Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Call For Writers: Unpopular Opinions of Film and Television

Feminists know a good deal about having and voicing unpopular opinions about films and television. There are often uncomfortable truths about well-loved movies or series. While many people prefer to either ignore those uncomfortable truths or deride those attempting to expose them, it is imperative that we remain active participants in the consumption of media.

Our theme week for November 2016 will be Unpopular Opinions of Film/Television.

Feminists know a good deal about having and voicing unpopular opinions about films and television. There are often uncomfortable truths about well-loved movies or series. For example, Game of Thrones is one of the most popular TV shows of all time and features many complex female characters, but it engages in rape culture, demonizes and discards women of color, punishes sex workers, and is therefore misogynistic. Avatar is ostensibly a beautifully animated film that has an environmental agenda, critiquing resource extractive economies as well as the practice of stealing from and genociding Indigenous people. However, the lead character is a white man masquerading as an Indigenous man, which is a classic instance of the White Savior trope, and the fact that he can only be a hero if he ceases to inhabit a wheelchair is ableist rhetoric. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a groundbreaking feminist series that has become a cult classic; however, the show engages in bisexual erasure and, until late in its final seventh season, the show espouses a purely White Feminism (non-intersectional feminism that focuses primarily on the struggles of white women).

While many people prefer to either ignore those uncomfortable truths or deride those attempting to expose them, it is imperative that we remain active participants in the consumption of media. We must turn a critical eye on even our best loved pieces of art, questioning why we love them, how they are successful, and what inherent stereotypes or potentially damaging tropes they are advancing. It is only through exposing the ways in which film and television fail to accurately represent or include marginalized peoples that we can call for a higher standard and begin creating more intersectional, meaningful, and visionary work.

We want to read your most unpopular opinions about film and television. Tell us how and why a movie or series has failed its audience. You may also have an unpopular reading of a film or show that is inclusive and intersectional, but people are not open to your interpretation. We want to read those, too!

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so please get your proposals in early if you know which topic you would like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Monday, November 28, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Here are some possible topic ideas:

Game of Thrones

Avatar

Star Wars

Apocalypse Now

Girls

The Help

Star Trek

The Last Samurai

Revenge of the Nerds

The Mindy Project

Dances with Wolves

Downton Abbey

Transparent

High Fidelity

The 100

Dallas Buyers Club

Jessica Jones

Frozen

Dangerous Minds

The Amy Schumer Show

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Harry Potter

Modern Family

Sixteen Candles

Bi Erasure in Film and TV: The Difficulty of Representing Bisexual People On-Screen

As frustrating as our erasure and stereotyping is, however, I’d like to go beyond the question of “good” and “bad” representations of bisexual characters to ask this: exactly what it is about bisexuality which makes it so hard to represent on-screen? And why, when bisexuality is visible, is it so likely to collapse back into dominant stereotypes of bisexuality as either promiscuous or merely a phase?

This guest post written by Amy Davis appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Positive and complex representations of bisexual and pansexual characters on-screen are so few and far between that film critics discussing bisexual representation are often left lamenting our erasure, or – on the rare occasions we are represented – our stereotyping and demonization.

In the 100 top-grossing domestic films in the U.S. in 2015, out of 4,370 characters (speaking or named), only 32 characters or .7% were LGBT, and only 5 of those characters were bisexual, according to USC Annenberg. According to GLAAD, 4% of regular characters on primetime broadcast television series are LGBT characters. Of the 271 LGBT characters (regular and recurring) on primetime, cable, and streaming television series, 76 or 28% are bisexual. According to Stonewall’s report on the representation of LGB people (unfortunately they did not include statistics on trans characters) on television series watched by young people in the U.K., in over 126 hours of programming, bisexual people were portrayed for just 5 minutes and 9 seconds, compared to 4 hours and 24 minutes for gay men, and 42 minutes for lesbian women.

When we do appear on-screen, bisexuality is often used to indicate hypersexuality, such as Bo from Lost Girl and Doctor Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At its most extreme depictions of reinforcing biphobic tropes, the character’s bisexuality is also used to code “evil” or “dangerous” or “murderous,” using their (hyper)sexuality as a method of manipulation and control, for instance Sharon Stone’s character in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct.

Narrative film and television, with its emphasis on conflict and resolution, is poorly equipped to represent bisexuality. The committed, monogamous couple continues to represent the pinnacle of romantic fulfillment in contemporary Western culture. As such the familiar romantic plot in narrative film and television involves some kind of conflict – usually an erotic triangle – which is resolved when the protagonist makes a choice between potential suitors and becomes part of a couple (see, honestly, any rom-com ever made). Within this format then, bisexuality can often only be a disturbance to the status quo. In 2010 comedy-drama The Kids Are All Right, for example, the lesbian relationship between Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) is disrupted when Jules begins an affair with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the sperm donor of their children. Throughout the film, Jules identifies as a lesbian, never declaring she’s bisexual or questioning her sexuality. So long as Jules’ infidelity persists, bisexuality has a spectral presence in the film. The narrative conflict presented by bisexuality/infidelity is resolved, however, when Jules ends the affair and the lesbian/monogamous status quo is restored. In the final scene, Jules and Nic are shown smiling at each other and holding hands, the threat of Jules’ bisexuality effectively repudiated. At best, bisexuality is depicted in The Kids Are Alright as a temporary phase, at worst, as non-existent; a mere moment of weakness within an overarching narrative of monogamous lesbian couplehood.

Of course the widespread misconception of bisexual desire as triangulated and therefore always split between two object choices is demonstrably false. Many bi spectrum individuals see themselves as attracted to people rather than genders and do not feel unfulfilled when they are in a relationship with a person of a particular gender. What’s more, many queer people reject the notion of the gender binary altogether, having relationships with people all over the gender spectrum, including genderqueer and non-binary people. Nonetheless, the notion that gender is binary and the overwhelming importance placed on (binary) gender as object choice in our society means that bisexuality is inevitably viewed as dichotomous desire within our society. In The Kids Are All Right, and numerous other films with bi potential, bisexuality then gets mischaracterized as an unstable, dichotomous desire which must be subsumed back into the monogamous, monosexual (straight or gay) status quo.

But to understand the mechanisms through which this occurs, it is necessary to understand the dominant logic of monogamy. In its most perfect and pure form, a narrative of monogamy involves the notion that there is one true partner for everyone. The truth for many of us, however, is that we have several romantic relationships and sometimes even several marriages in the course of our lives, which is described as “serial monogamy.”. For the logic of the “soul mate” to work alongside the realities of serial monogamy, however, is it necessary to de-emphasize the importance of past relationships or disregard them as mere mistakes on the road to finding one’s eventual life partner (“I thought I was in love but I didn’t know what love was”).

Within this dominant paradigm of monogamy, depictions of characters who have serial, monogamous relationships with men and women are rarely read as bisexual since their past relationships (with a particular gender) are dismissed as not meaningful. A classic example of this is Willow (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is depicted as straight for the first few seasons, during which time she has a relationship with boyfriend Oz (Seth Green), and upon entering a relationship with Tara (Amber Benson) is subsequently depicted as a lesbian. Her past relationships with and interest in men becomes re-written as “not real” (or not as as “real” as her newfound lesbian love) and thus any potential bisexuality is erased.

Too often bisexual visibility requires individuals to trace relationship histories which subvert the dominant ideals of monogamy, even if they themselves are consistently monogamous. Alan Cumming, actor and bi advocate, said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2014:

“I used to be married to a woman. Before that I had had a relationship with a man. I then had another relationship with a woman, and I since then have had relationships with men. I still would define myself as bisexual partly because that’s how I feel but also because I think it’s important to — I think sexuality in this country especially is seen as a very black and white thing, and I think we should encourage the gray. You know?”

I was struck, reading this quote, by just how familiar this form of bisexual storytelling is. I’ve told a version of this story myself when talking about my bisexuality, and heard it from friends and strangers alike. It’s a story designed to make one’s bisexuality visible and legitimate with full awareness that it could slip through the cracks, becoming subsumed into heterosexuality or homosexuality, at any moment. Cumming is all too aware that his expression of desire for men and women is insufficient in itself to make his bisexuality visible, and that in the context of his marriage to a man his “mere” desire could be easily dismissed to create a coherent homosexuality. His bisexual narrative instead involves emphasizing the importance of his past relationships and marriage, describing them alongside his current relationship and implying that while they are not current they are nonetheless still meaningful in his sexual identity.

Further, Cumming’s narrative involves relationships with men and women which are dispersed throughout time, rather than a series of relationships with women followed by a series of relationships with men, which could be easily subsumed into a gay (rather than bi) “coming out” narrative similar to Willow’s plotline. And although none of these relationships are depicted as non-monogamous in themselves, Cumming’s narrative disrupts the “one true love” logic of monogamy at the same time as making his bisexuality visible over time. In making explicit reference to his past relationships as significant to his current sexuality, Cummings refuses to be dismissed, revised, or excluded by monogamy’s “one true love” narrative or bi erasure.

Similar disruptions accompany other moments of bisexual visibility in film and television. How to Get Away with Murder, for example, successfully depicts Annalise Keating’s (Viola Davis) character as bisexual or pansexual by bringing a past relationship into the present. In the course of season one, Annalise’s love interests are male. However, early in season two, it is revealed that she had a relationship with law school classmate Eve Rothlo (Famke Janssen) and the two briefly rekindle their relationship in the course of working together.

Given the dominant ideals of monogamy, had it merely been revealed that Annalise had a college relationship with a woman, it would have been too easy for audiences to dismiss her past relationship in order to reinscribe a current straight identity. On the other hand, had she kissed a previously unknown woman, audiences would likely have read it as a loose erotic triangle – involving the woman and on-again-off-again boyfriend, Detective Nate Lahey (Billy Brown) – probably requiring resolution into a straight or lesbian identity. However, Annalise’s sexual and emotional intimacy with Eve in the present avoids the bisexuality-as-narrative-disruption trope and instead functions to draw our attention to the importance of Annalise’s historic relationship with Eve. The previous relationship cannot (and should not) therefore be easily dismissed as a “phase,” simultaneously disrupting the logic of monogamy which relegate previous relationships to the past only and allowing Annalise to remain visible as a bi character.

As bisexual people, we get tired of the persistent association between bisexuality and non-monogamy, demonstrated through popular stereotypes which position us as promiscuous, confused, dangerous, greedy, deceptive, cheaters, and unable to commit. A familiar response to this charge is the reminder that, like straight and gay/lesbian people, bisexual people can be (and are) both monogamous and non-monogamous. While this refutes the myth that bisexual people are necessarily non-monogamous, it does little to explain how the association between bisexuality and non-monogamy emerged in the first place. And more importantly for our representation on-screen, the ways in which dominant narratives of monogamy create the conditions of both our erasure and our visibility.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bisexual Representation
Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Willow Rosenberg a Lesbian or Bisexual?
Exploring Bisexual Tension in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
LGBTQ Week: The Kids Are All Right
How to Get Away with Murder Is Everything “That” New York Times Review Said It Is
How to Get Away with Dynamic Black Women Leads

Amy Davis is currently completing a PhD on bisexual erasure at the University of Wollongong. Amy is interested in feminism, queer and trans politics, animal rights, law, ethics and, most importantly, cats.

