Slayage (Mar 2001)
Vampires and School Girls: High School Jinks on the Hellmouth
Abstract
Buffy The Vampire Slayer treads an entertaining if uneasy course between conservatism and contemporary feminist girl power. On the one hand the weekly successful tackling of monsters emerging from the hell mouth denotes a conservative underwriting of the certainties of the American Dream's superheroes—that wrong can be righted, quests can succeed: evil is visible, tangible and destructible. On the other hand, Buffy, ostensibly physically more suited to be a prom queen or a cheer leader, is a feisty example of late twentieth-century/early twenty-first century girl power. Buffy possesses the energies of the New Woman, the mid-century tomboy of girls' comics, “Supergirl,” teen heroines. She is a girl with a team of friends who support her on her missions to sort things out, to dismember and dismantle the latest monstrous emergent from the Hellmouth. But as a slayer she is herself on the edge, “Other” in her powers, irritated at their intrusion into teenage life; dedicated to her mission, yet in love with a vampire, Angel, who loses his soul when he sleeps with her. Buffy intervenes with vampire slayer conventions as the series intervenes with vampire fiction formulae.
