Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
History is where the dead things are. Buffy, as her Watcher Rupert Giles tells her mother Joyce, resists the historical. "She lives very much in the now, and history of course, is very much about the then" he stammers, aware perhaps of the history echoing in his British accent ("Angel" I:7). The show's appeal, however, resides in its battle with history, not its denial. History is the repressed but resurrected, whether personal -- Giles' "dark age" of demon-worship comes back to (almost) kill him ("The Dark Age" II:8) -- or cultural, such as the Master's bad Old World "family" of vampires. The force that stands between the resurgence of the occulted past and the world's continuation is the myth of an adolescent girl, presently incarnated in Buffy Summers. The Slayer presents an alternative history to vampires who inhere in the same body throughout time but derive their power from multiplicity. The Slayer is ever-changing, ever-singular, and forever embodied in a teenage girl.
Repository Citation
Levy, Sophie. ""You still my girl?": Adolescent Femininity as Resistance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–15. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss1/6
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Television Commons