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Bisexual Representation

But the clearest example of the Buffyverse’s discomfort with bisexuality, in my opinion, appears in the character of Faith Lehane. … Despite what was at the time a groundbreaking portrayal of a loving lesbian relationship, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ still had many issues in its messaging surrounding queer sexualities, in particular bisexuality. In my opinion, a few material changes could have gone a long way in removing at least some of this negative messaging.

This guest post written by Lisa Ward appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired, it was considered to be a groundbreaking, feminist television show. Its nuanced portrayals of girls and women stood out in a genre where girls and women were generally portrayed as one-dimensional victims, not three-dimensional heroes (and villains). And for a generation of young people (myself included), this representation was vital and growing up with Buffy had a lasting positive impact on their lives.

However, from the perspective of intersectional feminist criticism, the series was far from unproblematic: its portrayals of people of color and in particular, women of color, were sparse, generally poorly handled, and all too often ended in untimely death; many of the underlying attitudes the show reinforced with regards to sexuality, in particular female sexuality, were deeply troubling; mental illness was portrayed in a very stigmatizing way (despite, in my opinion, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar)’s Season 6 arc with depression being handled fairly well); and the show sends a very mixed message regarding its gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters.

It is this final topic — bisexuality and bisexual characters — that I want to explore. While bisexuality is also inclusive of people outside of the gender binary, I will be primarily using the term bisexual, rather than related terms, such as pansexual, as the Buffyverse does not seem to recognize the existence of more than two genders (except perhaps in its non-humanoid characters).

Willow Rosenberg

A piece on bisexuality in the Buffyverse cannot be written without discussing Willow Rosenberg.

There is a lot of debate from Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans on whether Willow (Alyson Hannigan)’s character counts as a triumphant case of lesbian representation (at least until Tara’s murder which fulfills the classic Bury Your Gays trope and facilitates Willow’s, admittedly temporary, jump into the Psycho Lesbian trope), a sad case of bisexual erasure, or a nuanced example of sexual fluidity. I can see merits in all of these arguments.

Willow was deeply attracted to and formed physical relationships with men before meeting Tara (Amber Benson) and coming out as a lesbian. Even after coming out, Willow goes on to make comments that imply an ongoing attraction to men as well as women — for example, she describes both Dracula (Rudolf Martin) and Giles (Anthony Head) as “sexy” during Season 4. And Willow’s vampire self, as seen in “Doppelgangland” is quite clearly openly bisexual, making sexual overtures towards both men and women (and her own alternate universe self, because she is a Depraved Bisexual trope – a trope Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a very damaging relationship with indeed). It is these plot points that tend to lead to accusations of bisexual erasure for the character of Willow Rosenberg.

However, as is rightly pointed out by those who disagree, there are several in-universe of Watsonian explanations available for these plot points. For example, sexual identity is about more than just sexual attraction. It is known that many people who identify as straight have had same-sex fantasies or experiences, and for some, do not see these fantasies or experiences as changing their fundamental heterosexual identity. The same can apply for those who identify as gay or lesbian. Being queer is strongly correlated with behavior and attraction (as well as self-identification), but not strictly defined by these things. This explanation allows us to interpret Willow as a nuanced portrayal of a lesbian woman, not an erased bisexual woman.

Another in-universe explanation for Willow’s characterization is that sexuality is fluid and sexual identity can change over time. It’s not unusual for someone to identify as straight throughout their teen years and come to realize that they are queer later in life. Willow Rosenberg could be a nuanced example of this true to life scenario. Not everyone realizes their sexuality as a teen or even a young adult, and sexual fluidity is a perfectly acceptable explanation for her character.

Personally, I like both of these in-universe explanations. Sexual identity is complex and nuanced; if we explore Willow’s character from a real-world perspective, then it’s perfectly acceptable to say that she provides a realistic representation of a complex lesbian woman who at one point in her life identified as straight.

However, when we explore the character of Willow through an out-of-universe or Doylist lens, looking at the Buffyverse as a whole and how the writers choose to represent bisexuality in other characters, the accusations of bi erasure in the case of Willow gain a lot of validity.

Bisexuality and Evil in the Buffyverse

From the outset, bisexuality is regularly associated with evil in the Buffyverse.

Often one of the key signifiers that a human has been turned into a vampire is sudden hypersexual — and frequently bisexual — behavior. This is particularly true for female vampires, who quite often fit the Depraved Bisexual archetype.

Some key examples include, of course, vampire Willow — who aggressively flirts with human Willow, including groping and licking, while maintaining her hypersexual relationship with vamp Xander (Nicholas Brendon) — and Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters)’s lovers Darla (Julie Benz) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) — who, in a flashback scene, are shown in their underwear discussing a shared sexual encounter followed by bathing together and implied oral sex.

For male vampires, this is less explicit — most likely due to taboos concerning sexual behavior between two men on-screen versus sexual behavior between two women. On-screen, male characters’ sexuality tends to become more overtly predatory towards women in order to signal their change from good (human) to evil (vamp), but nonetheless we also get allusions to off-screen bisexual behavior. For example, Spike confirms he and Angel have slept together saying, “Angelus and I were never intimate, unless you count that one time…” Angel expresses a mutual interest claiming, “I love the ladies, but lately I’ve been wondering what it would be like, to share the slaughter of innocents with another man. You don’t think that makes me some kind of a deviant do you?”

Other evil characters are often portrayed as both bisexual and/or hypersexual as shorthand for evil, bad, or wrong throughout the series. Some examples include: Glory (Clare Kramer) licking Tara’s hand before mind-raping her and flirting with Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) before bleeding her; Ethan Rayne (Robin Sachs)’s sexually charged dialogue with Giles (a relationship which writer/producer Jane Espenson confirmed did take place in their younger, “dark magic” days); Andrew (Tom Lenk)’s ambiguous attractions expressed towards men such as Warren (Adam Busch), Jonathan, and Spike, and women such as Buffy, Anya (Emma Caulfield), and a woman at a bar; and Forrest (Leonard Roberts)’s angry, possessive behavior towards Riley (Mark Blucas) and unreasonable jealousy of Buffy, even though he finds her “so hot.”

But the clearest example of the Buffyverse’s discomfort with bisexuality, in my opinion, appears in the character of Faith Lehane.

Faith Lehane

Despite never actually being referred to as bisexual or sharing any openly sexual moments with any women on-screen, many Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans consider Faith (Eliza Dushku) to be a bisexual woman who falls in unrequited love with Buffy. Personally, I think there is subtext in the television series that supports this view (and writer/producer Jane Espenson, writer/producer Doug Petrie, creator Joss Whedon, and actor Eliza Dushku all agree); this qualifies as both queerbaiting and bisexual erasure, all while playing into the Depraved Bisexual and Psycho Lesbian tropes.

Faith is, in the words of Andrew, “the dark slayer” and is supposed to represent a counterpart to Buffy’s lighter, more conservative nature. This means that, unlike Buffy, she is overtly sexual and open about her desires — and later, after her switch to the dark side, she becomes unacceptably sexually predatory.

When she first appears, it seems like Faith’s approach to sexuality might be positive – in fact, Faith’s pronouncement that slaying always makes her hungry and horny results in the other characters covertly shaming Buffy for being so repressed when she claims in return that sometimes slaying makes her “crave a non-fat yogurt afterwards.” However, as the series progresses, it’s made clear that Faith is a bad influence, and by the time she joins the forces of evil, Faith is slut-shamed by the main characters on a regular basis.

When Faith and Buffy first meet, there is a lot of tension between them, with Buffy in particular feeling threatened by Faith. But as their relationship progresses, this tension moves from rivalry into something more romantic in nature.

All of this culminates in what I would describe as the three key points in Faith’s character arc: Season 3’s “Bad Girls,” Season 4’s “Yesterday’s Girl / Who Are You,” and Season 7’s “Dirty Girls.”

In “Bad Girls” (an episode title that tells us a lot about the show’s attitude to Faith’s “deviant behavior”), the chemistry between Buffy and Faith reaches its climax. Faith is set up as “seducing” Buffy into her way of thinking and, despite herself, Buffy responds. The sexual tension between them is sizzling… until everything goes wrong, of course. Faith accidentally kills a man and doesn’t trust Buffy to protect her from the harsh punishment she knows will follow. Thus begins Faith’s descent into evil.

After this, Faith and Buffy behave more like scorned exes than nemeses (“Is that how you say the word?”) until their final showdown (which mirrors the previous season’s showdown with ex-turned-evil, Angel) where Buffy puts Faith in a coma.

Faith awakens from her coma in Season 4’s “Yesterday’s Girl / Who Are You,” and again, acts like a scorned lover when she finds out Buffy has “moved on” from her, grabbing her chance to finally possess Buffy, quite literally, by stealing her body using a body-swap spell. However, she discovers that even total possession of Buffy cannot heal the pain of her rejection. Faith leaves at the end of this episode to seek redemption and does not return to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (although she does appear on Angel) until Season 7’s “Dirty Girls” (another interesting name choice for an episode focused on the return of Faith).

In “Dirty Girls,” we meet a reformed Faith, whose new-found maturity is almost immediately tested by a barb to her sorest spot – another rejection from Buffy, who failed to warn her that there’s a new evil afoot that specifically targets slayers. But Faith rises above and we start to believe that perhaps she has managed to move on. We even get to see her turn down an opportunity that the old Faith would never have been able to resist – a chance to try to seduce Buffy’s love interest (Spike). The audience gets to marvel at reformed Faith’s growth and maturity as a character, that is, until she utters this seemingly throwaway line, “I just spent a good stretch of time locked away with a mess of female-types. Kinda had my fill.”

The unfortunate implication becomes that Faith has quite literally “straightened out.” Faith no longer has “deviant” bisexual urges; Faith is no longer a “dirty girl”; Faith has reformed.

Conclusion

Despite what was at the time a groundbreaking portrayal of a loving lesbian relationship, Buffy the Vampire Slayer still had many issues in its messaging surrounding queer sexualities, in particular bisexuality. In my opinion, a few material changes could have gone a long way in removing at least some of this negative messaging.

The first crucial step would have been to remove the show’s tendency to use bisexuality as a shorthand for evil. The second step would have been to introduce some positive examples of bisexual people who fight on the side of good – here, the idea of Willow’s character identifying as bisexual (while Tara and Kennedy still identify as exclusively lesbian) feels like a hugely missed opportunity. However, this character wouldn’t necessarily have to be Willow. There were plenty of opportunities for other bisexual characters, male and female, within the show’s seven season run. And finally, bringing Faith’s sexuality and unrequited love arc from subtext to text, with the proviso that when she reforms, it’s not because she’s no longer bisexual, would work well, provided it wasn’t set to a backdrop that codes bisexuality as depraved. With better representation of bisexuality in the Buffyverse generally, Faith’s arc would be the story of an individual who happens to be bisexual, not a classic Depraved Bisexual stereotype.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Willow Rosenberg a Lesbian or Bisexual?
Exploring Bisexual Tension in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg: Geek, Interrupted
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Humanization of the Superheroine

Lisa Ward is a Faith fangirl who works in PR, writes songs, and lives on a wind-blasted island in the North Sea. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a bunch of other places she’s probably forgotten about as @sheltielisa.

