The Feminist Filter: Faith, Hope, and Trick

[gabrielleabelle]

Have fun with it, guys! Remember to make your comments relevant to gender! :)

Mission Statement:This series is intended to outline the feminist text of each episode so as to provoke and encourage open discussion. It's not so much about making value judgments about events and/or characters but about analyzing the series from a feminist framework so

Comments

[blamegame]

In the commentary included on the DVD's it says that Faith is suppose to be the "Dark Slayer" or Buffy without the support system (family, friends, money) that we are told is one of the things that set her apart from other Slayers.

So we get a Faith who is poor. Buffy's parents had the money to live in a nice urban house. Faith live in the seedy part of town in some kind of motel.

Buffy's parent have good jobs and had the resources to relocate after Buffy's problem in another school. Faith is a dropout; she is Buffy's age but we never know if she went high school at some point and we are point out in future episodes that the "school thing" was not her thing.

Buffy has friends, mother, father, and aunt is mentioned. She also has a watcher. Faith have no family left, no friends, dead mother, dead watcher. She tries to befriend Buffy, but she feels single white femaled instead of happy to know another peer; even after her only real peer Kendra was killed.

Eventually in the series go out of the way to let us know that Buffy is the real Slayer. Faith is not the real deal.

I think is was Doug Petrie that said that Faith is "Buffy's evil twin".

It's interesting how if Faith is her evil twin, then

Evil = Poor.
Evil = Product of abusive and alcoholic parents.
Evil = Sexual.
Evil = Uneducated.

Can you think of other character in the series just like that? The answer is Xander, but hey, Xander is a guy, he can be all that, but that does not make him evil. It just make him expendable.

Class in Buffy is very poorly handled. We know Xander struggles with money too. The status of realness or expendable of these characters may be faulted to their economic status too. Faith is poor, so she is not the real slayer even when she has the same power as Buffy. Xander is poor, he does not really contributes to the group (as we see on the episode The Zeppo). Why both of these character are low class and have alcoholic parents? Why they are low class and uneducated? Faith is a high school drop out, Xander with his low SAT score could not get into college.

We can also do an intersection between Faith low class status and her sexual precocity and display. Society sometimes mistake low class with "loose moral".

While I think showing how a Slayer/Woman/Person can be if she does not have a support system, it is problematic how it is standard in TV and movies to equate low class with being wrong, bad or in Faith case, with no morals or ethics and killing another human being without caring. Specially because in the Buffy universe the ones doing the killing are usually Demons or the Slayer killing those demons.

Sorry if the comment is all over the place and rambly and more about Faith's arc not only about the episode. That's what happens when you write while trying to work at the same time.

[lynnenne]

It's interesting how if Faith is her evil twin, then

Evil = Poor.
Evil = Product of abusive and alcoholic parents.
Evil = Sexual.
Evil = Uneducated.

Can you think of other character in the series just like that? The answer is Xander, but hey, Xander is a guy, he can be all that, but that does not make him evil. It just make him expendable.

Great observation. It is pretty troubling.

[trovia]

This is such an interesting observation. It particularly got me thinking, because when I read people's comments on Faith and her attitude vs. her background, my mind immediately jumped to a comparison between her and a character from another show, the new Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck. And I thought, all those observations about Faith apply to her too, except for how she's not poor or uneducated. Then again, she's not evil - but she's unstable, and parallels are drawn between her habit of sleeping around and her background as a child of an abusive alcoholic (particularly striking because, it's a remake of an old show where Starbuck was a man. Who also slept around. But male Starbuck was more like a Captain Kirk, and getting laid all the time made him cool. And he had no background of abuse. So for the man it's okay and for a woman, it has to be explained with an abusive past. She can't just be like that without cause).

So I thought a little more, thinking of another character on that show, who sleeps around (yes, I'll get back to BtVS eventually!). That's Gaius Baltar, a man, who is also portrayed as unstable and who is a very morally ambiguous character. However, no background of abuse. But, from a poor background and desperately trying to hide that fact. And here, his sexuality serves to illustrate one of his strengths, too, which is his ability to sway people and make his charm work for him. That comes in handy for him multiple times on the show. It's a way of showing that he is powerful in his own way. It's not portrayed as a bad thing. So we have a woman's promiscuity as a sign that she's mentally unstable, connected to her past of abuse, and a man's promiscuity as an illustration of his power, connected to his past of being poor. Being poor and being a victim of abuse make you promiscuous, no matter what gender, but if you're a guy all that gives you an edge.

Which all brings me back to Buffy and the OP's remark about Xander. Xander is from a poor and abusive background and he's a guy, so by that logic, if he slept around a lot, that would make him more powerful. I think that the show stays true to that stereotype. Because Xander sure would like to get laid every other day. But he doesn't (unlike his mirrorverse counterpart, who's really cool and popular and powerful and obviously gets laid all the time). So Xander has those "lowly" needs, because he has that negative background. But they remain unsatisfied and so he's a much less powerful person than he could be. He has a potential to be powerful, but he isn't, and it's illustrated in his lack of skill in attracting women. His counterpart Baltar, meanwhile, is a force to be reckoned with, as illustrated by his ability to find partners.

On a slightly different note, I would love for somebody to chime in and draw a comparison to Angel's Gunn, who I believe to remember was also from a pretty poor background? I don't remember enough about that show to make comparisons myself. I'm trying to remember more poor characters, but can't think of any.

[hello_spikey]

Never saw Xander as poor - he occupies the same privileged suburban space as the other characters, and he TAKES the SAT at all - so his failure there is individualized.

Actually... I could write a whole thousand pages ranting just on Xander's working-class-ish arc with its clear privilege. (And utter lack of understanding of the construction industry).

On topic - you're right that Xander can do all the things Faith does and get away with them, because being focused on appetites and being promiscuous are considered male traits, with much less of a class element to them.