Reply to “Do We Always Practice What We Preach? Real Vampires’ Fears of Coming Out of the Coffin to Social Workers and Helping Professionals.”

• Main Author: Joseph Laycock
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2019-05-01
• Series: Critical Social Work
• Subjects: vampires; identity; sociology of knowledge; ontology; anomie
• Online Access: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/view/5904

This reply analyzes criticism of the article “Do We Always Practice What We Preach?  Real Vampires’ Fears of Coming Out of the Coffin to Social Workers and Helping Professionals” published in Critical Social Work (2015), 16(1) by DJ Williams and Emily E. Prior. That article was widely publicized and received a seemingly disproportionate amount of criticism from both religious and secular voices. This reply applies Peter Berger’s notion of anomie to suggest that critics of the article felt threatened by the implications of tolerating emerging identity claims, such as those made by self-identified vampires. By attacking Williams and Prior as unreasonable, these critics suggest that an individual’s ontological status is taken-for-granted rather than socially constructed. Paradoxically, their protests also suggest an awareness that ontological status actually is socially constructed and that helping professionals, such as Williams and Prior, are imbued with cultural authority that can alter the established order. This reply suggests that the ontological threat presented by helping professionals is what is actually at stake in these critiques. Critiquing the article appears to be not only a call for the continued medicalization of self-identified vampires as deviant, but more importantly a strategy of repressing the realization that norms are socially constructed and therefore susceptible to change.