Is ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg a Lesbian or Bisexual?

So is Willow bi, or is she a lesbian? Well, I guess it’s your choice. I personally believe she’s bisexual; it makes more sense to me, a bisexual woman, that Willow is also a bisexual woman, just with a preference for women. But I have read that many lesbians connected with Willow’s story on such a fundamental way, and I can’t wholeheartedly take it away from them; they have just as much of a right to her as I do.

This guest post written by Gail Wald appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

For many people, labels matter. Humans put labels on everything, from gender to interest groups to clothing styles to sexuality. These labels define not just each individual person, but also our culture as a whole. We are the culmination of all of these groups: the groups we accept, the groups we detest.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, at its center, supposed to be about the groups we don’t accept. It centered on three unpopular geeks who hung out with a librarian. And sure, they were all very pretty – but everybody’s pretty on TV; at the end of the day, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) wasn’t winning any popularity contests, Willow (Alyson Hannigan) was a computer nerd, and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) seemed to spend all of his days watching every single movie in the history of Hollywood. This group – the Scoobies – were mocked by Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and the rest of the popular crowd; they were losers.

And so they were outsiders. Willow, especially, seemed to never really get over that outsider feeling, always eager to prove herself, to be better – her greatest fear: failure; her deepest secret: self-loathing. In this light, it makes so much sense that Willow was Gay All Along. After all – it fits with her character so well. Trying to hide herself away only to realize she never could.

Of course, the fact that Willow is attracted to women is hardly debatable – in fact, it’s hard canon. The relationship between Tara (Amber Benson) and Willow is nothing if not as genuine – definitely sweeter – than every other romantic relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even though it took the series more than a season to have them share a kiss (one of the first lesbian kisses in prime-time television), the show was hardly ever hiding the relationship. While Kennedy (Iyari Limon) is controversial at best and openly despised at worst, Willow is definitely attracted to her – in a major way. Willow likes girls. End of story.

The problem with this, of course, is that Willow spent more than three seasons forming romantic and sexual attachments to, well, men. First, Xander; then, Oz (Seth Green). And then she cheats on Oz with Xander, seemingly motivated for no reason other than lust. And she has sex with Oz, not divulging to us, the viewers, that she felt any discomfort with the act. These are definite signs of attraction to the male gender, after all.

So wait, what is going on here?

Well, as I said, labels are important. Willow calls herself a lesbian. And if a woman who had been with men stood in front of me in real life and called herself a lesbian, I would believe her. After all, there are several reasons why this could happen. She could be, in fact, a lesbian who experienced compulsory heterosexuality; she could have decided to try sex with guys but realized she didn’t want to do it again; she could be a woman who decided that she was only interested in relationships with women, and therefore identified with the label more than with any other label. And since she is a real human being with her own unique experiences, it isn’t my place to tell her she isn’t a lesbian because she had sex with a man, or a relationship with a man, or any other experiences with a man. She is a lesbian. End of story.

But Willow Rosenberg isn’t a real person. She’s a character, open for interpretation. And them’s the facts: Willow Rosenberg liked having sex with men and women.

But! Somebody screams. Willow seems to never experience attraction towards men after she starts dating Tara!

Not true. Even if we ignored the whole episode in which she shows she’s still attracted to Oz after his return, despite being with Tara at the time, there is still this scene in season 4, in which Giles sings “Behind Blue Eyes” and the gang are left in shock, each with their own unique reaction. “Now I remember why I used to have such a crush on him” seems to me at least to not be the most homosexual line ever.

So is Willow bisexual then?

Well, the truth is, Willow does call herself a lesbian, and like I said twice already, labels matter, especially self-identified labels. But the thing is, she never dismisses the label of bisexual, either; she simply assumes she is a lesbian since she is interested in relationships with women. And as I said, Willow isn’t a real person – she was written by other people, imperfect people, people like Joss Whedon who might do good, positive work, and still be biphobic, whether intentionally or not.

Willow never brings up the possibility of being bi. Had she brought it up and dismissed it – well, firstly, the word “bisexual” would have been uttered on television, which seems to be a difficult feat to accomplish, and secondly, it would be a lot easier to accept that she was a lesbian for us bi folk. Because there are real bisexual people out there who experience bi erasure, who are told they’re gay or lesbian when they’re with a person of the same gender and heterosexual when they’re with a person of the opposite gender, who are told they’re confused, who are told they must choose. And it would be so easy to bring it up on the show, as well. It could go something like this:

Buffy: So, you’re gay now?
Willow: Yeah. I thought I might be bisexual, but I’m a lesbian.

See? So easy. These two lines turn Willow from bi erasure to pure lesbian representation.

So is Willow bi, or is she a lesbian?

Well, I guess it’s your choice. I personally believe she’s bisexual; it makes more sense to me, a bisexual woman, that Willow is also a bisexual woman, just with a preference for women. But I have read that many lesbians connected with Willow’s story on such a fundamental way, and I can’t wholeheartedly take it away from them; they have just as much of a right to her as I do.

She’s anything you want her to be, at least until we invent a machine that allows us to travel into fictional universes.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Exploring Bisexual Tension in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg: Geek, Interrupted

Gail Wald is a recent high school graduate who has wished to become an author since the age of seven. In her spare time she writes books and essays about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which she has been a fan of since seventh grade), complains about the patriarchy (in the newly opened Facebook page Gail Complains About the Patriarchy), and plays with her cat.

Exploring Bisexual Tension in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’

The possibility existed to use season 3 to explore the sexual identity of three very central female characters in this show. Buffy could have been questioning; Faith could have been explicitly bisexual rather than simply implying as much through very sexually-charged dialogue with Buffy; Willow could have started exploring her sexuality earlier to arrive at a more self-aware place, whether that was as a bisexual woman or a lesbian.

This guest post written by Audrey T. Carroll appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Nearly twenty years have passed since the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’re still having conversations about this TV show. The conversations range from the creepiest monsters to the most empowering moments of feminism the series has to offer. One of the staying discussions regarding Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been the queer identities of its characters. Certainly, the series invites this as it centralizes a same-sex romance in season 4 with Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara (Amber Benson). The couple wasn’t even allowed to kiss until the season 5 episode “The Body.” There’s no doubt that having a same-sex couple was trail-blazing for a television series to tackle.

That said, we now have the benefit of a retrospective view of both the series and the fifteen intervening years of LGBTQ rights progress since “The Body” first aired. Viewers can now easily recognize that bisexuality is never overtly represented in the series, and is in fact never even brought up as a possibility. But the groundwork for bisexual/queer interpretation is present. This especially comes into play when people bring up the idea of bi erasure and Willow. The possibility of bisexuality in season 3 in particular could have enhanced an already tense triangle of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Faith (Eliza Dushku), and Willow. In addition to the scrutiny of Willow’s sexuality in recent years, the obvious sexual tension between Buffy and Faith, especially originating from Faith, is never outright articulated in a consequential way. There’s, of course, the platonic friendship aspect to the tension of this triangle where Willow feels like she’s losing her best friend to Faith.

But these women present three angles on potential queerness that many viewers would have connected with:

1) Buffy must be “good” at all times, which includes being virginal (see: Angelus becoming a monster after they have sex). Potentially, this expectation of being the “good” slayer could include heteronormativity. But, in the comics, the slayer is willing to explore her sexuality.

2) Faith, in part, defines herself by using and ditching men as nothing more important than the sex they give her and the sense of power she feels with them.

3) At this stage in her life, Willow is in a committed relationship with Oz (Seth Green), but she clearly possessed an attraction to women that she had yet to discover.

While she’s otherwise dated, Buffy only had sexual experience with one person by season 3: Angel (David Boreanaz). In season 2, they had sex once, Angel turned into a soulless monster, and she eventually had to kill him. He’s resurrected, but they know they can’t fully be together. This sexual tension with Angel runs parallel to Buffy’s sexual tension with Faith. Buffy acknowledges, in season 3 and beyond, that her relationship with Faith can be perceived as more than simple friendship or fellow slayer-hood. In the season 3 episode “Revelations,” Buffy even draws attention to the fact that she “wouldn’t use the word ‘dating,’” for who she has plans with that night and, when Faith shows up as her partner for the evening, goes on to say, “Really, we’re just good friends.” In that same vein, Buffy claims in the season 7 episode “End of Days,” that “I am tired of defensiveness and — and weird mixed signals… I have Faith for that.”

In the comics, Buffy is, to quote creator Joss Whedon, “young and experimenting and… open-minded.” Even if this is a questioning moment of her sexuality, rather than an actual declaration of bisexuality, the possibility of this exploration earlier in the series could have ramped up the tension even further between Buffy and Faith and Willow, making the stakes all the more intense. It could also show that being the “good” slayer didn’t come with the implication of celibacy or heteronormativity as a requirement. If Buffy, the hero, the one who many girls aspired to be, could question her sexuality and explore her sexuality, that could create a connection to her, and a comfort for viewers who are inclined to do the same. It would, of course, have to be handled delicately, but if executed well it could have been a really revolutionary examination of identity and a fascinating aspect for the hero.

On Faith’s end, she infuses a lot of her words and actions with sexual innuendo. Often, her sexuality is tied to extracting from men what she wants — power, physical satisfaction, etc. The season 3 episode “Bad Girls” opens with Faith insisting that Buffy must have had sex with her friend Xander (Nicholas Brendon): “What are friends for? … It’s just, all this sweating nightly, side-by-side action, and you never put in for a little after-hours…” Faith insinuates that slaying together leads to sex, in the midst of her and Buffy slaying vampires together. One look at any number of Faith’s lines of dialogue with Buffy shows possibility for sexual interpretation (“Give us a kiss.”) if not outright mentions of sexual acts (“Bondage looks good on you, B.” or “So let’s have another go at it. See who lands on top.”). And this isn’t even to mention the very provocative dance scene the pair of slayers share at The Bronze during “Bad Girls.”

If Faith’s bisexuality were actively articulated, it could underscore an interesting layer to the eventual deterioration of their relationship. It seems that the path Buffy toys with in “Bad Girls” is not only one of (mostly harmless) rule-breaking. Buffy appears to be entertaining a very flirtatious and charged relationship with Faith. Faith is very lonely and wants acceptance and friendship. If you add to the pot that both of them were pursuing each other in a romantic or sexual sense, then Faith’s feeling of rejection (from the Scoobies in general, but Buffy in particular) feels like a more pointed one. In this framing, there’s even greater motivation for Faith to later hurt Buffy romantically by going after Angel and engaging in a twisted relationship with him merely to taunt the “good” slayer.

