Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 87

B u ff y t h e V a m p i r e S l a y e r

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heterosexual duality, the transgendered roles in Bujfy offer a resistance to traditional
gendered roles within the more repeated, conventional, and much larger, context
of mainstream culture.
By hlurring the lines between female/male gender roles, we all have new
opporuinitics for acting, thinking, reading, and writing. These new “multiple
subjectix ities** may be represented in characters like Buffy. Buffy has power and
strength—attributes traditionally tied to males. The two recurring males in the
show, (liles and Xander. are femini/ed. Giles is nurturing and caring; Xander is
insecure about his popularity. Both stand in contrast to the decisive words and
action of the hero, Buffy. Angel, Buffy’s love interest, is characterized as “the
most sexualized and eroticized of all the characters [with a body that] invites the
constructed consumer gaze of romance novel covers, soft-core pornography, and
mass circulation advertising (Wilcox). These roles reverse the typical power matrix
of female/male roles traditionally seen in action shows. They offer visual evidence
of “transformative subjectivities.”
As a subplot of the “Thanksgiving” episode, Angel returns to Sunnydale
because of a vision that indicated Buffy was in trouble. However, when he reveals
his presence to Giles, Giles tells him, “She’s not helpless. It’s not your job to keep
her safe.” Characteristically, although he is of some assistance, Buffy makes the
final blow that saves everyone’s life. Yet, in a crossover episode on Angel’s spin
off show, when Buffy comes to Los Angeles to confront Angel, she ends up saving
his life by killing a demon as he lays helpless on the ground. This is an example of
frequent reversals of the “damsel-in-distress” plot in Bujfy. An episode in the first
season “Teacher’s Pet,” played with the “feed the virgins to the dragon” storyline.
In this episode, a female demon-teacher seeks out male virgins. Many other episodes
exaggerate traditional gender roles to the point of approximating the “subversive
parody” suggested by Butler.

What does this show and its main character add to our understanding of how
females are portrayed in cultural texts?

Teachers and parents of adolescent females often complain of the dearth of
strong female characters in narratives. Helen Harper voices this concern in a review
of three adolescent novels with female protagonists. “...I am still uncomfortable
with the theme of thwarted dreams, of helplessness, tolerance, and endurance turned
into what is admirable, heroic, noble, or beautiful, that seems to recur in these
stories and in the literature generally aimed at young women” (147). She goes on
to point out that although studies have shown that young women prefer stories
with strong, decisive female characters there is a decided lack of such stories in
school libraries and classroom shelves. A brief perusal of comments from the chat
line participants on my daughter’s Buffy list-serve supports the assertion that young