I'm Buffy and You're History

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism

Patricia Pender

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave contemporary TV viewers an exhilarating alternative to the tired cultural trope of a hapless, attractive blonde woman victimized by a murderous male villain. With its strong, capable heroine, witty dialogue, and a creator (Joss Whedon) who identifies himself as a feminist, the cult show became one of the most widely analysed texts in contemporary popular culture. The last episode, broadcast in 2002, did not herald the passing of a fleeting phenomenon: Buffy is a media presence still, active on DVD and the internet, alive in the career of Joss Whedon and studied internationally. I'm Buffy and You're History puts the entire series under the microscope, investigating its gender and feminist politics.In this book, Patricia Pender argues that Buffy includes diverse elements of feminism and reconfigures - and sometimes revises - the ideals of American second wave feminism for a wide third wave audience. She also explores the ways in which the final season's vision of collective feminist activism negotiates racial and class boundaries.Exploring the Slayer's postmodern politics, her position as a third wave feminist icon, her placing of masculinity in extremis, and her fandom and legacy in popular culture, this is a fresh and challenging contribution to the growing literature on the pitfalls and pleasures of a great cult TV show.

1

‘I’m Buffy and You’re … History’: Buffy Baffles the Binaries

In Buffy’s world, any encounter with the unknown, be it person or demon, initially forces us to evaluate it according to simple criteria: is it friend or is it foe? The starkly polarised moral universe of vampire slaying provides an uncanny double for political debates that circulate in contemporary cultural studies. Feminist critiques of popular culture frequently mobilise a strategy similar to Buffy’s slaying technique when they question whether any given text is part of the solution or part of the problem: is Buffy the Vampire Slayer a groundbreaking, empowering and transgressive text or is its political potential compromised, commodity-driven and contained? Put simply, is Buffy good or bad? In this chapter I interrogate the polarised positions in this debate by examining the ambivalent gender dynamics of the series. Paying particular attention to representations of seriousness and silliness, to the avowedly political and the shamelessly post-modern, I suggest that Buffy is a television show that delights in deliberately and self-consciously baffling the binaries; the juxtaposition of mundane reality and surreal fantasy in the lives of the Slayer and her friends evokes a world in which the sententious morality of black and white distinctions is itself demonised as an unnatural threat from an ancient past.

Just a girl

Pike:Buffy, you’re not like other girls.

Buffy:Yes, I am.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

The quote above is taken from the 1992 film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which pre-dates the television series by five years yet highlights one of the central thematics of both texts: namely, the ambivalent position Buffy occupies between authentic adolescent and supernatural Slayer. Not surprisingly, assessment of the transgressive political potential of Buffy the Vampire Slayer frequently involves examining the heroine’s relationship to contemporary cultural stereotypes. At issue in this debate is the extent of Buffy’s resemblance to and difference from ‘regular’ teenage girls, and her subsequent efficacy as an empowering feminist role model. On the one hand, Buffy is celebrated, in the words of Alyssa Katz, as ‘a supremely confident kicker of evil butt’.¹ On the other hand, she might justifiably be accused of subscribing to, and therefore reinscribing, commercial and patriarchal standards of feminine beauty: she is young, blonde, slim and vigilantly fashion conscious. In what follows I examine the rhetorics of transgression and containment that characterised the initial academic and popular media response to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Focusing in particular on the first three seasons of the series, I hope to illuminate the ways in which the unspoken assumptions that underwrite much of this criticism work inadvertently to circumscribe – to contain, in effect – the political and transgressive potential of the series.

If one of the principle motivations of popular cultural studies is to decode the political subtext of any given work, then of central concern for students of the Buffy phenomenon is the question: is Buffy feminist? Assessing the late 1980s/early 1990s surge of ‘women in action’ represented by such figures as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, Michelle Yeoh’s Wing Chun, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lucy Lawless’s Xena: Warrior Princess, authors Anamika Samanta and Erin Franzman pose the question this way:

No longer damsels in distress, women are kicking ass and saving the world from doom – in Hollywood technicolor. But is happiness really a warm gun? […] Is this a sign? Are we on our way to mass physical empowerment? Or are we just headed for a whole new pack of stereotypes to live down?’²