As mentioned already, Willow is often brought up in terms of bi erasure. If the possibility of her queerness is brought up in season 3, it lengthens the exploration of her sexuality and allows for her to deepen her understanding of it. By season 3, she’s only been sexually interested in Xander and her boyfriend Oz. If it were introduced that she may be sexually attracted to women, it would allow for a more fully fleshed-out representation of her sexuality over the course of the series. In fact, in the season 3 episode “Doppelgangland,” Willow thinks that the vampire alternate-dimension version of herself is “kinda gay.” Buffy assures her the vampire version of a person is nothing like the real person. Angel starts to correct her, but stops. All of this implies that, from at least season 3, Willow has her “kinda gay” self bubbling under the surface.

One of two things could’ve happened here: 1) Willow could have discovered she was bisexual, and maybe even been afraid this would cause Oz to reject her. That’s a fear that bisexual people in hetero relationships might be able to relate to. 2) Alternatively, Willow could have discovered that she was, in fact, a lesbian. This explicit exploration would have made how she self-identifies feel more genuine. Otherwise, her season five “Triangle” declaration of “gay now” feels like a tight clinging to a label rather than a genuine expression of her sexuality. If that exploration and determination happens earlier and more clearly, then the viewer can feel that conclusion is natural. It gives opportunity to address her sexuality in a more fully realized way.

One potential discrimination against bisexual people is the idea that they can’t be in a long-term committed relationship, rooted in the idea that they’ll pursue the opposite type of relationship than the one that they’re currently in (either same-sex or opposite-sex). If Willow is bisexual, and clearly so in the show, then the fight that she and Tara have in the season 5 episode “Tough Love” has more context. It’s possible, with a lesbian-identifying Willow, that Tara fears Willow may “turn straight” again. But a review of their history makes this implication during their fight feel strange. (Willow, after all, turned down Oz when he returned to town toward the end of season 4, actively choosing Tara over her first boyfriend.) But, with the idea that Willow is bisexual in mind, this fight with Tara could have tapped into an anxiety in the queer community — that bi people are more sexually deviant or less romantically loyal because they’re not monosexual.

This sexual identity questioning would also lend more tension to the whole Buffy/Faith/Willow triangle. In addition to the platonic threads there, Buffy and Faith already have an established, if not candidly articulated, sexual tension. Adding Willow’s sexual identity to the mix, she could have questioned whether her jealousy of the Buffy/Faith dynamic was platonic or romantic on her part. Buffy is her closest friend, except for maybe Xander, the latter of which she had a crush on for years and cheated on Oz with. Willow could reasonably fear that an attraction or possibility of attraction toward Buffy (akin to what she once felt for Xander) could jeopardize their friendship. On the other side, Willow might have been confused or unnerved if she thought she might be attracted to Faith, who was her opposite in many ways and with whom she had a very contentious relationship. She might not have thought about Buffy or Faith that way, but the questioning and anxieties there might have resonated with certain queer viewers and enhanced Willow’s aversion to Faith even further.

Using the context of future seasons, the possibility existed to use season 3 to explore the sexual identity of three very central female characters in this show. Buffy could have been questioning; Faith could have been explicitly bisexual rather than simply implying as much through very sexually-charged dialogue with Buffy; Willow could have started exploring her sexuality earlier to arrive at a more self-aware place, whether that was as a bisexual woman or a lesbian.

This all at least highlights an opportunity for future fiction. Allowing characters to be bisexual or to entertain the idea of not being heterosexual can add innovative layers to otherwise developed and intriguing characters. In the end, whether these characters are bisexual or simply open to questioning their heterosexuality, representation helps people feel less alone in their experiences, and ultimately guides people toward empathy.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg: Geek, Interrupted
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Humanization of the Superheroine
Are You Ready to Be Strong? Power and Sisterhood in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Audrey T. Carroll is a Queens, NYC native whose obsessions include kittens, coffee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Rooster Teeth community. Her poetry collection, Queen of Pentacles, is available from Choose the Sword Press. She can be found on her site as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Bisexual Erasure in Media and Pop Culture Is Still Far Too Prevalent

Bisexuality is commonly erased in the media, despite there being many examples of characters attracted to multiple genders.

This guest post written by Amy Squire originally appeared at Fanny Pack and an edited version appears here as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. It is cross-posted with permission.

Did you know that 23rd September is Bi Visibility day?

Since 1999, the bisexual community has celebrated and promoted its existence on this day but it may seem a strange idea that bisexuality needs more visibility. Everyone has heard the term and many claim to understand it. It’s the famous ‘B’ in ‘LGBTQ’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer). Yet glaring misconceptions and myths still persist, and bisexual people often face rejection from both inside and outside of LGBTQ communities. Bisexual erasure is all around us, but you don’t miss what you don’t see — until someone points it out.

Misconception and myth

Misunderstanding is a causal factor of bisexual erasure. Such misunderstandings can be willful; a refusal to believe in the experience and existence of bisexuality. The most common of these is when a bisexual person settles into a long term relationship or marriage. Depending on the gender of their partner, they are assumed to have settled as either gay or straight, with their previous preferences dismissed as a phase or mistake.

Image source: me-me-me.tv

But the myth-busting of bisexuals as confused or promiscuous can in itself be harmful. It maintains the ideas that confusion and promiscuity are harmful, abnormal, and best avoided. This is challenging for societies that view lifelong monogamous relationships as the ideal. The term ‘bisexual’ itself has been seen as trans-exclusionary, as it most popularly describes people attracted to one of two binary sexes. However, its meaning has evolved since the first recorded use of the term in 1824, when it described intersex people. Later in 1892, it was repurposed to its common use today.

Bisexuality and homosexuality

Bisexual erasure is often a symptom of biphobia, which is expressed in different ways. Bisexual people have been accused of simultaneously being closeted gay people taking advantage of straight privilege — or benefiting from straight passing privilege, which doesn’t actually exist — and attention-seeking heterosexual people taking over queer spaces.

They may erase themselves in order to fit in to either space. Some bisexual people refuse to discuss the gender of their partner where they are of the opposite sex, so as not to contribute to homophobia. They are also often erased in legal matters and the marriage equality debate, where their rights vary depending on the gender of their partner and same-sex couples will automatically be referred to as lesbian or gay.

Ironically, when lifelong bisexual visibility activist Robyn Ochs married her partner Peg Preble in 2004 (in one of the first same-sex marriages in the U.S.), she was misidentified in the press as a lesbian.

Pop culture invisibility

Bisexuality is commonly erased in the media, despite there being many examples of characters attracted to multiple genders. The Netflix series Grace and Frankie follows two women whose husbands fall in love with each other. They continue to love and sleep with their wives, but when they are found out, people call them gay. Some argue bisexual women are more “acceptable” to society than bisexual men. Viewed through the heterosexual male gaze, the idea of women who could sleep with you and other women is titillating; the idea that your male friend could be attracted to you as well as his girlfriend might be more unnerving. Both thoughts are dehumanizing to the individual in question.

Despite this, even the beloved series Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t discuss Willow the witch being bisexual, despite being hailed as a progressive show. She was openly attracted to her male best friend, had a long-term relationship with a man, then was suddenly gay. Writers side-stepped discussion of whether she had felt societal pressure to get a boyfriend and was a lesbian all along. Bisexuality was never mentioned at all. Many bisexuals feel her sexuality was erased but most lesbians understandably feel she was a great example of representation. Others have a new interpretation of sexual fluidity to try and reconcile the two.

Image source: Hellmouth Yeah Whatever

Conversely, well-known bisexual or gay characters are erased from the media by being rewritten as straight. Did you know that Mystique from the X-Men is bisexual in the comics? Her character was brought to the mainstream through the X-Men film franchise, but she was only depicted following or being attracted to men. Given her ability to morph into any man or woman at will, sexual fluidity is a logical conclusion for her character.

Bi discrimination

Biphobia at its most dangerous can be lethal. There is poor understanding of the mental health issues of the bisexual community, as well as an increased rate of suicide. In 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection found that 61% of bisexual women have a lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. This is compared to 45% and 35% for lesbians and heterosexual women respectively.

The portrayal of Amber Heard’s bisexuality as incriminating, rather than a risk factor in her alleged abuse from ex-husband Johnny Depp, is a damning example of society’s biphobia. The explanation that he may have been jealous of her female friends is another example of bisexual people being deemed as promiscuous and dishonest. Shockingly, in this case it’s used as an excuse for intimate partner violence.

These are just a few ways in which bisexual people are made invisible. So what is the future for bisexual people? Both heterosexual and LGBTQ communities need to accept and listen to them. Some are now choosing to redefine themselves. Pansexuality and polysexuality are the latest identifiers, which some use as an alternative to bisexual, while others claim it’s a way to describe people who are attracted to all gender identities (such as agender, genderqueer, Two Spirit, and non-binary people, as well as cis and trans women and men).

However, like feminism, bisexual people are now using their original name to encompass a more intersectional, trans-inclusive meaning. Ultimately, it’s up to you to describe your own identity. That may even mean not using a label at all. I hope with every Bi Visibility Day that passes, it becomes more of a celebration and less of an appeal for recognition.

Amy Squire is from Essex and works in London. She is a contributor and the social media coordinator for Fanny Pack. Raised a feminist in an all-female household (much of the time in her mother’s student digs), her approach is that feminism is inclusive, common-sense, and applicable to all our daily lives. Her passion for equal rights and opportunities for women and the next generation of girls developed during her midwifery training. She learned about women’s issues such body image, domestic violence, and female genital mutilation and how they often come to a head during childbearing. She now wants to use her writing to spread the positive message of feminism.

Call For Writers: Sisterhood

Despite what the multitude of Bechdel-test-failing media would have us believe, relationships among women can be complex and about much, much more than men. The sibling relationships of sisters, in fact, can be particularly rich, nuanced, and worth contemplation. Sibling rivalry, as it appears in ‘A League of Their Own’ and ‘Sixteen Candles,’ examines competition for recognition, birth order conflict, and self-doubt when faced with perceptions of sibling superiority.

Our theme week for August 2016 will be Sisterhood.

Despite what the multitude of Bechdel-test-failing media would have us believe, relationships among women can be complex and about much, much more than men. The sibling relationships of sisters, in fact, can be particularly rich, nuanced, and worth contemplation. Sibling rivalry, as it appears in A League of Their Own and Sixteen Candles, examines competition for recognition, birth order conflict, and self-doubt when faced with perceptions of sibling superiority.

Twinness is a fascinating trope that is often part of popular consciousness. Sister, Sister and The Parent Trap (along with all of its sequels and remake) explore the mirroring of twinness in a lighthearted, fun way. Orphan Black, on the other hand, delves into the dark, science fiction realm of the uncanny with questions surrounding cloning. All these examples ponder the nature versus nurture debate, dissecting the differences and similarities between twins.

Some stories highlight themes of sacrifice, like Frozen and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the love between sisters is depicted as something pure, righteous, and good. On the other hand, some stories focus on the mysterious unknowableness of the sister bond like in Beloved and The Virgin Suicides, where the bond seems to transcend this life and this reality.

What is so fascinating about the relationship between siblings? What are your favorite depictions of sisters? While there are fewer depictions of sibling women of color and even fewer depictions of trans sisterhood, are there examples that really stand out as excellent or problematic?

