Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Shepherd, Laura J.

Titel

Policing the boundaries of desire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Ist Teil von

• Gender, Violence and Popular Culture, 2013, p.39-55

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• There are widely accepted readings of the popular television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) that emphasise the transgressive potential of representing a strong female character as the agent of her own salvation (and indeed the salvation of the world); I mention some in the previous chapter’s discussion of Angel before ultimately concluding that the representation of gender in the latter is potentially deeply conservative, denying as it does a vision of female empowerment outside of the conventional model of appropriate femininity in liberal late-modernity. In this chapter, however, I explore the logics of gender and of sexuality that organise the boundaries of desire in Buffy and argue that competing readings of these logics both reinforce and undermine the inscription of a conservative moral/sexual code through representation of consequential violences. I argued in the previous chapter that BtVS, and its spin-off Angel, both rely on conventional/conservative narratives of gender, despite claims to neo-/post-feminist influences; here I argue that paying close attention to the politics of sexuality both denies a monolithic reading of the series as a textual source and offers codes of sexuality that are considerably more transformative than a simple valorisation of female agents of violence. The chapter is divided into five discrete sections. First, I present a brief sketch of the ‘Buffyverse’, the world inhabited by Buffy and the other lead characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and discuss both its production and consumption as ‘one of the best, most influential, genre-defining television series in decades’ (Harrington 2005). In the second section, I map out a politics of sexuality derived from the works of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, which inspires the analysis of Buffy that I present here. The two substantive analytical sections that follow present two different readings of sex and sexuality in Buffy. The first explores the ways in which female sexuality is disciplined by and rendered unthreatening to conventionally heteronormative sexual regulations. The second disrupts this narrative, arguing that, ultimately, lesbian sexuality saves the world, in the final episode of the series, which is product/productive of a greater freedom from a heteronormative moral/sexual code than might be anticipated. In the concluding section I argue that ultimately, the lesbian relationship between two of the show’s central characters is validated and legitimised in a way that heterosexual relationships are not, and that this series of representational practices tells the audience something quite interesting about the (sub)versions of gender/sex and sexuality evident in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.