Rachel Fudge poses the question slightly differently in the journal Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture: ‘Is Buffy really an exhilarating post-third-wave heroine, or is she merely a caricature of 90’s pseudo-girl power, a cleverly crafted marketing scheme to hook the ever-important youth demographic?’³ However the question is phrased, the concerns are remarkably similar: does Buffy represent an empowering feminist role model or a return to, and reinscription of, repressive patriarchal stereotypes? While the first critical responses to this central question vary markedly, they are alike in affirming the either/or structure of the ‘good Buffy/bad Buffy’ binary. Collectively, such criticism relies on a model of feminist agency that itself has important political implications.

In her 1999 article, ‘Media criticism: The sad state of teen television’, printed in New Moon Network: For Adults Who Care About Girls, Lynette Lamb canvases a range of television serials targeted at teenage girls, among them Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Felicity, and concludes: ‘Women and girls are portrayed no more fully or honestly than they were when I was a teenager 25 years ago. Indeed, in some regards the situation is worse’. Lamb argues that ‘[l]‌ike so many teens on prime time TV, Sabrina’s and Buffy’s major preoccupations are their appearance and their boyfriends, in roughly that order’.⁴ Lamb is relatively singular in her outright condemnation of Buffy as ‘bad’. Other critics express unqualified approval of the series. For example, Jennifer L. Pozner writes in ‘Thwack! Pow! Yikes! Not your mother’s heroines’ that ‘profeminist options are springing up on almost every network’.⁵ She identifies Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with Xena and The Simpsons, as ‘three of the most subversive and campy programs on TV’ and writes that Buffy, ‘cornered by three snarling freaks […] does what most high school girls wish they could do – thanks them for dropping by, tells them she’s not in the mood, and kicks them into another dimension, literally’. Pozner applauds, ‘[h]ow’s that for a role model?’⁶ Despite their opposing judgements of the series, the model of feminist agency mobilised by these critiques is quite similar. Lamb upholds one end of the ‘good Buffy/bad Buffy’ binary, while Pozner maintains the other. In the majority of critical responses to the series, however, the binary distinctions ‘feminist/not feminist’ and ‘transgressive/contained’ operate and circulate in a more fluid fashion.

A third style of critique suspends initial judgement of the series’ politics in order to explore its conflicting representations of femininity and feminism. Thus Micol Ostow, in a 1998 article entitled ‘Why I love Buffy’, confesses that ‘I’ve never known quite how to explain my penchant for the program, but the bottom line is that Buffy and Buffy alone is the reason that I bothered to learn to set the timer on my VCR’.⁷ Ostow applauds the show’s ‘sheer camp appeal’ but at the same time maintains that, ‘one can hardly consider Buffy a feminist icon’.⁸ She suggests that ‘for every few positive messages that it sends girls […] it creates some problematic scenarios’.⁹ Rachel Fudge argues that ‘while she may not be your typical feminist activist’, Buffy’s ‘anti-authority stance, her refusal to be intimidated by more powerful figures (whether the school principal or an archdemon)’, has ‘deeply feminist potential’.¹⁰ Fudge suggests that ‘Buffy is an ongoing lesson in this sisters-doing-it-for-themselves ideology’ and maintains, in an interesting aside, that

the impulse that propels Buffy out on patrols, night after night, foregoing any semblance of ‘normal’ teenage life, is identical to the one that compels us third-wavers to spend endless hours discussing the feminist potentials and pitfalls of primetime television.¹¹

