2015 | UnderCurrents 19 51 tury literature can be read as an early imagining of species-challenging hy- bridity, a hybridity that is also inherent in the terms ‘queer’ and ‘amphibious.’ I propose that ‘queer,’ ‘amphibious,’ and ‘vampire’ might be viewed as contigu- ous concepts, animating an ecological aesthetic that “ruthlessly denature[s] and de-essentialize[s]” the concept of nature in vampire texts (Morton, “Ecol- ogy as Text” 1). Recent queer and ecologically-in- formed criticism has focused on the vampire as “a kind of queer nature that refuses the binary opposition between the natural and the unnatural, especial- ly in terms of the sexual” (Azzarello 139). In this paper, I build on previous descriptions of the vampire as “eco-de- constructive,” reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) alongside Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), a text in which a queer female vampire is explicitly de- scribed as “amphibious.” The amphibi- an has been given an important place in the critic Timothy Morton’s recent at- tempts to theorize “dark ecology” (Ecol- ogy Without Nature 185). Morton calls for a re-estimation of “Nature,” demon- strating that “[l]ife-forms are constantly coming and going, mutating and becom- ing extinct” (21). Rather than venerat- ing Nature as a single, identifiable fetish object, Morton encourages us to see the world as ecology in motion, as a mul- tiplying series of interconnected life forms ( and texts). The Latin ambo, “in both sides,” infuses Morton’s account of how species-relation and aesthet- ics might be simultaneously rethought along ecological, interconnected lines. There is an ethical imperative, Morton argues, to value and protect the margin- al, the ambivalent, and in particular the amphibious: [I]f current industrial policies remain unchecked . . . spaces, such as coral reefs, and liminal spaces (Latin, limen, bound- ary) such as amphibians, will be increasingly at risk of be- ing wiped out . . . I mean here to support these margins. As a matter of urgency, we just can- not go on thinking of them as in “between.” We must choose to include them on this side of human social practices, to fac- tor them into our political and ethical decisions. (51) The amphibian must, for Morton, be brought into our view of what it means to be a social human, and might be used to challenge our distinction be- tween Nature and ourselves, between subject and object. The amphibious, then, is a liminal category that might be used to problematize the conceptual co- herence of “species,” and to produce an inclusive and ecological version of the human. For Morton, the ecologically re- “Queer reworlding,” Donna Haraway has recently argued, “depends on reorient- ing the human” ( Companion Species xxiv). In Haraway’s account, “[q]ueering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/non- human” (xxiv). Haraway is one of a number of critics who have recently highlighted the ways in which the disruptive energies of queer theory might intersect with an ecological disruption of species categorization. 1 Queering, then, is seen in this article as necessarily extending in ecological directions, challenging the conceptual integrity of the ‘natural’ and the ‘human,’ alongside the heteronormative and anthronormative 2 apparatus these categories have often supported (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 22). Haraway famously gave us the species-disruptive hybrid figure of the cyborg as a “political myth” that might help us with the task of “reinventing” Nature (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 149). I propose in this article that other ambiguous, “more-than-human” creatures (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 23) presented in the literature of previ- ous centuries might be read as the imaginative forerunners of such a reinvention. Spe- cifically, I will suggest that the unruly figure of the vampire in late nineteenth-cen- NAOMI BOOTH Dark Ecology and Queer, Amphibious Vampires