Patricia Pender is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern Womens Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (2012) and the editor, with Rosalind Smith, of Material Cultures of Early Modern Womens Writing (2014). A member of the editorial board of Slayage, she specialises in gender and popular culture, early modern literature and feminist theory.
Series Editor: Stacey Abbott
The Investigating Cult TV series is a fresh forum for discussion and debate about the changing nature of cult television. It sets out to reconsider cult television and its intricate networks of fandom by inviting authors to rethink how cult TV is conceived, produced, programmed and consumed. It will also challenge traditional distinctions between cult and quality television.
Offering an accessible path through the intricacies and pleasures of cult TV, the books in this series will interest scholars, students and fans alike. They will include close studies of individual contemporary television shows. They will also reconsider genres at the heart of cult programming, such as science fiction, horror and fantasy, as well as genres like teen TV, animation and reality TV when these have strong claims to cult status. Books will also examine themes or trends that are key to the past, present and future of cult television.
Published and forthcoming titles:
Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel, edited by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy
Being Bionic: The World of TV Cyborgs, by Bronwen Calvert
The Cult TV Book, edited by Stacey Abbott
Dancing with the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the New Doctor Who Universe, by Lorna Jowett
Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, edited by Douglas L. Howard
Im Buffy and Youre History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism, by Patricia Pender
Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies, edited by Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown
Investigating Charmed: The Magic Power of TV, edited by Karin Beeler and Stan Beeler
Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction, by Jes Battis
Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran
Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present, by Miles Booy
Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV, by Janet K. Halfyard
Time on TV: Narrative Time, Time Travel and Time Travellers in Popular Television Culture, edited by Lorna Jowett, Kevin Lee Robinson and David Simmons
Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television, edited by Rebecca Williams
True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic, by Brigid Cherry
TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, by Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott
Ideas and submissions for Investigating Cult TV to
Im Buffy and Youre History
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism
PATRICIA PENDER
Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright 2016 Patricia Pender
The right of Patricia Pender to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78076 745 1 (HB)
978 1 78076 746 8 (PB)
eISBN: 978 1 78672 010 8
ePDF: 978 1 78673 010 7
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by Out of House
In Memoriam
Kylie Quinane 19702010
We will never not be fighting.
Joss Whedon
Contents
The Turkish Potential, Lessons, 7.1
The German Potential, Beneath You, 7.2
Chao Ahn and Giles, First Date, 7.14
Potential Slayers Feel the Power, Chosen, 7.22
Potential Slayers Feel the Power, Chosen, 7.22
Potential Slayers Feel the Power, Chosen, 7.22
Potential Slayers Feel the Power, Chosen, 7.22
Potential Slayers Feel the Power, Chosen, 7.22
Riley Finn, The Initiative, 4.7
The Arms of Riley, The Initiative, 4.7
Rileys Cowboy, Restless, 4.22
Riley and Adam, Primeval, 4.21
Maggie Walshs Surveillance, The I in Team, 4.13
Riley and Maggie, The Initiative, 4.7
The Initiative on Patrol, Pangs, 4.8
Masterpiece Theatre Andrew, Storyteller, 7.16
Buffy vs Edward, Jonathan McIntosh
Lessons from Twilight
Andrew as Documentary Maker, Storyteller, 7.16
As the book that follows makes embarrassingly clear, I have been writing and thinking about Buffy for more than 20 years: first in undergraduate essays written at the University of Sydney in the mid 1990s (on the 1992 film), then as a graduate student at Stanford University in California and Assistant Professor at Pace University in New York, and back full circle to the University of Newcastle in Australia where this book finally took shape. The debts I have accrued during the long gestation of this project are consequently considerable.
To begin at the beginning, I would like to thank my Sydney friends in student politics, who helped me flesh out my fledgling ideas about Buffy and feminism and with whom I ran a Buffy and the Vampire Slayers team for student government which was miraculously elected: Michelle Swift, Gina Laurie, Kirsten Tranter, Natasja Worsley, Catherine Burnheim, Lena Nahlous, Ben Ho, Eugene Ho, Simon Clarke, Anna Davis, Polly Porteous and Caitlin Vaughan. Flatmates in various shared houses at this time had to put up with an inordinate amount of Buffy watching. My thanks to Michelle Swift (again), Nicola OShea, Storm Stanford, Jane Shadbolt and the late lamented Kylie Quinane for their, if not infinite, then certainly very admirable, patience with my obsession.
Work towards this book began in embryo at Stanford University where I was fortunate to be able to design and teach my own undergraduate seminar, Girls on Film: Cultural Studies in Third Wave Feminism. I thank the Feminist Studies Department for this opportunity, particularly Penny Eckert, Nikhila Pai and Caitlin Delohery, and Stanfords Institute for Womens and Gender Studies, where a graduate dissertation fellowship gave me the boon of productive conversations about the diverse interdisciplinary meanings of feminism, particularly with Falu Bakrania, Celine Parreas Shimizu and Miriam Ticktin. My work on