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, August 26, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Here are some possible topic ideas:

Frozen

Sisters

Beloved

Transparent

Sister, Sister

A League of Their Own

The Virgin Suicides

Bride and Prejudice

Ugly Betty

Sunshine Cleaning

Pariah

Rachel Getting Married

Sixteen Candles

The Secret Life of Bees

Orphan Black

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Cosby Show

Ginger Snaps

Mustang

Parent Trap

Little Women

The Color Purple

Sense and Sensibility

Jem & the Holograms

Practical Magic

My Neighbor Totoro

Middle of Nowhere

Charmed

Half & Half

Full House

Lilo and Stitch

Daughters of the Dust

Grey’s Anatomy

Superheroines Week: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Superheroines Theme Week here.

How the X-Men Films Failed Iconic Black Female Superhero Storm by Sara Century

To me, this is where the X-Men films utterly fail Storm as a character. While her comic form is definitely a sympathetic and understanding person, more importantly, she is a warrior trained in hand-to-hand combat, an orphan, a divorcee, a Black woman in a leadership role on a team of mostly white men, a wife, a mentor, and an activist.

‘Supergirl’ and Room for the Non-Brooding Superhero by Allyson Johnson

There is an indisputable charm to Kara’s strong will that can go toe to toe with the might of her fist. Here is a young woman that believes so strongly in her fellow being that she tries talking to many of the baddies of the week rather than immediately resorting to fighting. Her kindhearted and giving spirit is ultimately what sets her apart from the other heroes that have populated television and movies for the last few years…

Catwoman, Elektra, and the Death of the Cinema Superheroine by Heather Davidson

Now, don’t get me wrong – neither Catwoman nor Elektra are by any means good movies. The first is silly, the second dull, and both are confusing and ugly, with little interest in their source material and an odd propensity to give characters magical powers. They deserved to fail – but they didn’t deserve to take an entire gender down with them.

Top 10 Superheroines Who Deserve Their Own Movies by Amanda Rodriguez

So few superheroines are given their own movies. I’m officially declaring that it’s high time we had more superhero movies starring women. The first in a series of posts, I’m starting with a list of my top 10 picks for super babes who deserve their own flicks.

Why Scarlet Witch May Be the Future of Women in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Maddie Webb

Having a superhero grapple with the right use of their power is hardly a new theme and it’s central to the broader narrative of Captain America: Civil War. But allowing a female superhero to tackle the same dilemma on a deeply personal level feels quietly subversive. …Women superheroes can be inhumanly powerful without being reduced to a boringly infallible female badass caricature.

Elektra in Daredevil: Violence, White Masculinity, and Asian Stereotypes by Kelly Kanayama

And then there’s Elektra Natchios, half-Asian, half-white, sexual, violent, dangerous, and in some ways, the most problematic character on the show. … Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. …Her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

Daisy Johnson, Superheroine of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — And Why She Matters by Lee Jutton

What makes Daisy special among superheroes is that she embodies all of these tropes as the centerpiece of a network television series — and is also a woman. Not only that, she is a mixed-race woman — and not a token one, but one surrounded by other women, of various ages, races and backgrounds.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Humanization of the Superheroine by Kaitlyn Soligan

Often carrying the burden of representation in a genre overrun with male characters, superheroines were strong or weak, clear-headed or in constant need of saving, but rarely complex or allowed complicated internal lives, and even more rarely truly relatable. Buffy changed all that.

Supergirl’s Feminism and Why the Series Works by Dennis R. Upkins

Even with her powers, Kara is the underdog who has to evolve to overcome insurmountable odds, thus making her relatable to viewers. With the series being entitled Supergirl, it shouldn’t be a surprise that feminism is a prevalent theme. What is a pleasant surprise is how well the series tackles it.

Barbarella and the “Savagery” of Futuristic Sexual Politics by Olga Tchepikova

One version of Barbarella draws her as a progressive, sex-positive, and role model-worthy character that saves the universe. … Barbarella the character might be the worst example of a superheroine by many of our contemporary expectations for a female lead not least because of the ambiguous dynamics of her (sexual) agency. … ‘Barbarella’ as a film remains a superheroine movie with a mission: save the future of sexual politics.

How Hawkgirl Saved Me by Maggie Slutzker

This is about my favorite chess-playing, mace-wielding, war-crying, winged superheroine role model: Shayera Hol. … Hawkgirl taught me to be observant. She taught me that it’s possible to come through trying times. She taught me that being able to think was just as important as being able to fight, and that good and evil aren’t always absolutes.

Why Black Widow Is the “Realest” Superheroine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Yes, Even After All Those Tropes) by Kayleigh Watson

It is this factor alone why Black Widow is so important. She is the longest standing female protagonist within the Marvel film franchise, having starred in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron and most recently, Captain America: Civil War. She was the only female Avenger in both Avengers films (until Scarlet Witch switched sides at the end of Age of Ultron), and as such was subject to being the onscreen vessel of female representation in a superhero super-team otherwise occupied by straight white men.

How Does Vixen Collide with Race, Gender, a Black Sense of Home, and the Video Vixen? by Tara Betts

…There is more to be said about how essentializing African identities around myth, folklore, the continent, and animals can impose limits on how Black people, particularly Black women, can be written, and how those Black characters are experienced in a more accessible, mainstream outlet. In other words, even Black superhero characters, carry the burden of limitations if the racial stereotypes outweigh the plot and character development. In this case, Vixen has room for more episodes, a potential live-action series, and delving deeper into a host of issues on identity, power, and defining home.

Brown Girls Can Be Heroes Too: Why We Need a Ms. Marvel Movie by Bhavna Vasnani

I’d internalized the rather damaging notion that only white girls deserve to have their stories told. Only white girls can slay the patriarchy without breaking a nail. Only white girls get to be the heroes, and get to be heroes of their own stories. And the rest of us? We don’t matter. … It’s important for young South Asian girls to see that just because they’re South Asian doesn’t mean that they have to be relegated to the sidelines, to being the sidekick, to being the brainy Indian doctor, and so on. They can be superheroes too.

Stop the Fridging: The Invisible Feminism of Arrow by Becky Kukla

So while Arrow seems pretty reluctant to move away from the traditional stance on women existing to be love interests and to be rescued, the individual female characters themselves sometimes show some hints of progressiveness… if only they’d be allowed to live long enough!

Show Me a (Woman) Villain by Mary Iannone

We all recognize the gross disparity of women superheroes, in the Marvel canon and beyond. But I would argue that the cinematic landscape is even less primed to allow women supervillains. … Women are generally presented as easily manipulated and too emotional to be true villains. It is yet another characterization of the “soft” woman, dictated by her emotions, propelled by a propensity to nurture rather than destroy. But we need stories of women who hunger for power, who are willingly selfish, and who stick to their principles, no matter the cost. … No more scenes of men talking women into saving the world. Let them try their best to destroy it.

Batgirl / Oracle: A Superheroine with a Disability and Representation by Adam Sherman

There aren’t a lot of superheroes with disabilities; many of the ones who do gain powers from their disabilities. … Barbara Gordon as Oracle is a more accurate and positive representation of people with disabilities. She’s way more real because despite the fact that she sometimes needs the help of more able-bodied people, like a real person living with paralysis from the waist down, she still lives a positive and active life.

Where Are All the Superheroines Who Are Getting Too Old For This Shit? Ageism and Superhero Movies by Celey Schumer

Even in the rare superhero films with more gender-balanced casts, the age gap between male and female performers can be seen time and time again. Men are allowed to age, to become grizzled, world-weary with experience, or stew for years on a plot of vengeance. … Their women counterparts, however, must remain lithe, “hot,” and never over the age of 40.

Go ahead, try and find a superheroine or female supervillain over 40. I’ll wait. Great. Now that we’re all done pointing at Halle Berry as Storm — who was 46 at the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past — and Famke Janssen as Jean Grey/Phoenix — who was 41 at the release of X-Men: The Last Stand — let’s look at the bigger picture.

Scarlet Witch and Kitty Pryde: Erased Jewish Superheroines by Sophie Hall

While Black Widow’s portrayal remains true to her comic book origin, Scarlet Witch’s does not, as her comic book counterpart is Romani and Jewish. … Not only is erasing Judaism a disservice to both Scarlet Witch and Captain America, it’s also disrespectful to the Jewish writers who invested so much in making a statement about Jewish resistance in their artistic expression. …

In the comics, Kitty Pryde is a feisty, spirited, and proudly Jewish member of the X-Men. …The filmmakers missed out on a more poignant story. Kitty Pryde would have faced what her ancestors faced generations ago; where they were targeted for their religion, Kitty was now being targeted for her mutation.

Superheroines of Color and Empowerment in Fantasy on TV by Constance Gibbs

It’s a rare sight to see women of color as superheroes, but rarest, probably, on television. … Superheroines are important. The desire for women to be seen as heroes, as strong, as capable, as desired, as everything transcends race. But when women of color are constantly told they have to wait or aren’t given the same chances, it does the same thing as when it’s men vs. women. …

Why can’t we have a Black or Asian or Latina or Arab or Native heroine acting as a universal hero for all girls of all races? Why must white continue to be the universal standard and everyone else is relegated to a niche audience? People of color want the empowerment fantasy too.

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the Humanization of the Superheroine

This guest post written by Kaitlyn Soligan appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Before there was a girl on fire, or a woman in an office with a drinking problem and a dark history, before there was, even, a cheerleader whose salvation could save the world, there was the chosen one. She alone would stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She was the slayer.

Our generation’s slayer was Buffy Summers, and she was a mess. By turns bubbly and serious, flirtatious and driven, insecure and confident, Buffy Summers worried about boys and her birthright, rising demons and her parents’ divorce, algebra and the somehow ever-present threat of global apocalypse. While there were superheroines on page and screen long before Buffy – the iconic Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and X-Men like Storm were represented on both – none had ever been allowed to be so human, particularly on television and in movies, where they were mostly absent. Often carrying the burden of representation in a genre overrun with male characters, superheroines were strong or weak, clear-headed or in constant need of saving, but rarely complex or allowed complicated internal lives, and even more rarely truly relatable.

Buffy changed all that.

Buffy worried about make-up, her curfew, whether or not a boy liked her, and how she would ever get her homework done on time in the moments between plunging a stake into the heart of multiple attacking vampires. Over the objections of her guardian Giles, a stand-in for the stuffy and outdated rules about how superheroines should behave, she made friends and went on dates, and still managed to slay demons and kill monsters. She was funny and goofy and sweet and deadly serious when occasion called for it. Buffy broke hearts and had hers broken, said things she shouldn’t to lovers and friends and family, hurt people and stood beside them when they needed her most. She was phenomenally imperfect as a woman and as a heroine.

