Good Girls, "Bad Girls," and "Dirty Girls": The Stakes for Marginalized Girls in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Abstract

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has long been hailed as a feminist show for its reworking of horror’s final girl trope. Instead of being either feminine and a victim or masculine and a hero, the show combines femininity with heroism through the central figure of Buffy. But is the mere representation of female heroism enough to warrant feminist praise? Feminist and poststructuralist theorists have long argued that “woman” is a multivocal category and challenged the framework of representation for its assumption of a universal “woman,” or “girl” subject. Yet Buffy centers around one blonde, white, middle-class girl and her struggles to be a normal girl, creating a gendered ideal of normalcy. A close reading of two other Slayer characters reveals that Buffy’s normalcy is upheld over the experiences of girls of color and working-class girls. I argue that this exclusion is no accident but by design; the show’s choice to represent girlhood through Buffy effectively universalizes Buffy’s experience of girlhood. This universalization shows how appeals to “girl” as a stable category will always end up reifying hegemonic notions of girlhood, pointing us towards the pitfalls and limitations of representation as a feminist political tactic.