Buffy has frequently been commended for its representation of High School life, especially the intense pressures on teenage girls.  This paper examines the issue of self-harm, particularly common amongst young women.  When Buffy’s sister Dawn discovers that she is ‘not real’, but the human casing of the Key, she cuts her own arm with a knife.

With the recent release of Secretary, representations of cutting on screen have gained a high media profile.  This paper considers how Buffy uses horror to represent the psychology of self-harm in a way sympathetic to young women who cut, but which also contains a highly sophisticated analysis of the historical and cultural relations between femininity, suffering and power.  Dawn’s self-injury presages the climax of the season’s horror plot when her blood must be drained drop by drop for the Key to open the portal for the evil goddess Glory.  The sacrificial instrument used to cut Dawn is a large knife like that with which she has earlier cut herself.  What we saw and experienced then was the shocked reaction of Dawn’s friends and family to her lacerated arm so that it is this bloodletting rite which represents the act of cutting on screen.

This paper contrasts Dawn’s involuntary suffering in this final scene with Buffy’s heroic leap into the abyss to save her sister in order to show how the series redefines the terms of self-sacrifice and service to others on which femininity has been conventionally constructed.  The bloodletting rite pathologises a model of female agency founded on suffering in the way in which it harks back to Dawn’s earlier act of cutting.  Conversely, the ritual trapping in which this act is later cast provides a way of theorising self-injury.