Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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.

In this chapter, Graves considers the lasting cultural influence of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-03) through the lens of textual genealogy, tracing contemporary intertextual and metatextual references to the show that situate Buffy as an enduring parent text. In particular, the chapter focuses on the close genealogical ties between Buffy and the long-running Supernatural (WB 2005-06; CW 2006-present), which strongly features not only a generic debt and a narrative structure that is directly influenced by Buffy, but also contains both a deep intertext with and myriad references to Buffy. Additionally, an exploration of Supernatural’s extra- and paradiegetic expansions clearly situates Supernatural as a direct paratextual and transmedial analogue to Whedon’s show, further illustrating Buffy’s lasting significance.

Keywords: paratext, metatext, intertext, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, transmedia, Joss Whedon, fandom, narrative structure, crossover, WB, Eric Kripke

Quest narratives are as old as Western culture. In stories like The Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter, men set out on journeys, fight battles and become heroes. Women traditionally feature in such stories as damsels in need of rescue or as the prizes at the end of heroic quests. These narratives perpetuate predominant gender roles by casting men as active and women as passive. Focusing on stories in which popular teenage heroines—Buffy Summers, Katniss Everdeen and Disney’s Princess Merida—embark on daring journeys, this book explores what happens when traditional gender roles and narrative patterns are subverted. The author examines representations of these characters across various media—film, television, novels, posters, merchandise, fan fiction and fan art, and online memes—that model concepts of heroism and girlhood inspired by feminist ideas.

La bouche de l’enfer a ses zones d’ombre. Impossible de l’ignorer : la question du racisme reste une écharde saillante dans le pieu de la Tueuse. Évident pour ses détracteurs, impensable pour ses admirateurs, le sujet mérite d’être dépassionné pour mieux comprendre la complexité du Buffyverse.
- Cet article a initialement été publié dans le n°5 de Clap!, magazine bimestriel dédié au cinéma et aux séries.

Special issue of "Culture Unbound". Through an introduction and six original articles, the issue investigates a variety of cultural and scientific discourses and practices that in different ways are related to neuroscience and the brain.

The special issue was edited by guest editors Peter Bengtsen and Kristofer Hansson.

Could there have been television without California? California without television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience — a pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time — they are also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay (“If you’re going to San Francisco…,” “two girls for every guy”), by the contradiction played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the dead to bury the dead. California and television, as it were, conspire in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest, what really “takes us back.” And so we also will take ourselves back: to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, already almost charmingly quaint, and Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus The Origin of the German Mourning-Play. What can come of this improbable conjunction? It will not seem too strange that Benjamin, posthumous wanderer across the textures of Americana, should again take up lodging at the Hotel California. But more is at stake than just another hapless visitation from the on high of high theory: reading Buffy as the remediated afterlife of the dead-on-arrival genre of the baroque German mourning play, Adler’s book records the first broken, awkward steps toward a project that, with the recent rise of “quality television,” seems more urgent than ever before: a political-theological characteristic of the television series.

Research on dubbing in audiovisual productions has been prolific in the past few decades, which has helped to expand our understanding of the history and impact of dubbing worldwide. Much of this work, however, has been concerned with the linguistic aspects of audiovisual productions, whereas studies emphasizing the importance of visual and acoustic dimensions are few and far between.
Against this background, Dubbing, Film and Performance attempts to fill a gap in Audiovisual Translation (AVT) research by investigating dubbing from the point of view of film and sound studies. The author argues that dubbing ought to be viewed and analysed holistically in terms of its visual, acoustic and linguistic composition. The ultimate goal is to raise further awareness of the changes dubbing brings about by showing its impact on characterization. To this end, a tripartite model has been devised to investigate how visual, aural and linguistic elements combine to construct characters and their performance in the original productions and how these are deconstructed and reconstructed in translation through dubbing. To test the model, the author analyses extracts of the US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its French dubbed version.

The title of this paper “Getting Stuck on Level One: Designing a Research Method Appropriate to X-box” reflects my current mental state about my progress in my PhD research. Although the process of PhD research and gaming in general have few intersections, I feel that Espen Aarseth’s use of the notions of aporia and epiphany to describe the progress of the player through the game has certain resonances with the process of ‘writing’ a PhD.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the catalyst for bringing the gothic vampire genre to Teen television. This was later succeeded by the airing of True Blood and The Vampire Diaries with the similar concept of Vampire Teen drama. Additionally when previously studied, Buffy was seen to contain elements of feminism , with it representing female characters as strong-willed. Similarly, such elements are also seen in The Vampire Diaries, hence leading to the examination of this study that looks at the relation of genres and themes to the representation of women in Vampire Teen TV. Consequently, this study mainly uses the literature review and textual analysis to achieve the purpose of this study. The methods used in approaching the research questions are a semantic and semiotic approach in analyzing the genre and female representations found in The Vampire Diaries.

Taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its starting point, this essay examines the veg- etarian and vegan politics and identities that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon’s 1997–2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 adaptation of it, and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris), which first aired in 2008. These texts highlight a shifting cultural discourse of rights, violence, and identity that indicates a moment of profound uncertainty with regard to what it means to be human in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racist, and post-human world.

Why should we still care about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? With over 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 American 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 essay, the author returns to Buffy and its darkly queer hero, Willow Rosenberg, as indicators of utopian possibilities forgotten - hopefully not yet lost.

Keywords: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, queer, melodrama, homonormativity, utopia, negativity, futurity

While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, Joss Whedon demonstrated a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its successful spin-off Angel. Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon's reliance on folkloric antecedents resulted in two distinct but fundamentally irreconcilable portrayals of the human soul as both a metaphor for human moral agency and as the reified seat of individual identity and conscience. This paper argues by contrast that the ongoing tension between these two representations—one existential and the other ontological—opened the way for Whedon and his writers explore questions about human identity from inexact and shifting moral perspectives that were unusually nuanced.

Librarians and libraries are frequently depicted in fantasy and science fiction, but what is less frequently shown is the interface between the two: how the collected information is organized and how users find what’s in the collections. My focus in this talk will be on works by Terry Pratchett (Good Omens, which he co-authored with Neil Gaiman, and the Discworld series) and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel). I’ll look at how users find what they need in the somewhat-medieval Library of the Unseen University, the family and organizational collections in the just-pre-computer era of Good Omens (1990) and its recent television adaptation (2019), and the contemporary (for its time) high school and corporate libraries of Buffy (1996-2003) and Angel (1999-2004). How realistically is the organization and retrieval of information depicted? Is it depicted at all, or are users just shown rummaging randomly through piles of books? Is an information professional there to facilitate the search, and what does he or she do? What happens when there IS a retrieval method, but the original source is lost, or when the retrieval method is magical? What expectations do our users bring to libraries because of shows like these?

In the fifth season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2001), Buffy sacrifices herself to save her sister (and the world) by leaping into a portal with her arms outstretched. In the final scenes of The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Marty refuses to die in order to save the world, instead watching as it crumbles around him. In the former, Buffy is an obvious Christ-figure, while in the latter Marty subverts the trope in his refusal to be a sacrifice. This paper explores the prevalence, meaning, and evolution of the Christ-figure trope in the works of Joss Whedon. Drawing from research in the fields of both Whedon studies and religion and popular culture, I define and set parameters for identifying Christ-figures before exploring the use of the Christ-figure in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Finally, I briefly reflect on the question, what can we learn from the conflicted religiosity of the Whedonverses?

This article will investigate how the creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer used the opening title sequence. The opening montage evolves to update the narrative, note newly prominent creators, make new implicit promises, evoke different moods, and suggest new things to come. In addition, it serves as a tool to position new and returning viewers, to craft a sense of community among their fans, and to communicate the creators’ understanding of their evolving narrative. Such sequences present an unusually direct form of communication between the authors of the series and their audience. They explicitly serve to prepare particular viewing postures for the audience. The opening titles present a series of promises about what narrative forms, visual pleasures, formal approaches, and themes to expect. They indicate who the authors believe their audience is. In addition, they offer the most direct expression of the authors’ perception of what is most important about the work. Much can be deduced about the changing understanding of the audience and the series by its authors through closely investigating the evolution of the opening credits sequence.

Willow (giving a tour of the high school to Faith): “And over here, we have the cafeteria, where we were mauled by snakes.” Xander : “And this is the spot where Angel tried to kill Willow.” Willow: “Oh, and over there in the lounge is where Spike and his gang nearly massacred us all on Parent-Teacher night. Oh, and up those stairs, I was sucked into a muddy grave.” — “Faith, Hope, and Trick” (B3003)

The Twilight phenomenon has made us aware of a new kind of story about monsters. In these narratives the protagonist, instead of fleeing from it in terror or hunting it down, embraces the monster. Twilight was not the first of these tales (nor the best) and sparkly vampires are not the only demonic lovers. But despite a long history of monstrous couplings in literature, myth, and folklore, a distinct contemporary genre has emerged, called variously paranormal romance, dark romance, Gothic romance, or dark fantasy (though the definitions are imprecise and shift in reference).

