Buffy begins the series as a loner, the quintessential outsider in the high school scene. She generally experiences intense pleasure in physically challenging encounters with various monsters. And heretofore in television, we have not seen the adolescent female body in this way-signifying toughness, resilience, strength, and confidence. Nor have we seen adolescent female pleasure embodied as "a supremely confident kicker of evil butt" (Katz 1998, 35). It is worth noting, however, that Buffy's body is a site of considerable struggle in the narrative. She is recognizably coded as slim, youthful, fit, and stylish; her body is a billboard for American commodity culture. (Katz 1998, 42) Sometimes her face and body are dominated by the camera; sometimes she fills and dominates the frame. But there can be little doubt that Buffy's agency drives the narrative and saves the world. Moreover, she talks back, she looks back, and she can take a blow as well as she can land one.
Pivotal relationships with two adults and three teens further refine the complexity and ambivalence of Buffy's character. She is most carefully supervised by her Watcher and mentor, Giles, who is marked as comically "foreign" in the post-modern world of Sunnydale High School.
Giles is forty-something, speaks with a British accent, and is an expert on antiquities and arcane medieval mysticism; he is absent-minded, ambiguously gendered, fussy, and resistant to most late-twentieth-century technology. In the first two seasons of the series, Giles is the only (responsible) adult who knows about the monsters. By contrast, Buffy's mother is marked as "ordinary"--she is emblematic of second-wave liberal bourgeoisie feminism. (Fargonis, 1994, 101-110) Curator of a local museum, she provides a lavish upper-middle-class lifestyle for Buffy. She is divorced from Buffy's father, she is white, she articulates liberally progressive perspectives, and she is utterly clueless about Buffy's closeted identity as a vampire slayer. Like the maternal character in the film, The Lost Boys, Buffy's mother unwittingly (and repeatedly) exposes her child to danger (Auerbach, 1995, 159).
The contrasts between the two adults are noteworthy. The feminized adult male both instructs and nurtures Buffy; his generational and cultural eccentricities function primarily to connect the youthful slayer to a historical past contained in rare books about mystical monsters that walked the earth prior to the age of reason. The feminized adult female is well intentioned but largely ineffectual; her efforts to nurture and instruct frequently are framed as misguided or naive. For example, in the final episode of the first season, she mistakes Buffy's apprehension about death at the hands of a powerful vampire as teen angst over going to the prom. Giles hones Buffy's physical and mental prowess in preparation for the showdown; Buffy's mother buys an expensive (white) prom dress to boost Buffy's confidence. Throughout the episode, the dress draws ironic commentary from all the characters, including the murderous vampire king. "Nice dress," he sneers. Buffy's mother (known occasionally as "Joyce") functions as a measure of Buffy's struggle to conceal her identity as a slayer, and as an exemplar of how clueless suburban parents (especially mothers) are about the dangers their children face.
Willow is conventionally gendered in most dimensions of her character: She is an excellent student, non-assertive, and concerned with the feelings and perspectives of others. She is the moral voice of the group, although she stutters and stammers through much of her dialogue. Her mode of dress and grooming is more childlike than any of the other teen characters. Significantly, however, Willow is re-gendered as a creative and fearless computer hacker; later in the series, she discovers additional creative powers through witchcraft. Xander possesses no capacity for mystical power. He is a feminized heterosexual male who is anxious about heteronormative masculinity (he does not succeed in bonding with alpha males, and he is disparaged by the female teens he desires).
Xander's character makes ironic and self-mocking commentary on the perils and challenges of masculine social scripts, giving voice to the anxieties invoked by the presence of the capable, confident super-heroine, Buffy. Xander and Willow play les femmes to Buffy's butch performance, each yearning for the super-heroine from a related, yet different, position in the gender matrix of the narrative.
Cordelia comes to the group reluctantly and gradually, over the course of the first and second seasons of the series. Her character is a sly parody of the bitch-cheerleader stereotype, the consummate high school "insider."(Butler, 1990, 22-25) Cordelia is utterly confident in the power of conventional femininity, performed well, and in the celebration of commodity culture. She is flashy, vain, shallow, mean-spirited, narcissistic, fetishistic and generally fearless. Her relentless self-centeredness provides comic relief in the face of whatever monstrosity is served up by the narrative.
Cordelia's embodied social power is an important contrast to Willow's girlishness and Buffy's re-gendered power; the scenes between and among these three characters set up the possibilities for exploring the transfer of social power from the bounded performance of a given social script, to the transgressive re-visioning of the script. Cordelia's hostility to Buffy's unconventional power is structurally aligned with Xander's anxieties about heteronormative masculinity; Cordelia mocks Xander because he is not able or willing to perform as alpha male. (The caustic, comic edginess to Cordelia's character is historically indebted to the literary tradition of Lysistrata.)
Still, Xander's characteristic ironic dialogue suggests that he is aware of the paradigmatic shifts in gendered relations; thus, although Cordelia's taunts wound, they are framed as out of bounds. Cordelia castigates Buffy and Willow for their shortcomings as feminine commodity consumers, and her critique frequently hits the mark. In the context of the narrative, her words have the power to mark deviance; failure to accessorize femininity is on par with failures to act (convincingly) like a man. These character intersections invite viewing audiences to consider cultural changes, and resistance to change, in feminine social power and gender politics.
A hard-edged, humorous assault on the shortcomings of liberal reform and the inherent flaws of American civil society, the series is most challenging to mainstream culture when it manipulates irony and fragmentation as modes of critique. The series reconfigures some of the relations of power in the body rhetorics of horror and action by relocating narrative agency from masculine to feminine.
The series is most conventional in its uncritical embrace of American capital culture. Assumptions about social relationships are predicated upon the very commodity culture that television helps to construct and mediate. Buffy's power is domesticated by her oft articulated longing to be "normal"--to have a steady boyfriend (with all that entails) and to consume life uninterrupted by the demands of civic obligation. The narrative opposes the costs of leadership and political potency, with intimacy, stable relationships, and material comfort. The quality of a woman's private life is diminished by the burden she bears to participate in civil society. Moreover, in spite of Buffy's narrative agency and physical potency, her body project remains consistent with the re-scripted body signs of American commodity advertising. In other words, political potency is both imagined and reduced to matters of consumer style.
A post-feminist perspective is constructed through Buffy's relationship with her mother, Joyce. Although Joyce and Buffy clearly enjoy benefits from the first and second waves of the American feminist movement, little is ever said about the history of women's struggle in American culture.(Bordo, 1992, 283) More to the point, Joyce is emblematic of parental and feminine limitation in the series. Buffy's strength and confidence are not learned from the vast experiences of past generations of women; rather, they are her mystical birthright as a slayer. The series plays at transgression; as such, it is quintessential television. But it remains to be seen whether transgressive play can challenge institutional relations of power.
References
Auerbach, Nina (1995). Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 159.
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. 22-25.
Fargonis, Sondra (1994). "Postmodernism and Feminism." Postmodernism and Social Inquiry. Ed. David R. Dickens and Andrea Fontana. New York: Guilford Press. 101-26.
Katz, Alyssa (1998). "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Nation 6: 35-36.
Katz, Alyssa (1998). "Death Becomes Her." Brandweek: 42.
Owen, Rob (1997). Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place. Syracuse: Syracuse UP.81-83