Buffy’s battles, real and metaphorical (and occasionally metaphorically revealing what was all too real), panned the camera to the battles of girls more generally and forced it to linger on what was uncomfortable and almost always previously unacknowledged. In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Buffy fights an invisible foe who turns out to be a fellow classmate who disappeared for lack of attention. The episode examines the visibility of the female and the female body – and the ways these related to the feminine – in multiple ways, with Buffy and her classmate Cordelia battling for the title of May Queen before battling for their lives. Many episodes dealt with intimate partner violence; in “Ted” Buffy battles her mother’s violent boyfriend, while in “Beauty and the Beasts” she faces a classmate abusing his girlfriend. Throughout all of these episodes and arcs, Buffy is both average – experiencing jealousy, vulnerability, the need for company and compassion, pushing her friends and family away and then pulling them back in close – and superhuman, fighting against unnatural forces with equally unnatural strength.

Buffy’s humanity also marked one of the earliest moments of feminism brought to bear on the superhero genre – not a mere personal feminism limited to character portrayals, but a structural feminism, with an acknowledgement of structural systems of oppression, played out within and on characters and throughout story lines. In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Buffy faces the structural systems that exploit women’s bodies and turn them against one another as competitors. In “Ted,” her mother’s boyfriend is controlling and manipulative, gaslighting her, an eons-long practice even before we had a succinctly encompassing term for it. In “Beauty and the Beasts,” Buffy faces her classmate’s reality as a victim of assault while simultaneously exploring her own past as a survivor of abuse. Buffy and the other female characters were constantly underestimated because they were women. No episode ended with a neat lesson in which every male character realized the error of their ways and repented, and this underestimation often had long-term, structural, and painfully realistic consequences for the characters.

While Buffy’s humanization broke new ground for superheroines, it also brought into relief against that image the limits of what was still possible on television. While the many white female characters on the show were deliberately complex, the first featured recurring Black character, Kendra, was largely two-dimensional. Bearing the burden of representation, Kendra’s efforts to find acceptance through perfection reflected the limits experienced by women of color, a choice between being “good” and acknowledged, or not good enough and ignored, pushed further back into the margins both visually and narratively. While Black male characters on the show – most notably the cool and organized Mr. Trick and the steady and almost unbearably sexy Principal Wood – were good and evil, kind and ruthlessly ambitious, flawed and righteous by turns, Black female characters came in by inches and retreated just as quickly back outside the frame.

In Season 7, at the end of the series’ television run, Buffy discovers that her powers come from a spell cast long ago by men in Africa who needed a protector. One girl was chosen – likely not voluntarily – to be that protector: the First Slayer. And her power passed from one generation to the next. Buffy’s power is literally drawn from a history of Black women around the world; their sacrifices over thousands of years have enabled her rebellion from girl soldier to human being over the objections of a system designed to imprison, use, and discard her. As a white woman in her own place and time, Buffy could do what they could not.

In the end, Buffy enlists another woman, Willow, a powerful witch and, not incidentally, one of the first recurring LGBTQ characters on television, to reclaim and redistribute that first power, allowing every girl in the world with the potential to become a Slayer to rise up simultaneously, together. The act was at its heart a symbolic gesture hearkening to the notion that white women whose privilege has been gained at the ongoing expense of many other women, particularly women of color, have a responsibility to both destroy the system and build a better one, one that has far more universal benefit. In her final moments, Buffy chose between being special – one girl in all the world – and building a platform on which she would be only one of many, only as special as she made herself, meaningful not at the expense of others’ lack, but of her own making – as her own woman.

She went to prom and saved her classmates from a giant dragon. She mourned the loss of her mother and fought a fallen God. She fell in love and died and got aggravated with her roommates and worked in fast food and slayed demons. 2017 will mark 20 years since Buffy first aired, and Buffy would be truly old for a slayer now – nearly 40. If she felt all her years and more at sixteen, with her outsized responsibilities, one can only imagine how she would feel today, and it’s understandable: Buffy is the grandmother of the modern superheroine. These dark, flawed, occasionally failed, damaged, traumatized, real girls and women onscreen and in comics – from Katniss Everdeen to Jessica Jones to Joss Whedon’s own later heroines like Firefly’s Zoe – owe a great deal to the strides Buffy made in her complexity, her humanity, her failings, and her growth alike, as do we. After all, she saved the world. A lot.

Kaitlyn Soligan is a writer and editor from Boston living in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes about that, and bourbon, at www.ivehadworseideas.com. You can follow her on twitter @ksoligan.

Frankenstein and His Bride: Mapping Maternal Absence

However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.

As the daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley inherited radical ideas about the intellectual abilities and sexual freedoms of women. She learned these ideas from her mother’s books rather than her presence, however, because Wollstonecraft died soon after her birth. Anne Mellor points to compelling evidence that the undated events of Frankenstein are set over the nine months of Mary Shelley’s own gestation, in 1797, with the date of Victor Frankenstein’s climactic death coinciding almost exactly with Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Created lovelessly as a theoretical experiment, Frankenstein’s monster is the ultimate icon of the unmothered child. Mary’s own beloved father, philosopher William Godwin, would disown his teenaged daughter when she became pregnant by married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a deeply personal betrayal that contradicted his theoretical conviction in anarchy, and motivated Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to rename herself Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Mary Shelley was thus shaped by the trauma of parental rejection as a result of her sexuality, an experience common to girls of the 19th century and queer youth of the 20th.

How appropriate, then, that the greatest screen adaptation of Frankenstein should be the work of a gay man, James Whale, whose own identification with Shelley’s monster is explored in fictionalized biopic Gods and Monsters. Though there have been adaptations more technically faithful to the novel, none has been truer to its central pathos of maternal absence. It was because Whale acknowledged him as the film’s emotional core, that we now associate “Frankenstein” with the abandoned monster rather than his egoistic creator. Where Mary Shelley’s monster rapidly acquires educated speech, while his stigma is a physically undefined “ghastliness,” Whale’s monster evokes intellectual disability by his realistically slow learning, and his distorted physique equally provokes the audience’s ableism, luring them into complicity with the persecuting mob and challenging them with their own temptation to reject the “monster.” In sequel Bride of Frankenstein (whose very title suggests the monster as “Frankenstein”), Whale demonstrates his sympathetic understanding of Shelley’s emotional identification with her monster, by casting Elsa Lanchester in the dual role of Mary Shelley and the monstrous Bride. However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.

Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and as Bride

“The Body,” the acclaimed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s fifth season that portrays the death of Buffy’s mother, features a symbolic art class in which Dawn is instructed to draw the negative space around an object, rather than the object itself. In art teaching, drawing negative space is a recognized technique for breaking preconceptions and allowing the viewer to perceive with fresh accuracy. In a society that chronically undervalues the labor of motherhood, drawing its negative space is one technique for reassessing its worth. Opening with the narrative of a polar explorer who has abandoned his loving sister for territorial conquest, Frankenstein portrays the execution of a girl falsely accused of infanticide, the destruction of the monster’s bride and the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s own bride in vengeance. It may well be claimed that Shelley’s entire novel is a mapping of the negative space surrounding female nurture.

By choosing to bring forth the Bride (in the novel, Victor destroys the Bride before she’s completed), Whale develops Shelley’s theme from woman’s absence into her rejection, touching on painful legacies of maternally rejected queer and disabled youth. Frankenstein’s monster is created with a brain labelled “abnormal,” raising issues of inborn and predestined sinfulness, yet his violence is always directly provoked by cruel treatment and maternal absence. In Bride of Frankenstein, Whale conflates Mary Shelley with her monster through their joint embodiment in Elsa Lanchester, insightfully converting the Bride’s climactic rejection of Frankenstein’s monster into the author’s rejection of herself. To become adult is to assume responsibility for self-parenting. Because adults instinctively base their self-care on the model of their own parents, many suffer for life from absent nurture in youth. Frankenstein’s monster seeks a Bride-mother-lover to supply his lack of parenting, but the new monster is as lacking as himself. Though women are often imagined as unlimited sources of nurture, rather than humans wrestling their own psychologies, James Whale allows his Bride to be broken. Those to whom nothing is given, have nothing to give. Bride of Frankenstein should be celebrated for powerfully reclaiming the maternal as a learned capacity and a voluntary commitment, rather than an automatic quality of womanhood.

Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) rejects Boris Karloff’s “monster”

From its eerie opening of grave-robbing, Frankenstein cuts straight to the rejection of the female, as Henry Frankenstein (Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is renamed Henry, while friend Henry is inexplicably Victor) writes to his fiancé Elizabeth, instructing her to wait for him: “My work must come first, even before you. At night the winds howl in the mountains. There is no one here.” In its howling winds, the film evokes Shelley’s endless polar wastes, visualizing fields of masculine achievement as deserts of desolation. Though his own father assumes that Henry must have abandoned Elizabeth for another woman, his scientific research is a substitute for all women, perhaps echoing William Godwin’s substitution of philosophical theories of liberation for personal support of his daughter’s freedom. As Henry successfully animates the monster, he cries out, “In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” As Christianity teaches that we are sons and daughters of God, so Henry’s assumption of the divine role is surely the ultimate assuming of responsibility for self-parenting, leading to catastrophe precisely because of the deep flaws in his internalized parental model. Boris Karloff’s monster is justly iconic, his sinister appearance contrasted with the mute yearning in his eyes, his palms spread and beseeching for warmth, whether of companionship or simple sunlight. The instant that his monster becomes burdensome, Henry’s first impulse is abandonment: “Leave it alone! Leave it alone!,” displaying an assumed freedom to disengage that is typical of society’s model of fatherhood.

Shelley and Whaley question whether a man who has abandoned family for science can successfully parent his scientific creations, as Shelley’s prologue describes herself parenting the novel Frankenstein. Where Dr. Frankenstein understands public work and domesticity to be in opposition to each other, a patriarchal logic that segregates male and female, Shelley and Whale suggest rather that maternal care is demanded inseparably of both public and domestic spheres. It is Henry Frankenstein’s assistant Fritz, a hunchbacked “dwarf,” who viciously torments the monster with a burning torch, perhaps acting out his own parental model of hostility and rejection. Unlike Shelley’s novel, in which the monster kills as calculated punishment for Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment, Whale presents the monster’s first killings as justifiable self defense. Escaping the tortures of Frankenstein’s laboratory, the monster encounters Little Maria, a young girl who accepts him as a playmate. Through Little Maria’s moving acceptance, in the absence of parental supervision, Whale implies that intolerance must be learned from parental models. Little Maria shows the monster how flowers float, and he accidentally drowns her in compliment to her flower-like beauty. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein is driven back to his fiancée by revulsion at what he has created. Leaving Elizabeth at the monster’s mercy, by protectively locking her into her room, illustrates how counterproductive Henry’s efforts to control life have become. The film ends with the iconic image of a mob with burning torches, united to persecute the outsider and avenge the death of Little Maria. As the mob sets fire to Frankenstein’s windmill, Whale dwells on the monster’s agonized screams, panic and isolated death. He then cuts to Henry Frankenstein’s being tenderly nursed by a flock of maids and his loving fiancée, ending his masterpiece with harsh contrast between the abandoned and the cherished.

Meeting the maternal man: “Alone: bad. Friend: good!”

