Ms. Patricia Pender

Ph.D. Candidate

English

Stanford University

Palo Alto, CA

USA

 

 

Whose Revolution Has Been Televised?:  The Transnational Sisterhood of Slayers

[Click on the link above to see this paper's placement in the SCBtVS Program.]

 
In extending the Slayer’s powers to young girls across the globe, Buffy’s season seven can be seen to begin to redress – albeit belatedly and incompletely – the national, cultural and racial privilege the series has assumed through its seven-year cycle. Bringing ethnic diversity and racial difference to the Slayer story, a generous reading of Buffy’s finale might see it as an exemplary narrative of transnational feminist activism. A more critical reading might see it as yet another chapter in a long, repetitive story of U.S. imperialism. In this paper, I argue that the idealized vision of universal sisterhood with which Buffy concludes needs to be read against the immediate political context in which its final season screened; a context that illuminates some of the same gestures of cultural imperialism that the series elsewhere successfully critiques. Buffy’s celebration of what is effectively an international military alliance under ostensibly altruistic American leadership demands special scrutiny in our current political climate. In the context of the indefensible arrogance of Bush’s "War on Terror" and the spurious universalism of his "Coalition of the Willing" Buffy’s final gesture of international inclusivity is imbued with unwittingly inauspicious overtones. A critical analysis of Buffy’s racial representations need not, I suggest, be considered a critique of the palpable pleasures the series provides, but rather, as Gayle Wald has suggested in a slightly different context, "a critique of the production of pleasure through gendered and racialized narratives that signify as new, transgressive, or otherwise exemplary."

Sources:

Gayle Wald, "Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23.3 (1998): 585-610.

Rhonda Wilcox, "‘Show Me Your World:’ Exiting the Text and the Globalization of Buffy." Keynote address, Staking a Claim: Global Buffy, Local Identities Conference. University of South Australia, Adelaide. 22 July 2003.

Winnie Woodhull, "Global Feminisms, Transnational Political Economies, Third World Cultural Production" in Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, eds., Third Wave Feminism. Special issue of Journal of International Women’s Studies 4.2 (2003). http://www.bridew.edu/Depts/Artscnce/JIWS