Buffy Scholar/Critic

Dr. Naomi Hetherington is interested in the interface between religious cultures and feminist writing and thinking. She has recently gained her PhD in Christian narrative and New Woman fiction from the University of Southampton, UK. She now teaches in the Faculty of English and Centre of Jewish/Christian Relations, Cambridge and is beginning a post-doctoral project investigating the attraction of Catholicism to a number of lesbian writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

An avid Buffy viewer whilst writing up her dissertation, she began to make connections between the series' take on 'girl power' and feminist texts at the turn of the last century which, like the horror plot of Buffy, revisit and revise a conventional Christian iconography of female self-sacrifice and suffering. She has experience of working in the mental health field and her paper here brings together insights she has gained from feminist psychoanalysis as well as her literary and theological studies to examine how the series treats female self-harm in the character of Dawn.

Hetherington, Naomi. Blood Sisters: Sisterhood, Sacrifice, and Self-Harm in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Five (paper presented at the Slayage Conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Nashville, TN, May 2004).