Virgin Envy : The Cultural (In)significance of the Hymen ed. by Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr (review)

In the little remembered 1985 B movie and comedy-horror flick, Once Bitten, the central premise revolves around a joke about virginity, specifically male virginity: a vampiress is required to drink the blood of a young male virgin three times every year by Halloween so as not to lose her immortality and youthful appearance. Alas, modern times being what they are, she finds this task increasingly difficult. Cue the entrance of high schooler and male virgin, Mark Kendall (played by a young Jim Carrey, of all people), as desperate to lose his virginity as the vampire is for him to keep it. Less terrifying than farcical, the film imagines a world where virginity is a scarce commodity, easily defined, and even more easily lost. In the end, the monstrous countess is defeated not by stakes and torches but, rather, when Mark and his girlfriend have sex – in a coffin no less. If only all such movie monsters were so easily conquered. Yet the film brings up more questions about the nature of virginity than it perhaps intends. Among them, how can you tell if someone is a virgin anyhow and what is so special about virgins?

Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In)significance of the Hymen, a collection of articles edited by Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr, addresses these and many other questions about the nature, limits, and position of virginity within a variety of cultures and texts just like Once Bitten. In the introduction, the editors note that their goal in revisiting virginity is to go "beyond, in varying ways, the hymen" as "the signifier of virginity" and instead look at it as a concept. In this, they claim to provide queer inquiries into virginity, to provide "a space in which to think about the tensions between the 'normal' and the 'deviant."' The articles collected in response to this queering are divided into four parts, each with two chapters, representing a wide-range of historical and methodological approaches as well as a varied body of texts and subjects.

The opening section, "Too Much Pain for Such Little Reward," focuses on historical narratives of virginity. In Amy Burge's contribution, she examines the virginity test in two medieval romances. Jodi McAlister explores virginity and the representation of the hymen from the thirteenth century forward. The second part of the collection focuses on the relationship between virginity and contemporary popular representations of vampires. The first article, by editors Jonathan Allan and Cristina Santos, looks at the Twilight series, while the second article, by Janice Zebenthauer and Cristina Santos, examines the show True Blood. In the third part, the collection focuses on male virginity. Kevin McGuiness analyses Derek Jarman's 1976 film Sebastiane through the intersecting lenses of virginity, religiosity, and homoerotic aesthetics. The second article in this section, by Gibson Ncube, explores queer masculine virginities in North African Arab Muslim societies. The final section explores virginity in terms of its political and cultural ramifications. Asma Sayed's chapter on Bollywood examines how depictions of virginity perpetuate India's patriarchal values, while in Tracy Crowe Morey and Adrianna Spahr's closing chapter, they explore the Latin American concept of the virago or the third sex.

Taken altogether, Virgin Envy offers a necessary intervention into several different fields of study, including, but not limited to, queer studies, history, cultural studies, popular romance studies, film studies, and so on. The danger of collections around a certain theme or topic is, always, that the unifying idea the editors assert is something barely addressed by the following articles, making the entire endeavour only sporadically relevant to academics and students seeking information on the issue. However, this weakness becomes a strength in Virgin Envy as their topic is such a broad, quasi-universal one that the individual articles on virginity reveal the myriad ways such a concept translates into particular instances. As...