Buffy the Vampire Slayer may seem an implausible, even a strange, object from which to initiate a discussion of queer pedagogy, let alone of psychic resistance or social transformation. Never-the-less the argument of this paper is that we might learn something of interest from what we might call the uncanny pedagogy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that is, from how the show enacts and invites a process of learning from trauma, engaging attachments precisely to discontinuity within the self and the social, attachments that bring one into difficult knowledge. 

Specifically, this paper makes and moves through several claims about the show’s uncanny pedagogy. Firstly, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer both stages and thematizes key dynamics of what Jameson has called the "political unconscious," and their undoing, in a queerly popular pedagogy. Secondly, that BtVS' enacts a radical critique of heterosexism and homophobia, by staging heterosexism and homophobia within the show as repressive phantasies, as well as through enacting the ambivalent return of the repressed in the queer bodies and desires of the "monstrous" principals of the show's ensemble.  Finally that BtVS' double movement resists both the homophobic imaginary and the demand for positive representation of the "reality" of queer lives and subjects. The paper will conclude with some remarks upon the implications of this working through of tensions between the pedagogical wish of consciousness raising and psychoanalytic regard for the "psychic reality" of the unconscious for contemporary sexual politics.