit review says it’s not,” said Williams. “It’s really frustrating because that’s a myth. Look at our lit review. In our journal we published a paper about that process called ‘Does Social Work Need a Good Spanking?’”

Williams first became aware of the self-identified vampire community around 2005, while working with a dominatrix in regards to furthering his understanding of the BDSM community.

“I came to find out in the course of our interaction over several weeks that she identified as a vampire, and I had never heard of this. I never knew there were such people,” said Williams.

According to Williams, there are two different types of self-identified vampires:  the lifestyle vampires, and the true vampires.

Think of the difference between the two like that of Good Charlotte fans hanging outside of a Hot Topic, head-bobbing to “The Anthem,” looking cool, while Minot Threat fans slam dance in the pit to the pulse pounding pace of “Straight Edge.”

“There are two ways to understand that:  one is the real vampires, and by that, they call themselves real in quotes to differentiate themselves from the lifestylers,” said Williams. “Real vampires, it’s all about energy, for the lifestylers, it’s all about the persona of the vampire. Real vampires say, ‘this is a chronic condition.’ This is who they are.”

Real vampires, in reference to energy, might be labeled as sanguinarians, or those who feed on blood to make up the energy deficit, psychological vampires, or those who feed off psychological energy, and even pranic vampires, those who feed off breath or nature.

One of the challenges to providing care for self-identified vampires lies in human nature itself:  bias.

“In codes of ethics, we have common ethical standards. One is embracing human diversity. That certainly applies with vampires, like it does with anybody else,” said Williams. “Cultural competence and your own biases, the therapist’s biases, that certainly applies with all kinds of minorities, and it applies here.”

Williams and Prior recently published “Do We Always Practice What We Preach? Real Vampires’ Fears of Coming out of the Coffin to Social Workers and Helping Professionals” in the journal titled “Critical Social Work.”

Eleven adult participants were selected to participate in the study referenced in the paper. According to the study itself, “of these, nearly all had college experience; four had earned college degrees, and two had attended graduate school.”

“The mean age of participants was 37.6 years. Reported religious affiliations included five pagan, four Wiccan, one spiritual, and one of no affiliation.”

As part of the study, Williams and Prior utilized a method that is known as poetic representation.

“There are different ways that that method can be conducted. The real purpose of these kinds of methods, number one, is to show rather than tell, and to really bring out lived experience,” said Williams. “We can look at people’s stories, we can present things in a story and capture that rich, thick description from participants points of view.”

After gathering data, Williams examined the results, and pulled out the most common themes and words given by participants, and molded them into a poem that would be easily understandable by people who might not have any prior knowledge or experience with self-identified vampires.

For more information on self-identified vampires, please see the full body of the study by visiting www1.uwindsor.ca/criticalsocialwork/Vampires.