Bride of Frankenstein opens with Mary Shelley narrating the sequel to her tale to Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a setting of elegant luxury–a choice that foregrounds the story’s female authorship. Marvelling at Mary Shelley’s youth and femininity, Byron booms: “Can you believe that bland and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?” Yet, though Byron postures in his grinning celebrity as “England’s greatest sinner,” it is the woman, Mary Shelley, who has truly suffered for unsanctioned love. When Byron brands her “angel,” she smiles enigmatically: “You think so?” Whale’s portrait of Mary Shelley revels in her dainty, feminine appearance and twinkling grin, before unveiling her secret kinship with the monster through her reincarnation as his Bride. Fading from Shelley’s luxury to Frankenstein’s burning windmill, from which the monster makes his improbable escape, we witness two women in the persecuting mob: one who weeps at the “terrible” sight, and another who gloats that she is “glad to see the monster roasted to death.” What sharper illustration that woman is “naturally” neither merciful nor cruel, but individual? Henry Frankenstein is lured back to science by the amoral Dr. Pretorius, who has grown life “from seed” to create a menagerie of shrunken authority figures. In this empowerment fantasy, the overbearing, lecherous king can be plucked from his targets with tongs, while the squeakily disapproving bishop may be bottled in a jar. By shrinking authority figures to ludicrous insignificance, Dr. Pretorius is giddily liberated from the constraints of social conditioning: “Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn’t be much more amusing if we were all devils, with no nonsense about angels and being good,” recalling Elsa Lanchester’s skepticism, as Mary Shelley, when described as an angel.

By introducing a second creator figure rebelling against nature (Dr. Pretorius and his menagerie are not in the novel), Whale allows the procreation of two men: “Together, we will create his mate!” Meanwhile, the wandering monster shows self-loathing inability to nurture himself, by attacking his own reflection in a pond, before finding kinship with a compassionate, blind man in the forest. The blind man welcomes the monster, assuming a maternal role: “I shall look after you, and you will comfort me.” Through the excellence of his care, and the rapid progress of the monster under his tutoring, we understand that the maternal is a nurturing quality independent of sex. Men like Dr. Frankenstein do not lack maternal nurture as a fact of their maleness; they willfully reject it in their pursuit of fortune and glory, the social rewards for masculine achievement. In Whale’s ending, it is those who have found mutual nurture – Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth – that Frankenstein’s monster chooses to spare, while those who are unable to care for others – Dr. Pretorius, Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride – “belong dead.” Though they center male characters, Shelley’s novel and Whale’s films reverse male priorities, elevating the maternal to reign supreme.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is credited with inventing science fiction, while her follow-up, The Last Man, founded sci-fi dystopia. After more than a century of male-dominated authorship, science fiction continues to obsessively echo Shelley’s themes of fatherly inadequacy and the vain hubris of the inhumanely over-rationalizing man. Like the persistence of Ann Radcliffe and Lois Weber’s Final Girl in the male-dominated horror genre, or the inability of female creators like Kathryn Bigelow to rewrite the masculine conventions of action film, this persistence of female themes in male-dominated sci-fi demonstrates the power of a genre’s original creators to fix its conventions and shape its expectations. The cultural contributions of female creators like Mary Shelley may be undervalued by society but, like mothers and maternal fathers, they’d leave one hell of an absence.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkSbwiKP3mo”]

Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends. Friends: good!

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy

This repost by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy (SARCom) was created in 1987 by the manga artist Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2. Her mixture of kung-fu demon-of-the-week fights, romance and comedy, with a supernaturally strong heroine, dual shapeshifting supernaturally strong love interests and sarcastically quipping sidekicks, was then a completely unique format and rapidly became popular in the West and Japan. Takahashi’s creative control as visual and story artist (particularly after the success of the slapstick Urusei Yatsura) meant that the aesthetics of SARCom were shaped by the female gaze from the outset. Among its innovations, Ranma 1/2 introduces an Ice Prince/Wolf love rivalry between the hero Ranma and his rival Ryoga, a trope Takahashi would develop in her next SARCom Inuyasha. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer popularized the SARCom in mainstream Western culture, developing its own Ice Prince/Wolf rivalry with the characters Angel and Spike. The Ice Prince/Wolf dynamic now dominates teen girl cinema, after Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight set a new record for commercially successful female directors.

Hardwicke’s camera continually privileges Kristen Stewart’s female gaze as Bella Swan, moving with her and focusing on her lip-biting lustful reactions, while offering Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen as erotic spectacle, the camera panning over him lovingly. Twilight also almost fails a reverse-Bechdel through the intense Bellacentrism of all its characters. Male viewers react with defensive ridicule to the uncomfortable sensation that they are supposed to be lustful fourteen-year-old girls when watching this film. In this moment, they have a brief sensation of what it is to be the female spectator of 90% of Hollywood films, uncomfortably reminded by the Male Gaze that you are somehow supposed to have the reactions and expectations of a heterosexual man. Their unfamiliarity with the mechanics of the female gaze became obvious when Hardwicke was replaced in Twilight sequels by male directors, who fumbled uncomfortably to recapture her intensity. Not only excluded as unintended spectator, the male viewer of SARCom is more likely to identify with the always defeated “Wolf” (sexual pursuer, equivalent to female “Whore”), the vulnerable, openly desiring rival. The victory of the unrealistic “Ice Prince” (sexual resistor, equivalent to female “Madonna”) is therefore destructive to the male viewer’s ego, often provoking a hostility barely concealed under sneering ridicule, just as the Male Gaze’s Madonna/Whore logic has always been destructive to the female ego. So what, actually, is going on?

Celebrating Celibacy: The “Ice Prince” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the “Ice Prince” is his combination of emotional fidelity and sexual unavailability, which amplifies gazing female desire and sexual frustration simultaneously, and is generally accompanied by his emphasized superiority and/or physical threat. That is, his sexual unavailability becomes a symptom of his overall domination. Ranma, the hero of Ranma 1/2, not only rivals the heroine Akane in martial arts, but periodically transforms into a girl more sexually attractive than she is. This tantalizing superiority enhances the character’s sexual unavailability; the world of Ranma 1/2 plays with gender but is strictly heteronormative with biological sex. Ranma 1/2 occupies an intermediate position between the shounen (boys’ manga) harem plot of Takahashi’s previous Urusei Yatsura and the love rivalries of her later Inuyasha: as a shounen hero, Ranma is the center of a harem of sex-crazed women, but as a shoujo (girls’ manga) hero, he must be sexually attracted to none of them. The sexual friction from these conflicting genre demands seems to have accidentally invented the “ice prince” archetype.

Inuyasha tames its threateningly feral hero, while maintaining his sexual unavailability, by making him frustratingly in love with a previous incarnation of the heroine Kagome – thus, he loves Kagome as a reincarnation, but cannot consummate this love due to his frustrating fidelity to her original.

The most extreme “Ice Prince” archetype in Takahashi’s work is Sesshomaru, the haughty, aristocratic pureblood demon introduced as a villain, accompanied by a sycophantic toady, who is attempting to cheat his socially inferior, half-brother Inuyasha out of his inheritance; that is, almost exactly the set-up of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. She may have intended to create a villain, but Takahashi falls into Austen’s tried and tested Darcy arc: Sesshomaru meets an open-hearted, mischievous and unintimidated girl whom he struggles to scorn as inferior; his flaws are contextualized by introducing his controlling, snobbish mother; finally, he risk everything to rescue the redeemer-girl. Introducing a poison-clawed Demon Dog Darcy, with the power to raise the dead and blast his enemies to hell as a supporting character, unbalances Inuyasha: Sesshomaru’s well-written redemption arc commences just as Inuyasha’s own arc grinds to a halt, spending a hundred chapters randomly upgrading his sword while the fandom sways toward the narratively marginalized Sesshomaru. Demon Dog Darcy is then forced to hand his emotionally-earned powers over to Inuyasha in an exasperatingly contrived plot twist. But Sesshomaru’s very marginalization in Inuyasha‘s narrative, and total detachment from the main heroine, function to intensify fangirl emotional and sexual frustration: the ultimate aim of any Ice Prince. Although Demon Dog Darcy progressively thaws emotionally, the character’s sexual unavailability is emphasized by spiked armor encircling his chest and maintained by filling the “Elizabeth Bennet” role with a pre-pubescent girl.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel loves and saves Buffy but is made sexually unavailable by a curse that he will lose his soul if he has sex with her. This loss of soul also allows the intensification of Angel’s dominating physical threat and sadism, while permitting the “real” Angel to remain a dutiful lover. Twilight likewise presents Edward Cullen as a deeply loving and loyal “Ice Prince” who threatens Bella repeatedly by mentioning his urge to devour her and, of course, is sexually unavailable through his fear of ‘losing control’. All these narrative devices intensify friction, rather than satisfaction. However, since a female viewer can never fulfil her own sexual desires for a fictional construct, her experience of frustrated sexual tension is most satisfyingly expressed by sexual tension within the narrative. Also, because society constructs men as permanent sexual pursuers, a woman is relieved of her need to resist, and able to fully and extravagantly express her lust in a safer space, when the male is reimagined as loving resistor.

Demon-in-Distress: The “Wolf” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the “Wolf,” the eternally rejected sexual pursuer, is his combination of desperate emotional and sexual availability with repeatedly emphasized vulnerability and animalism. The most exaggeratedly vulnerable is Ranma 1/2‘s Ryoga, a little boy lost in the literal sense that he farcically lacks any sense of direction. The fanged, impulsive Ryoga’s regular transformations into a small, cute piglet add to his vulnerability. His inability to tell the heroine Akane of his true nature and feelings, out of fear of losing his privileged access as her pet pig, forms a near-perfect satire of the “Friendzone” phenomenon.

Inuyasha‘s impulsive, hotheaded Koga is a wolf-demon. In contrast to the elusive, emotionally conflicted hero Inuyasha, Koga falls for the heroine Kagome almost immediately and pursues her consistently. The manga is notable for constantly placing Koga in helpless “demon-in-distress” situations requiring rescue, and for counterbalancing Sesshomaru’s spiked, hug-repellent armor and Inuyasha’s loose robes with Koga’s skimpy armor and furred micro-miniskirt, concealing his crotch only by careful choice of viewing angle. This ogling display of male flesh is characteristic of the Wolf, maximizing the friction between his overt desirability and the need to resist him.

Although Buffy‘s Spike is a vampire, theoretically an “ice prince” archetype, the character bears a dog’s name and typical “wolf” impulsiveness and romantic vulnerability. In his second season introduction, he is confined to a wheelchair and forced to watch his beloved Drusilla seduced by ‘Ice Prince’ rival Angel. In the third season, he’s pathetically dumped and weeping. In the fourth, he’s neutered by a brain chip that zaps him for attacking, so “he doesn’t chase the other puppies anymore.” In the fifth, the trope of Spike’s muscular nakedness is introduced as vulnerability; he bares his chest to Buffy’s stake and confesses his love. This sequence is revealed as Spike’s dream; he is stripped and Buffy is fully clothed even in his own sexual fantasies. Spike is also stripped and tortured for love of Buffy by the dominant, female deity Glory in this season. In the sixth, after their first sexual encounter, Buffy is again fully clothed, abusing Spike verbally while he sprawls naked and defenseless. She repeatedly violates his sexual boundaries from a position of dominance; his attempt to force himself on her is presented as a crime of pathetic desperation. Though ‘Ice Prince’ Angel wishes to torment and kill Buffy when he is soulless, Spike’s soulless state is no obstacle to his love – the emotional dependence of the “Wolf” knows no bounds.

