Queering Kinship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Young, 2005

The young people at the centre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer present themselves as an alternative family that contrasts with the programme’s conventional families. This device helps to raise awareness about changing family structures in contemporary Western society, particularly with respect to the family’s capacity to facilitate the development of young people. The series implies that the stability associated with the nuclear family is often illusory and/or achieved at the price of young people’s freedom and agency. The alternative structure, by contrast, answers the call for the ‘democratisation’ of the family (Giddens, 1999) and is coded positively in spite of many weaknesses.

2009

Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 2004

No one familiar with Bram Stoker's Dracula could fail to recognise the scantily-clad female on the balcony, luring the vampire with her pale bosom and heaving chest. Stoker's Dracula, like many other vampire texts, painted women in very traditional, if opposing, lights: Lucy Westenra, empty-headed and flirtatious, dependent on men for both approval and support; and Mina Harker, embodying purity, innocence, and Christian faith - virtues she retained despite being bitten by the Count. Modern vampire stories, however, have moved on from these traditional depictions of gender. Today's women wear jeans and high heels, carry stakes in their purses and like their men (vampires) to be in touch with their feminine side. Or do they? This paper examines the portrayal of women in modern vampire stories in terms of gender and relationships. I will be comparing Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Bella of the Twilight series, assessing their roles as 'strong' women and examining the ways in which the characters interact with the men in their lives (Angel and Edward respectively) to determine whether vampires, modern men and feminism really can go hand in hand.

Sexualities, 2003

This article presents a phenomenological, Sartrean analysis of sexual relationships as portrayed in the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS). I argue that, through an examination of the differences between vampire and human characters in relationship, we gain an appreciation of the ambiguity of human sexuality as it is experienced. Through the narrative device of sexual relationships between human and vampire characters, BtVS offers a representation that potentially subverts current ideologies of love and sexuality. In addition, BtVS makes visible, although does not explicitly endorse, sadomasochistic sexual practices.

Can popularized images of lesbians exist beyond their sexualized stereotypes? At different points Willow and Tara's relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer adheres to and transgresses constructed stereotypes. This paper seeks to explore how this relationship can provide viewers a transgressive experience while remaining within the bounds of normative representation on a corporate television network. Willow/Tara's visibility contributes to an archive of transgressive lesbian representation.

Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 2016

Why should we still care about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB/UPN)? With more than two hundred scholarly articles, a yearly conference and an academic journal devoted to its study, Buffy has been well explored. Yet compared to current broadcast programming, the show continues to stand out as an uncommonly radical mainstream text. Since Buffy’s last airing, realist images of the ‘good gay citizen’ have proliferated across US broadcast television, depicting lesbian and gay characters as assimilated extensions of the bourgeois heteronormative family and its consumer practices. In contrast, Buffy offers viewers a melodramatic and queerly negative popular aesthetic of the sort that barely exists today. In this article, therefore, the author returns to Buffy and its darkly queer hero, Willow Rosenberg (played by Alyson Hannigan), as indicators of utopian possibilities forgotten – but hopefully not yet lost.

Slayage: The Online International Journal of …, 2002

2002