What’s Worth Writing About(,) Seriously?
I have spent most days this year trying to write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s place in academia but instead reading and writing about sexism and sexual violence off screen. Between keystrokes on either subject, I’ve grappled with questions that echo in the vast chasm that divides them: what is worth writing about? What is worth writing about seriously? And, what is worth writing about, seriously?! The last question asked, of course, in the valley-girl dialect projected onto Buffy’s young and female target demographic. Through the tumultuous summer of 2017, I wrote my Master’s thesis on the point of intersection between the established field of Gender Studies and the relatively emerging field of Animal Studies. Using Buffy as an accessible conduit through which to articulate my ideas, I argued that humanity-animality binaries present parallel and interrelated tendencies to result in social oppression, particularly in portrayals of sexual violence across media. My research aimed to challenge widespread presumptions about a canonical feminist icon and advocate for the crucial deconstruction of volatile social binaries in order to enable post-patriarchal and post-humanist liberative possibilities. But wait—a thesis on Buffy? Seriously? They let me call that a thesis? That’s basically just fan fic! Watching Netflix isn’t really research. It’s nothing like actual cultural criticism, contributing in a meaningful way to intellectual discourse—nothing like another thesis on a dead white man modernist novelist through a post-structuralist lens. Nothing like serious scholarship.
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In July 2017, The Walrus published Jason Guriel’s article entitled “Carly Rae Jepsen Hasn’t Earned Your Scholarly Scrutiny.” The article is yet another piece of overdone sexist clickbait that claims undue gravitas through high-minded prose and dead white man citations. Guriel bemoans what he seems to view as an epidemic of scholars granting serious thought to subjects he regards as unworthy of their “considerable attention.” “Why the earnest focus on Carly Rae Jepsen?” he asks. “Because, well, it’s easy! It’s easy to write about things that don’t have a ton of depth to them. It’s much harder to scale a Daryl Hine poem.” Guriel’s thesis is that intellectual critiques should be reserved for high art, rather than contemporary pop culture that has the audacity to proliferate without accreditation from the higher powers of academia. In a succinct series of tweets, writer and Ex-Puritan alum Domenica Martinello responded to Guriel’s article, questioning, “how exactly can a pop star (Carly Rae Jepsen, Lorde, Taylor Swift—I see a … trend here … it’s young women!!) ‘earn’ scholarly scrutiny?” Martinello called out the subgenre of sexist and intellectualist cultural criticism that questions what is “worth” writing about and called in those of us who are seriously working on topics that just aren’t taken seriously. Buffy, The Bachelorette, Britney Spears—elevating these topics to the level of scholarly criticism is “a subversive act.” And even this notion of “elevating” is problematic in itself; the dichotomy between commercial and literary or scholarly media is a social construction that those who task themselves with the work of cultural criticism should seriously consider deconstructing. Seriously. As Martinello argues, “Writing abt Carly Rae Jepson [sic] in a ‘scholarly’ way BLASTS OPEN THE CONCEPT OF THE ACADEMY.”Martinello was a finalist for the Bronwyn Wallace Award for her mesmerizing poetry on sirens and mermaids—mythic figures that, like vampire slayers, are extraordinary embodiments of female power, contained within a suprahuman species that abandons the confines of humanity. But they’re also inextricable from the depreciative connotations of girlhood, as seen in the youthful naivety and ostentatious femininity that contains them within mass-market packaging and enables easy critical dismissal. Popular media—particularly that which is written for a demographic of young women—is hard to take seriously.
