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

[red_satin_doll]

Though then we get S6 where money becomes an issue and Buffy has to get a crappy job at a fast food place. The show is a bit inconsistent in that.

And as blamegame notes above, it's inconsistent with that in terms of Xander as well. But then again, I'm used to that with American TV, which SUCKS, generally in dealing with class issues, and how people make their living (or at least my memories of watching TV from the '70's - '90's); but I remember wondering how Buffy's mom was able to live in a house like that, and how she was able to keep it, take care of herself and Buffy whilst working in an art gallery. (Did she own it or just work there? That's never made clear, and an art gallery isn't a huge money-producer. Ergo the sense that what Joyce does for work isn't really "work", it's frivolous, and of course art is a product meant to be purchased by the rich and upper-class.) Part of the answer would be that Buffy's dad pays child support (aside from whatever settlement Joyce got in the divorce) but that's never mentioned. By extension, Hank would be paying child support once Dawn enters the picture and "becomes" his daughter, but it's not mentioned then either as a source of income in S6. So S6 tries to deal with these aspects of finance that it never bothered with previously, hence the awkwardness when they try to throw it in the mix.

I suppose we could have an entire conversation about how Buffy fails to meet certain expectations of what white middle-class women "should" do: drops out of college, gets a low-paying job at a fast food joint etc.

On the same subject: I'm not sure what to think about Angel & Spike in terms of class; again it's there but mostly unspoken. On BtVS, what does Angel do to be able to afford the nice apartment (and later mansion), and modern/oriental artwork that decorates it? Where does his money come from? With Spike it's more explicit that he's always "on the edge" financially (although the most explicit attempt to address this - AYW - which is too ham-handed for words in this regard.) Even his accent, clothes, style and habits (drinking, smoking) suggest a lower class than Angel. (We see him later that William Pike was very comfortably upper middle-class, but I don't know that the writers visualized that backstory for Spike initially.) Here again though there's a coding of "class" to these vamps, as well as gender, at least in relation to Buffy (over the course of the show, Angel is the more stereotypically male in his "ruggedly handsome, man of few words, Big Damn Hero" mode, whilst Spike is more "feminine" in the ways he tends to support Buffy esp in later seasons. )