Joss Whedon wants to be the champion of bringing “Strong Female Characters” into the mainstream. He also has intentionally woven stories of lesbian characters into his plots to normalize same-sex relationships. It is well-intentioned.
But, Joss Whedon is a cisgender white straight guy, and his arcs appear clueless at times.
Yes, it’s time again in the feminist-verse/Whedon-verse to talk about Willow Rosenburg. It is possible that Willow gets more attention in the feminist community than Buffy. This is probably because she identifies as a lesbian, because her character is arguably more interesting and also because her development is a tad more revolutionary than Buffy’s. She starts out as a timid and withdrawn character who uses magic and sexuality to embrace a prouder and more solid identity.
Willow is Whedon’s version of the answer to the underrepresented gay community. But, Willow appears to have had a healthy sexual relationship with her boyfriend Oz, and there is no hint at otherwise. She also pined for Xander for years. Both men. We see her gradually start a relationship with Tara, but she never talks about or reflects on her sexuality or coming out. We see that she is nervous about whether her friends approve. But, it doesn’t get much deeper than that. No characters have a deep conversation with her about her orientation. It’s not a thorough exploration. She goes from being with men to exclusively being with women and identifying as a lesbian. This is fine for Willow, but because there are really not many open gay or lesbian characters within the entire series we are dependent on her narrative alone.
No one, not even Willow, ever bring up the possibility of bisexuality for her or any other characters. Willow isn’t the only one who seems misplaced at one end of a sexuality spectrum.
Buffy, for instance (in the eighth season comic books), has ostensibly good sex with a woman. These things hint at a spectrum of sexuality, but it is never explored. Buffy’s experience seems to be reduced by Whedon as “experimenting.” While self-identified straight people exploring the boundaries of their sexuality is perfectly legitimate, Whedon’s frame seems to stem from obliviousness to the experiences of the LGBT community instead of intentional development.
Fans became excited about the possibility of Buffy coming out as bisexual.
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| Excerpt from season eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
But, Whedon didn’t appear to see it that way.
“We’re not going to make her gay, nor are we going to take the next 50 issues explaining that she’s not. She’s young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?” he said in an interview with the New York Times.
He’s appearing open-minded in this statement except that he’s perpetuating the binary excluding the possibility of bi people. Buffy can be more than just straight or gay, obviously. There’s a whole spectrum of sexuality that he’s ignoring.
To be clear: I would not question how an individual chooses to identify when it comes to sexuality and gender. People have a right to claim whatever label fits them personally, and to have others respect that identity. But, Willow and Buffy aren’t real people. They are characters created by a cisgender straight white guy (as mentioned before.) And their choices in self-identification don’t seem to be the result of personal exploration, but straight-white-man-well-meaning obliviousness.
Whedon leaves out a huge group of people. Namely, the big percentage of folks who are neither straight nor gay. While he is trying thoughtfully to include different voices and backgrounds in his plots, Whedon needs to bring in more diverse writers to accomplish this.
It was a pretty sudden turn around for Willow. Even the episode where Oz returns seems to function as an opportunity for Willow to choose her side rather than acknowledge that she may not be a one side kind of woman. Her comment to Oz about not being surprised if they run into each other again when they’re old seems more like a friends thing than a romantic thing. I found this hard to reconcile, as I totally bought into the Willow/Oz relationship and Willow suddenly identifying as lesbian rather than bi felt like a rejection of what had been a really important relationship. I eventually explained it to myself as being part of Willow’s character to be all or nothing about things – like her magic addiction.
The other thing I found problematic was that I had heard that they had wanted to make one of the characters gay and had toyed with the idea of choosing Xander for that. I got the impression that choosing Willow instead was something of a cop out because showing lesbianism, especially with traditionally feminine looking women is more acceptable on TV than showing gay men having a relationship.
Whedon also uses the male gaze view of lesbianism as a porn trope in Xander’s dream in Restless, which feeds into this disparity of what is accepted.
Larry came out as gay, but never shown with a boyfriend and was killed off shortly afterwards. I don’t think this was a deliberate thing. Larry was shown as a much nicer and more relaxed character for having come out, but it could definitely be an issue of not knowing what to do with a gay male character and killing him off means not having to make a decision about that.
There were hints at bisexuality in Andrew’s feelings for Warren and Xander since he was then seen with women when he appeared in an episode of Angel. This could however be that Andrew was looking for role models in Warren and Xander and his actual sexual attraction was to women. It’s hard to tell whether Andrew was intended to be shown as bisexual or not. I choose to believe he was.
Also in Angel, it was hinted that Angel and Spike had slept together at some point in the past, but this seemed to be to do with their needing to kill time with something new in their immortal lives, so rather like with Buffy, it was the experimentation of open minded characters. Or rather a result of ennui in evil characters, so we’re left to make of that what we will in terms of moral judgements by the creators of the show on male homosexual behaviour.
Whedon’s approach to gay characters in Firefly is similarly uncomfortable. Inara is shown to have both male and female clients, but again we get the reference to male gaze. Jayne’s comment of “I’ll be in my bunk” is funny, but is the same humour we saw in Xander’s dream. The show is making fun of both Jayne and Xander rather than the women, but the joke relies on real world stereotyping and in both cases the women are shown to the audience in overtly titillating ways.
These are just observations, I don’t have any conclusions. However I think I agree with the article. Whedon is trying, but he shouldn’t think he’s there yet.
I was always annoyed how Willow went from straight to lesbian
@Sara if you’re referring to the girl in question episode(the one where Angel and Spike find out Buffys is dating the Immortal) Andrew was supposed to come out with male dates. But the director for that episode matched him up with girls, and it was too late for Whedon to fix that.
So, there are people who have sex with persons of each gender, have had relationships with people of each gender, and even then, he’s “excluiding” bisexuality? That’s interesting, this definition of “excluding” is exactly what I would define as “including”.
How does the series deals with marriage? How many married couples are in the series/comics? Do they make long digressions about what marriage means to them and how they identify as married couples as something more meaningful than just “having a stable relationship?” What about singles? Do singles talk a lot about all the philosophical aspects of being single, on being single as an identity/choice, rather than lack of choice? Or dos he “excludes” these sorts of people as well, by virtue of not there not being many ways to explore these subjects within the vampire-slaying context?
Virtually nobody perfectly identifies with every character, character development, relationship, or whatever they see on TV. Persons of any identification can point that the character development is lacking in some aspect or another (not only sexuality, as there’s much more to it in people’s lifes, and usually it isn’t the central theme of tv shows and comics). You simply can’t please everybody. I bet that if someone makes a character, specially a female character, a lipstick bisexual, then there would be torrents of complaints about that as well, for any conceivable point. From just being poor character development (probably with a harsher criticism than the standards usually held for heterosexual (and perhaps even those who switch sides evert now and then, but “aren’t” bisexuals somehow) characters in the same series, to accusations of fetishism and whatnot. I’d be surprised if there were not many people saying that the whole Buffy thing is just sexual exploitation of cheerleaders from pervert straight white males already.
yup