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First airing at the turn of the millennium, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) held primetime slots on the WB Television Network for the first five seasons and the United Paramount Network for the final two. The show has since sustained a significant following among fans and scholarly audiences through its recent migration to online streaming services like Netflix, the much-discussed and celebrated 20th anniversary of the series premiere in 2017, and the forthcoming revival announced in the summer of 2018.Buffy Summers just wants “to date, and shop, and hang out, and save the world from unspeakable evil—you know, girly stuff.” A partial subversion of what Whedon calls the stereotypical “blonde girl who would always get herself killed,” Buffy possesses the preternatural strength and predestined obligation to protect humanity from the demonic threats to which it remains largely oblivious. Despite being—to borrow Buffy’s own words—“carbon dated,” the eponymous heroine remains an icon of Girl Power, embodying the distinctive aesthetics and politics of 1990s mass-market white feminism—an evident counterweight to the patriarchal hegemony of preceding young-adult supernatural dramas, though with an evidently narrow feminist vision. Buffy scholar Patricia Pender suggests that “The passion the series continues to elicit in both fans and scholars means that its gender analysis can tend to be simply celebratory rather than genuinely critical.” Even for those who have canonized the series as a cult classic, engagement doesn’t necessarily entail rigorous debate of the show’s feminist merits and failings. The series premiere opens with two teenagers breaking into the local high school after hours. The young woman appears vulnerable and timid, wearing Catholic schoolgirl attire that emphasizes her innocence. Her coercive male companion urges her onwards despite her expressed hesitation, which seems to set up a clichéd horror-film scene of female victimization. However, this depiction is suddenly subverted when the woman assumes the unexpected and grotesque form of a vampire and attacks her companion. This turn establishes the show’s counterhegemonic representation of women—as being capable of assuming the conventionally masculine roles of predator or hero. She transforms from doe-eyed and soft-voiced to amber-eyed and fanged, illustrating the crucial binary between femininity and animality. Taking up Pender’s call for criticism, my thesis argued against the dominant reception of Buffy to contend that the show’s gendering of animality reinforces phallocentric tropes of predatory masculinity. While characters’ gender performances often appear to transgress conventional roles, vampiric violence is always coded as a masculine act against a feminized victim. The non-consensual penetrative act of biting stands in for the sexual violence rarely depicted on screen for an audience of young women in Buffy’s time. Despite the show’s evident complexity, scholars must persistently defend its place within academia and are nonetheless often relegated to the niche of Buffy Studies; while this interdisciplinary field produces vibrant and innovative scholarship, it is all too easily disregarded as fandom rather than study. Researchers are often underfunded, libraries understocked, and faculties unabundant. And yet despite these institutional barriers, I have yet to attend a conference that filled as many seats or prolonged as many question periods as Marquette University’s Buffy at 20 conference.
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“They’ve brought their phonebook-thick Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to a pillow fight,” Guriel writes of his disappointment in finding his beloved critics granting Carly Rae Jepsen more serious attention than he thinks she merits. Guriel carefully constructs his authority and that of the critics in relation to Jepsen. He name-drops a commonplace critical theory anthology and conveys its intellectual weight through a comparison to a phonebook—an archaic resource with which Jepsen’s young fans would perhaps have little acquaintance. These signifiers of intellect and experience are juxtaposed with the light and fluffy play of a pillow fight, the reductive quintessential image of adolescent girlhood. Serious academia has no place in the play of girlhood, and one can intuit the implied inverse: girlhood, its concerns, and its subjects have no place in academia. In her defense of subjects not taken seriously, Martinello argues, “It’s important to write about topics that ‘haven’t earned scholarly scrutiny’—it proves that EVERYTHING DESERVES LOVING SCRUTINY.” In my loving scrutiny, I argue Buffy present abundant opportunities for intellectual innovation as well as valuable discourses that are open to those outside of the academic elite. Does the show use concealed sexual violence as a plot device in the same fashion as the more-explicit Game of Thrones, or does it make use of fantasy in order to present social issues too often censored in young adult popular media? Is Jessica Jones the slayer of our present moment? Does Joss Whedon’s seat in the writers room for the Buffy reboot indicate an unapologetic commitment to the narrow feminist vision of the original series? These questions are worthy of debate on Twitter, in academia, and with every breath that might be otherwise wasted discussing the criteria for discussion, seriously.
