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

[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.