Disruptive and troublesome, female vampires are an embodied oxymoron, a thrilling contradiction, fundamentally problematising received notions of women's passivity, nurturing and social conformity. Female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments and complacencies and reveal them as aspects of constructed gender identity resulting from social and cultural hierarchies. This chapter explores this destabilisation in Gothic fiction, arguing that performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of the construction and representation of female vampires, so that there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. The exciting threat offered by female vampires in Victorian texts such as Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Stoker's Dracula (1897) is terrifying, punished, but lingers, re-read as disturbing potential. The fiction of Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Jewelle Gomez, shows female vampires at the height of their representation as liberating, sexually transgressive feminist figures, provoking questioning and undermining received certainties of identity, family and hierarchies based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Recent texts such as Nalo Hopkinson's culturally inflected ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’ (2001) and Charlaine Harris's ethnicity-focused, neighbourhood novels refocus the female vampire in a more socially engaged role. The popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series (2005–8) suggests that the female vampire, at least in the United States, has been reclaimed for neo-conservatism as her Young Adult vampire romance endorses both eternal (quite chaste) romantic love and family values. There are, however, encouraging signs that something more topical and subversive has emerged to challenge the imaginative impasse of the vacuously flamboyant or merely mundane female vampire. This may be seen in two fascinating texts, each filmed: Byzantium (2013), a twenty-first-century tale of survival, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), an Iranian feminist vampire tale written in comic vein. So, contemporary women's vampires have arisen energetic and crusading, indicating a new feminist energy.