ONE SENTENCE DESCRIPTION: This paper explore the verbal and visual codes of torture, abjection and eroticism (/ BDSM) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its sister show Angel, from the dress of protagonists to the persistent penetration of the male body.

PROPOSAL/ ABSTRACT: As fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its sister series 'Angel' will know, all the best clothes (that is, those with a fetish-wear twist) belong to the wicked. 'Are you evil?', asks Cordelia, of our vampire-with-a-soul hero in 'Eternity' ('Angel' 1/14) 'No, wait, evil Angel would never wear those pants'. Black leather and a penchant for torture and bondage sweep, leash in glove, down the demon infested streets of the shows' sets in Sunnydale and Los Angeles. And, unlike that earlier dungeon master, John Milton, Joss Whedon (the show's creator) is clearly and deliciously aware of being of the devil's party. This paper explores the way in which BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism and masochism) is positioned in the 'Buffyverse' as morally wrong, yet illicitly delicious, through the knowing humour of a semiotic tension between ostensible (verbal) condemnation and latent (visual) celebration. It also looks at the way in which the queer and feminist sensibilities of the show stage and eroticise the bodies of the tortured/ dominated as exclusively male, whilst positioning participating women on top. This produces a curious and deliberated Sadeian through-the-looking-glass world, since the two most frequently tortured bodies are those of the shows' male vampire stars, Angel and Spike, whose bodies, like those endlessly plastic women in 'Justine', are able to sustain a lot of damage and then heal up again just in time for more.

The women most consistently involved in BDSM-flavoured scenes are the show's two human, female, superheroes, Buffy and Faith. These scenes play out in relation to heterosexual desire (with the exception of Faith's veiled desire for Buffy). In 'Consequences' ('Buffy' 3/4) Faith (in her 'evil' phase) initiates some aggressive foreplay with Xander, during which she attempts to (non-consensually) strangle him. Angel manages to break down the door and stop her in time (maintaining Xander's status as the show's 'most rescued' - a role traditionally reserved, as critics have noted, for a girl). We subsequently see Faith chained up in Angel's crypt, where he asks her caustically if she 'forgot the safety word', to which she snarls back 'safety words are for wusses'. Faith's behaviour is condemned by the story arc, and yet the camera loves her. The strangulation scene is shot in intense close-up, a reversal of every eroticised horror movie shot of woman-as-victim, from the shower scene in 'Psycho' onwards. Thus in visual composition, if not in the show's dialogue, we can see an erotic fascination with female aggression (and indeed a celebration of the female top/ male bottom dynamic as an extension of on-screen female power)...

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