Twilight’s Jacob Black is another wolf defined by constant loyalty, before attempting to force himself onto Bella in an act portrayed as pathetic desperation. Where Edward’s brief moment of toplessness is a dramatic, suicidal act that will dazzle a watching crowd, Jacob’s muscular toplessness and skimpy attire are chronic, underlining his tantalizing availability and maximizing mental friction in the female spectators, as the heroine resists.

Shishihokodan! Or, Why Team Jacob Loses

Comparing the fandom of all four series reveals an interesting trend: fangirls are roughly equally divided between Team Jacob and Team Edward, Team Spike and Team Angel, Team Ryoga and Team Ranma, Team Koga and Team Inuyasha; nonetheless, the “Ice Prince” always gets the girl. It would be easy to blame the creators. Yet, Stephenie Meyer claims to be “Team Jacob.” Both Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson, Buffy‘s major female writer/directors, have made statements in support of the Buffy/Spike (“Spuffy”) romance. Rumiko Takahashi’s writings in the romcom genre, Maison Ikkoku and One Pound Gospel, also reward and root for heroes in the vulnerable “Wolf” mode, and it is Takahashi who provides a structural explanation for ‘ice prince’ triumph with Ranma 1/2‘s Shishihokodan arc.

The “Shishihokodan” is a blast of energy which enables perpetual loser Ryoga to defeat the hero Ranma by harnessing his own heartbreak. Ranma attempts to defeat the all-powerful Shishihokodan with a confidence-blast, but can only triumph by giving Ryoga momentary hope of sexual opportunity. In other words, Ryoga loses not because he is inferior, but because losing is the paradoxical source of his power. Any woman attracted to the “Wolf'” archetype is inherently drawn to vulnerability; her attraction is intensified by the wolf’s heartbroken rejection, her frustration intensified by the heroine’s resistance. Any woman attracted to the “Ice Prince” is inherently drawn to dominance; her attraction would be reduced by his loss of mastery if he were defeated. As such, pursuing the resistant hero, and resisting the pursuing hero, create positively and negatively charged polarities to an explosive battery of sexual tension; a narrative trap which dooms the “wolf,” as Takahashi showed herself sympathetically aware with the Shishihokodan arc.

The wolf is difficult to dispose of: any alternative love interest would undermine his painful availability, thus one could only be introduced with unsatisfactory suddenness at the last minute to make a weak consolation price. The sudden arrival of a pig-fetishist marks Ryoga’s sidelining in Ranma 1/2; a wolf-girl for Koga is a last-minute addition to the Inuyasha anime, while Koga simply loses his previously foolhardy fighting spirit, forgets his long-established vengeance vendetta and slinks out of the original manga after admitting that Kagome should be with Inuyasha. Abandoning pursuit annihilates a Wolf’s narrative role. Most disturbingly, the newly arrived love interest for Jacob Black is literally newly-arrived as a newborn; his obsessive need to psychologically groom an infant into a future bride doesn’t bother the infant’s parents, presumably merely relieved that the wolf has been disposed of. More satisfyingly, rather than slinking away Koga-style, Spike’s acceptance that Buffy can’t love him “but thanks for saying” allows him to destroy the Hellmouth and be redeemed, incinerating himself in a spectacular blast of purest self-destructive Shishihokodan.

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers. In fact, mankind’s Whore is generally more empowered than womankind’s Wolf, probably because culture sees male sexuality as common weakness but female sexuality as social rebellion. It is the female gaze’s model of dominant-resistor/submissive-pursuer that aligns the rivalry dynamic of triumphant dominant with the love dynamic of triumphant resistor in a perfect feedback loop, structurally maximizing sexual tension (hence the squealing). But the collateral damage for a male viewer is the destruction of the character he most identifies with, in a blast of purest Shishihokodan. As women well know, it sucks to be the unintended spectator.

Brigit McCone is unapologetically Team Wolf, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making weird Pride and Prejudice analogies.

Misogyny Demons and Wesley’s Tortured Masculinity in Joss Whedon’s ‘Angel’

Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

This guest post by Stephanie Brown appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

In their DVD commnetary on the season three Angel (1999-2004) episode “Billy” (3.6), writers Jeffrey Bell and Tim Minear explain that the episode has been both “widely acclaimed” and “much loathed.” Admittedly, my opinion of the episode changes almost every time I watch it. During the summer of 2012 when I binge-watched nearly all of Joss Whedon’s oevre, this particular episode stuck out to me with its oddly in-your-face treatment of misogyny, gender, and gendered violence. While such topics are generally treated with nuance and complexity in the Whedonverse, “Billy” ditches the usual complexity in favor of portraying the show’s good guys, namely Wesley, channeling their base (and as the episode seems to argue, natural), violent instincts. Not only do the episode’s final scenes resemble The Shining, with Wesley trying to kill Fred (a character he has had unrequited feelings for) with an ax, they also seems to take a dark pleasure in “allowing” him to act out in such a violently misogynistic way.

Evil Billy, in all his demon smarminess.

In case you haven’t seen this particular episode, the plot revolves around Billy, a demon from a rich and powerful family who has recently escaped from the hell dimension in which he was imprisoned. While Billy himself causes no physical destruction, he “infects” men who come into contact with him with violent misogyny. After handling Billy’s blood, Wesley becomes infected and tries to chase down and kill Fred. Though Fred ultimately forgives him, Wesley fears that Billy revealed a very real and violent part of his masculininty. The incident also sends Wesley’s character down a road of brooding intropsection, acting as a turning point in his series long character arc from a buffoonish Watcher (on Buffy The Vampire Slayer) to a troubled, interesting and complex character at the end of Angel’s run. In my humble opinoin, Wesley’s evolution is one of the most fascinating and masterful character arcs on television, and this episode is a key part of that arc.

Critics of “Billy” may see it as yet another instance of Angel’s problematic treatment of female characters, as this particular episode brings questions of gender and morality to the forefront in an especially unsettling manner. Billy, as Lilah puts it, brings out in men “a primordial misogyny” that causes them to react violently toward the women around them. Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

“Billy,” of course, isn’t the only episode Angel to be critiqued for its treatment of women and gender more generally. While Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer is, as you likely well know, frequently heralded as feminist or is at least the topic of much feminist-based discussion (even meriting a theme week from this very site), some critics regard Angel as much more problematic in its portrayal of women. Though to be fair, just as Buffy is often an exploration of the complexities of feminity, Angel can be seen as a similar exploration of the complexities of masculinity, perhaps at times at the expense of its female characters. For instance, every major female character in the Angelverse dies by the series’ end, with Cordelia and Fred both being stripped of their identities and then killed by demon possession (in season four’s “Shiny Happy People” and season five’s “A Hole In The World”.

And while this episode and Billy’s character can be read as a reinforcement of masculinity as both essential and naturally violent, I think Billy’s character can also be read as a device through which the episode demonstrates how essentialist notions of masculinity can be dangerous. As I noted earlier, one of Whedon’s signatures is that he works in gray rather than black and white, and this applies to his villains as well as his heroes. Billy, though, is a notable exception and is one of a few villains that fall short of Whedon’s usual character complexity.

Rather than a fully formed character, Billy acts as an extreme symbol of the The Patriarchy with a capital P, who forces our flawed heroes to rexamine and start to grapple with their underlying ideas about gender and mascunilinty throughout the episode. For instance, the episode opens with a scene in which Angel is teaching Cordelia to fight. In her former life on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia used to rely on handsome, strong men to protect her from the various demons of Sunnydale, but she is now ready to fend for herself. She faces, however, some resistance from Angel, as evidenced in their exchange about the reason for her defense training.

Angel: Then – just keep moving the line. You’ll be able to keep an attacker busy until, you know.

Cordelia: What? Until he dies of old age or until you swoop in to save me? Angel, I didn’t
ask you to train me so I could stave. I already know how to stave; now I need to learn how to fight!

Angel: You don’t think that I would?

Cordelia: Would what?

Angel: Save you.

Cordelia: Men-folk not always around to protect the women-folk, you know?

Angel is willing to give Cordelia the training she needs to stay alive, but he is more reluctant to give up his role as protector and savior. While this attitude may come from a place of caring, Cordelia rightly mocks him for his antiquated view of gender relations. Throughout much of the episode, Cordelia pushes back against both Wesley and Angel’s paternal concerns about her ability as a women both to fight and handle the violence that comes along with the job. Wes and Angel are both “good guys,” but they nevertheless struggle with predefined notions of what consitutes proper mascunilinty and femininity. While Angel and Wesley come from a place of concern; however, they still tend to treat Cordelia as inferior, unable to give up what they see as their masculine duty to protect her.

More troubling than Angel’s reluctance to trust Cordelia with full demon fighting responsibilities, though, is the ‘infection’ of Wesley by Billy’s misogyny-infused blood. Because Wesley is not only a white man from a wealthy family but also former member of the highly patriarchal Watcher’s Council, he’s prone to inner turmoil about gender, masculinity, and power.

The Watchers Council: Mostly Old White Men

Billy’s demonhood brings these latent issues violently to the forefront as Wes spends the final two acts of the episode first sexually harassing and then lashing out violently against Fred. As his generally affable, fatherly demeanor morphs into that of a terrifying, calculated killer, his once sweet crush on Fred is warped into a violently perverse sexual attraction. In this transformation we can see how seemingly benign characteristics of traditional masculinity and Billy’s twisted misogyny often fall under the same patriarchal umbrella. While they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum, they’re nevertheless symptoms of the same oppressive system.

While Wes is of course not actually a homicidal misogynist, his actions while under Billy’s spell do force him to face his inner demons (pardon the pun) and fundamentally change his relationship with both Fred and the rest of Angel Investigations. In the final scene of the episode, Wes sits alone in his dark apartment, staring at the wall when Fred comes to see him.

Wes: Fred, I tried to kill you.

Fred: That wasn’t you.

Wes: How can you know that? Something inside me was forced to the surface. Something primal, something…

Fred: Do you wanna kill me?

Wes: Oh, God, no.

Fred: It wasn’t something in you, Wesley. It was something that was done to you.

Wes: I don’t know what kind of man I am anymore.

Even though he was posessed by Billy, Wes nevertheless saw something of himself in his actions that he feels he must come to terms with. Wes of course is not only a victim of Billy’s, but also of the patriarchal definitions of masculinity that he was taught both by his father and by the Watcher’s Council. It’s these unresolved issues that Wes is now being forced to face.

Wesley and Fred talk after he is no longer possessed.

At the close of the episode, Fred seems relatively unaffected by the fact that her friend and boss nearly hacked her into little pieces, while Wes sits broken and weeping. His dejection shows us that while we tend to focus on the harm that befalls those who define themselves as feminine within a patriarchal society, rigid gender roles and misogny are just as harmful to those who define themselves as masculine.

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiast working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. You can follow her on Twitter or Medium @stephbrown.