The best known incarnation of this present-day demon lover is the sympathetic vampire, who was probably the first of these paranormal paramours to emerge from the shadows. But werewolves, angels, demons, fairies, trolls, cyborgs, and even the unlikely zombie have become objects of desire in these fictions (in film and TV as well as novels).

Such novels appeal to (or seem intended for) a mainly female and often young adult readership, which has led to some belittlement. But many of them are daringly creative, often questioning, and can be stylishly crafted with considerable literary care. Their presence is of more than sociological interest and the rise of new genres—new possibilities for writing and seeing, in other words—is itself of interest to those who value literature.

Literary monsters nearly always represent some kind of otherness—groups of people or sets of values deemed threatening to some elements of society. Their outsider status may be owing to class, ethnicity, or sexuality. Genres—kinds of writing—themselves correspond to different sets of values and different ways of knowing or looking at the world.

In this talk, I will be giving an overview of the wide range of these stories of loving what is dangerous, alien, and terrifying. I’ll give a brief account of how paranormal romance emerges out of an uncanny mating of the familiar scary Gothic horror and the oft-despised genre of romantic fiction (and other genres, too). Here, we can see what the collision of different perspectives can achieve and how it might be appealing. Through these novels, I’ll show what monsters may mean in today’s culture and what the dangerous loving of them might signify.

These opposing representations of witchcraft, so eloquently described in song by Xander, give a cursory insight into the numerous ways in which witches and witchcraft are portrayed in Joss Whedon’s Buffy: the Vampire Slayer series. While the presentation of witches and their craft found in today’s society has evolved substantially from those found in the folklore and popular culture of earlier centuries, within the confines of Sunnydale witches apparently encompass all available stereotypes. This paper will argue that representations of Witchcraft in the series fails to connect with any authoritative discourse, whether historical or practical.

The monster as a literary metaphor, it has commonly been observed, may represent individual or social anxiety, the resistance to change, and the threat of transformation—as in the threat of physically or psychologically becoming the monstrous Other. Such transformation is seen as threatening in contexts when stability is desired. However, the monster is also deployed occurs in situations in which instability and transformation may be valenced as spiritually productive, such as is found in mystical encounters. In currents of today’s popular culture, mystical activity and spiritual realization, far from being considered rarified states available only to ascetics, are increasingly portrayed as available to ordinary individuals. In this essay, I track the monstrous figure in American popular spiritualities as an intertextual creation contributing to a contemporary rescripting of notions of spiritual transformation. I utilize critical theory of metamodernism to unpack a new manner in which today’s monsters provide fruitful instabilities necessary for both personal as well as social transformations.

One exemplar of such a metamodern monstrous is found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the popular American television show that ran from 1997-2003 and enjoys a continued cult following. Recognized as one of the first television efforts to focus on sacred/religious/spiritual content in a decidedly secular setting, Buffy has been the subject of numerous theoretical treatments, a few of which have applied monster theory (Santana and Erickson 2008, 2016; Schofield Clark 2005). However, none has yet situated the show, nor the monstrous Other in general, within a metamodern epistemic shift. I connect these pieces to suggest a means of understanding the increasing comfort with monsters’ multivalence—as enemy, lover, friend, provider of Gnostic wisdom, and productive destabilizer.

Desde que Joseph Campbell publicara en 1949 El héroe de las mil caras muchos han sido los paladines que han cumplido las etapas del viaje del héroe en el ámbito audiovisual. Todos ellos han atendido "la lla-mada a la aventura", dejando sus otras obligaciones y responsabili-dades aparcadas, como hizo el profesor universitario Henry Walton Jones Jr., más conocido como Indiana Jones, para encontrar el Arca Perdida; han asumido, como el joven Padawan Luke Skywalker, un camino de "iniciación" superando numerosas pruebas y tentaciones, como el rechazo al Lado oscuro; y han terminado por emprender el "regreso victorioso", siendo honrados por la comunidad salvada, ho-menajeados, como Frodo, por elfos, humanos y enanos en El Señor de los Anillos: el Retorno del Rey, y volviendo a casa después de superar un periplo en el que han trascendido su propia humanidad, convir-tiéndose en figuras casi divinas. ¿Y qué han hecho las mujeres mientras tanto? Según Campbell, han podido ser una tentación o una posible desviación del camino, se han erigido como diosas sabias e inalcanzables, espejismos de la di-vinidad Magna Mater; con suerte han podido convertirse en figuras protectoras, casi siempre señoras de avanzada edad, que han apor-tado un amuleto de defensa fundamental o bien han ejercido un rol onírico y decorativo como Damas de la Casa del Sueño-Brunilda, la Bella Durmiente... En palabras del propio Campbell , "la mujer, en el lenguaje gráfico de la mitología, representa la totalidad de lo que puede conocerse.

