ABSTRACT
There are widely accepted readings of the popular television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) that emphasise the transgressive potential of representing a strong female character as the agent of her own salvation (and indeed the salvation of the world); I mention some in the previous chapter’s discussion of Angel before ultimately concluding that the representation of gender in the latter is potentially deeply conservative, denying as it does a vision of female empowerment outside of the conventional model of appropriate femininity in liberal late-modernity. In this chapter, however, I explore the logics of gender and of sexuality that organise the boundaries of desire in Buffy and argue that competing readings of these logics both reinforce and undermine the inscription of a conservative moral/sexual code through representation of consequential violences. I argued in the previous chapter that BtVS, and its spin-off Angel, both rely on conventional/conservative narratives of gender, despite claims to neo-/post-feminist influences; here I argue that paying close attention to the politics of sexuality both denies a monolithic reading of the series as a textual source and offers codes of sexuality that are considerably more transformative than a simple valorisation of female agents of violence.