The meta-critical gesture that compares the task of the vampire slayer and the task of the feminist critic is not elaborated by Fudge, despite its potential to illuminate the institutional and intergenerational dimensions of Buffy’s appeal. Critiques like those proffered by Ostow and Fudge suspend black and white judgement of the series in the interests of examining the ambivalence of Buffy’s political content, yet they cannot defer that judgement indefinitely. Indeed, while celebrating Buffy’s strength, her commitment, her sassiness, such analyses are haunted by the dark spectre of her patriarchal containment, embodied, ironically enough, in her popularity, her commercial success, in effect her Sassy-ness. Fudge writes: ‘Buffy could be the poster girl for an entire decade of girl-oriented mass media/culture. For better and most certainly for worse, she’s Sassy incarnate, an angsty alternateen with a penchant for Delia’s-style slip dresses.’¹² Ostow’s ‘Why I love Buffy’ tribute suggests that ‘some might find her utter femininity problematic’;¹³ the authors of ‘Women in action’, who insist that critics have so far failed to appreciate ‘Buffy’s potential as a post-feminist icon’, nevertheless characterise the series’ star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, as a ‘Barbie doll-doppelganger’;¹⁴ and the recurring animadversions cast upon Buffy’s tank tops, high heels and, most repetitively and insidiously, her cleavage, suggest that, Slayer aside, Buffy herself is something of a stumbling block for feminist criticism.¹⁵ As Fudge states: ‘Yup, she’s strong and sassy all right, but she’s the ultimate femme, never disturbing the delicate definition of physical femininity […] The Buffster, for all her bravado and physical strength, is a girly girl through and through.’¹⁶ In the final analysis, such critiques cleave to the either/or binary of ‘good Buffy/bad Buffy’ as much their second-wave feminist counterparts. They suggest that Buffy can either be a feminist or a femme; there is no middle ground.

Paradoxically, then, the spectre that haunts the early feminist critiques of Buffy’s political content is the spectre of the protagonist’s gender, the representation of her girlishness. Rachel Fudge summarises this position succinctly when she states that ‘Buffy’s unreconstructed, over-the-top girliness in the end compromises her feminist potential. Though this excessive femininity veers toward the cartoonish, in the end it’s too earnest – too necessary – to be self-parody’.¹⁷ Buffy’s femininity is repeatedly reconfigured as a species of femme-inanity, and it is this facet of her character that is presented, time and again, as contradicting, and thus undermining, her transgressive political potential. Such analyses leave off their discussion of the gender dynamics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at precisely the point that they become most interesting to me. How, for instance, does the exaggerated or cartoonish representation of Buffy’s femininity mediate its ‘earnestness’? Does Buffy’s femininity in fact require amelioration? And how does an understanding of her ‘over-the-top girliness’ as ‘necessary’ to her ‘make-up’ challenge the very political judgements that are frequently made about her character?

In what follows, I would like to rethink the terms of the debate staged around Buffy’s femininity by questioning the logic of the transgression/containment model. The model of feminist agency usually employed to analyse Buffy dictates that Buffy is ‘good’ if she transgresses dominant stereotypes, but ‘bad’ if she is contained in cultural cliché. Yet this binary logic itself works to restrict a range of possible viewing positions and to contain Buffy’s political potential. As Jonathan Dollimore has argued:

containment theory often presupposes an agency of change too subjective and a criterion of success too total. Thus subversion or transgression are implicitly judged by impossible criteria: complete transformation of the social (i.e. revolution), or total personal liberation within, or escape from it (i.e. redemption).¹⁸

By examining Buffy’s ambivalent constructions of authenticity and originality, I hope to illuminate the series’ own self-consciously parodic references to gender role-playing: ‘Sorry, I’m an old-fashioned girl. I was raised to believe that the men dig up the corpses and the women have the babies’ (‘Some Assembly Required’, 2.2). I suggest that a more productive reading of the politics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one that examines the challenges it poses under a rubric of feminist camp – a reading strategy flexible enough to recognise not only the ambivalence of the show’s political content but also the constitutive i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: How to Do Things with Buffy
• 1 ‘I’m Buffy and You’re … History’: Buffy Baffles the Binaries
• 2 Buffy in History: Feminisms Pro and Faux, Post and Most
• 3 ‘Kicking Ass is Comfort Food’: Buffy as Third-Wave Feminist Icon
• 4 Whose Revolution Has Been Televised?: Race, Whiteness and ‘Transnational’ Slayer Suffrage
• 5 Becoming Worthy of Buffy: Performing Masculinity in a Patriarchal World
• 6 ‘From Beneath You It Devours’: Andrew and the Homoerotics of Evil
• 7 ‘Why Can’t You Just Masturbate Like the Rest of Us?’: The Erotics and Politics of Buffy Fandom
• 8 ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: Trajectories in Buffy Studies
• Notes
• Bibliography