La série Buffy the Vampire Slayer, créée par Joss Whedon et diffusée entre 1997 et 2003 met en scène, durant sept saisons, une jeune héroïne, héritière de la culture populaire américaine, de la bande-dessinée, des Pulps, des mythologies américanisées du vampirisme dérivées de la littérature fantastique, des comédies ou séries pour adolescents, de la comédie romantique et du slasher movie, même si elle inverse le stéréotype en transformant la jeune victime potentielle en super héroïne dotée de pouvoirs surhumains. Le succès de cette série tient cependant à la promotion de valeurs humanistes et morales traversant non seulement les intrigues mais également la création des personnages. Buffy est pour tous un modèle moral, et n'est pas, comme d'autres tueuses, une héroïne.

This Master Thesis deals with the phenomena of "fans" and "fandom" in mainstream television. The work is divided into three parts. In the first part, after an introduction about the research process, and the requirements and difficulties of the investigation of a television series, an overview of the phenomenon of fandom from different perspectives is given. Different approaches, both academic and media studies as well as psychopathological, are offered. Some fundamental aspects of television production techniques and their interrelations with the target group, as well as the distinction between audience and fandom, an essential feature of the work shows, will be discussed. The production of fanfiction, being this one of the main bases of research, is discussed in more detail. In the second part of the work deals in more detail with the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series was chosen due to the broad reception, both in academic circles as well as by the non-academic fans. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in one hand a popular youth series about the daily horror of growing up, disguised as a battle against vampires and other demons. On the other hand, the series drove right from the beginning the attention of the academic world to the product for its use of text and subtext. The series is also known by a high level of interaction with the fan community. This interaction forms part of this research. The third part presents the research process and results to the research question: "How are the fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer represent in the series." The investigation focuses on two aspects. Firstly, the use of fanfiction techniques proofs their close contact with the fan base. Secondly, the series characters, to take over the role of fans in the series: "Trio" and Potential", are closely explored. The investigation is limited to the last two seasons of the series: Season 6 and Season 7 (first airdate 2001-2003). The reasons to reduce the whole 144 episodes of the series to this last 44 episodes are multiple: to begin with it is beyond the scope of a master's thesis, to look into the totally of 144 episodes at 45 minutes each; further the series itself offers a break between the first five seasons and the remaining two due to a channel change and the consequently new targeted groups; further on the study of these 44 episodes allows of a continuity while the threefold totally of the whole series would have been unmanageable; and finally, these seasons offer two new character groups, the aforementioned Trio and Potentials, that correlate perfectly with the usual clichés and associations regarding fans and fandom. An epilogue summarizes the results and answers the research question. Buffy the Vampire Slayer interacts with their fans at a high level, and the fans play a very strong role in the series. This role is outlined twofold, through the use of fanfiction techniques in the scripts, and through the characters that are supposed to represent the fans. The preceding analysis shows that fanfiction techniques are used rigorously and consistently, while the role of the Buffy fans in the series is mirrored by merely cliché characters. A dichotomy between the reception of the series by the academia and by the non-academic community is also addressed. While the academia puts a great emphasis on the subtext and its conscious use by the Buffy writers, the broad Buffy fan community is more attracted by the metaphor of growing up as a battle against a never-ending-demon-horde. Out of the talks carried out during the research, a dichotomous picture of the two fan groups appears: the academia focuses on the subtext, is more sensitive to the historical and literary ideas contained therein, is aware of subtle irony in the series and are mostly middle-aged. Non-academic fans are younger, belonging to the network targeted age group - tweens, 11 to 24 years old – they focus their reading of the product on the representation of their own struggle growing up. An annex with a brief summary of each of the 44 episodes involved in the research facilitates the understanding of the results. A detailed bibliography completes the work.

As television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel present a self-conscious polysemy, the ways in which characters’ identities are represented is increasingly multiple and diffuse.  This paper examines the Buffy ‘side kick’ character Willow’s evolution of performative identity across seven years. Critics have suggested her compulsive use of witchcraft during the sixth season of the programme operated as a simile for drug addiction.  By examining the development of her subjecthood across seven years, I show that a different and more rigorous reading implicates her identity performativity in a power/knowledge network governed by the ‘bully culture’ of highschool.  Willow’s attempt to shirk off her victim status by crossing the bully/victim divide allows an alternative reading in which the tenuous nature of self-empowerment is ‘shown up’ in Buffy.