Dr Katie

“Just as the vampires’ whiteness conveys their own deadness, so too their bringing of death is signalled by whiteness – their victims grow pale, the colour leaves their cheeks, life ebbs away. The horror of vampirism is expressed in colour: ghastly white, disgustingly cadaverous, without the blood of life that would give colour. The vampire's bite, so evidently a metaphor for sexuality, is debilitating unto death, just as white people fear sexuality if it is allowed to get out of control (out from under the will) – yet, like the vampire, they need it. The vampire is the white man or woman in the grip of a libidinal need s/he cannot master. In the act of vampirism, white society (the vampire) feeds off itself (his/her victims) and threatens to destroy itself. All”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“Old age is really a disguise that no one but the old themselves see through. I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me—sometimes even from itself—and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay. I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on. But”
― May Sarton, As We Are Now

“The development of an image of the glowing human being can be traced in European art. One index of it is the means for representing haloes. In medieval art, these are gold, very material, silhouetting the head; since the Renaissance, they have seemed to radiate from the head, in turn suffusing it with a glow. Rudolph”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture

“The secularisation and feminine specification of this seems to have been effected through the figure of the woman as angel, enlightened and enlightening. Theologically, angels have no gender, and in the Bible and medieval art they were depicted as male and manly. With the Renaissance, they begin to be depicted either as women or as men with ‘feminine’ traits (Underhill 1995: 56). Verbal and visual imagery of the angelic begins to be applied to idealised, or just simply adored, women. Edmund”
― Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture